That was theatre that was!

Frédéric Ferney, LE FIGARO

Bells are ringing out far away. The wedding feast of king Claudius and queen Gertrude is taking place this winter night. In the meantime, the late king Hamlet appears on the castle's ramparts covered with snow. The audience, sitting on both sides of the stage resembling a ring of wood and glass, seems to be revellers of this calamitous ceremony. We are subjects of this uncertain kingdom, mutes and accomplices. It concerns us all, we are all Danes, sacrificial lambs of this cult with no parallel. As terrified and stiff as the guards in front of the phantom.

On the hoisted platform, the actors of the tragedy resembling tropical fishes in an aquarium, not paying attention to anything, rub their shoulders with each other as if in a pensive quadrille.

Polish director, Krzysztof Warlikowski, clashes a couple of sublime scenes, according to both superb and brutal a liturgy, combining splendour and parody. The fervour of the process shuffling the characters, situations and moments like cards before a deal. We are thrust down into the depths of a mental palace, where everything accelerates, conspires and foments despite ponderousness, in an extreme tension demanding complete commitment. How does he manage, this Warlikowski, to avoid the danger of symbols' abundance, a dreamy mess and pseudo-sacerdotal ridiculness. Each moment he makes breaches, distorts duration, provokes ruptures, suspense and dissonances in the plot.

First of all (and that is what his courage is about), he makes restitution of enigma's tool. Apart from the beautiful and extraordinary dramaturgy, he respects the disquieting oddity of the masterpiece. He skims the sphinx not willing to reveal its secret. There is primacy of one genre - a tragedy, which takes the oriental sense of adventure after an epic. In Hamlet (as in King Oedipus) the heavens are empty, the gods are silent; everything is a problem, everything is a question.

Warlikowski doesn't attempt to give fixed answers. He does not hide the brilliant text's lacunas, as if singling out its understatements.

One is more and more seduced, fascinated and enraptured. Everything goes on as if we broke into underworld (or the unconscious) of a tragedy. Nothing shocks us, neither the fact that Hamlet is standing completely naked in front of his mother nor that he is waving flute symbolising his penis in front of Rosencrantz, or even when Claudius is tickling corpulent Gertrude on her fat calf. Everything becomes obvious, starts from the beginning, everything is truth. It is impossible to name all the original ideas, shifts contributing to the play, which draws from the sources of whisper and scream.

Not only does such an excellent staging of the most frequently played tragedy by Shakespeare owe to the liberty of choice and arrangement of the scenes. Those Polish actors are athletes of soul, acrobats of psyche, gladiators in a dream, hardened by long excursions in the land of towers and fog, surrounded by mad kings, dwarf astrologers and their master Witkiewicz.

They are: Stanisława Celińska (Gertrude), Magdalena Cielecka (Ophelia), Jacek Poniedziałek (Hamlet), Marek Kalita (Claudius). Bless those queer roman Catholics!

They are famous in their country. It's clear now.