This Hamlet fights with bare fists

Jean Pierre Leonardini, L'HUMANITE

Avignon. Krzysztof Warlikowski presents us with a stunning vision of Shakespeare's masterpiece.

Mad and/or bluffing; a homosexual, but at the same time Ophelia's lover. Anyway, the perfidious character played by Jacek Poniedziałek can be interpreted in various ways and it is impossible to assign a single and explicit reading to him.

An exclusive report

The expression Shakespeare Our Contemporary is owed to a Pole, Jan Kott, and it comes from one of his famous essays. It has been a notion of numerous meetings, debates and seminars. Today, another Pole, Krzysztof Warlikowski and his adaptation of Hamlet, where the prince is a young man of our times, proves that Jan Kott couldn't have been wrong. A shaved head and baggy clothes - Hamlet seeks his own self in the world of irritating rules, blindfold. Athletic Jacek Poniedziałek, suddenly shifting from mad dynamism to depression, seems to be examining all possible faces of the persona in front of us. We see him mad, then just pretending to be insane for homosexual impulse's prey, but at the same time making love to Ophelia; cowardly and, all of a sudden, courageous, he may be bold in his incestuous relations with his mother, but he is an uncovered suckling as well. One could say it is our times that let him show the whole range of Hamlet's incongruities. Others can only follow his way, which is full of contrasts and, paradoxically, seems to show him taming the nightmare on the stage.
The performance should be appreciated as it keeps on deluding us and playing with the text perceived as a beautiful and good trap, snares of which are discovered anew. The well-known scenes are deliberately played in a perverse way, which can cause an intellectual confusion. What is the most important, however, is that the interest does not decline in any moment of this journey from one surprise to another, where the audience, sitting in front of a kind of ring (set by Małgorzata Szczęśniak), is watching Hamlet's struggle with the world and his own desire for being seen.
Theatre's splendour, therefore, does not stem from glamorous costumes or pompous music. There are only some rags pulled out of the closet and barbarous drums (music by Paweł Mykietyn) playing sort of punk music to which Hamlet surrenders. He is accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played by women, which emphasizes their unique role of spies and deceivers. Warlikowski simply points our attention towards Shakespeare's extraordinary tale which constitutes the quintessence of theatre seen as mad complexity disguised as moving simplicity. He is no minimalist, as he is frequently described, although the means of expression are indeed reduced. It is rather the case of presenting theatre's tissue in acts and humanity squeezed to the very core, which results from the realism of bodies, muscles, nerves and emotions they provoke.
Hamlet here seems a casualty, one of those being against the whole world. Therefore he can only be kind towards others. You can acknowledge him as long as he does not show up at your door at noon. That is why there is no noon with Hamlet. It is dusk and night that make his kingdom.
Thus, there can never be too much Shakespeare. Each poor adaptation only rattles him off. The power of his genius emerges when his works are being mastered by people who find portraying human's torments with all sincerity their sacred mission. Warlikowski is one of them - he has an excessive instinct which lets him judge the scene duration's physical length properly, grasp the ideal moment for a change of tone, keep the tention among small audience gathered on both sides of the stage on which Hamlet's intimate menagerie reigns high. You can feel you are dealing with two different artists of different horizons - the old and the modern one - but it is an extra trump card hinglighting what really takes place in front of us and what fascinates us. And what normally could not be percieved this way, since this Hamlet is intentionally shown with his sex organs. It is nor a pure spirit or a conceptual monad. There is the grave scene with a pipe, featuring Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, when the prince says: „Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." In Warlikowski's version, this scene reaches the limits of endurance and gets an obscene quality as Hamlet attaches the pipe to his fly and forces his partner (a supposed man) to play it. A while later, Polonius gives Hamlet a blow in the face, knocking him down. This bluffed fellatio is one of the most striking scenes of humiliation one could think of. Aren't such provocative ideas what lets us judge artist's capability of revealing the dramatical reality by means of ambiguities?
It must be stressed that Warlikowski (born in 1962) has not come out of the blue. After studying philosophy and history in Cracow and history of theatre at Sorbonne, he took up play directing at the State School of Drama in Cracow. He was Brook's and, later, Lupa's assistant. He took part in Strehler's workshops in Milan, which resulted in work at Remembrance of Things Past. He is going to measure his strength againist the adaptation of World evenings. After having put The Bacchae by Euripides on the stage, he is preparing The Merchant of Venice. He has already managed to strenghten his possition by other Shakespeare's plays (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Tempest, Twelfth Night). He also produced Roberto Zucco by Koltes and The Trial by Kafka. He is really somebody.