Shakespeare Remixed
Shakespeare Remixed

A Postmodern Experiment at the German State Theatre In Timişoara

Summary/Abstract: Shaking Shakespeare – a tragical-comical-historical pastoral by Lia Bugnar is an intertextual experiment based on Shakespeare’s plays. Excerpts condensed in a collage, a kind of patch-work, re-imagine and tell, using the convention of theatre within theatre, the story of Hamlet’s existential drama. What is amazing is the fact that we witness a theatrical theatre within theatre mechanism. Hamlet, the main character of the drama, is at the same time an actor, playing next to the other actor-characters, as well as alongside Prospero, Caliban, Antonio, the Doge of Venice, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Desdemona, Othello, Shylock, Yago, Richard III, etc… He is no longer only the spectator or the stage director of an ordered production aimed to reveal the crime of Claudius. This performance reminds us of the postmodern trend of bricolage, a kind of intertextual and cultural game with the collective memory of mankind, this time based on Shakespeare’s oeuvre. In the end, a recurrent question arises – who is Hamlet? Is he the prince of Denmark, the character from Shakespeare’s tragedy? Is he only an actor? Is he both? Or even more?

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