Hamlet

Shakespeare's classic tragedy is re-imagined by mixing and repurposing Richard Burton's 1964 Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud.

The Burton production was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown as a special event for only two days in nearly 1,000 movie houses across the U.S. The idea of bringing a live theater experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called "Theatrofilm," made possible through "the miracle of Electronovision." The Wooster Group's production attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film.

HAMLET channels the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, descending into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing their own spirit with the spirit of another.

"The Wooster Group's HAMLET is a landmark of contemporary theater, in the history of Shakespeare performance, and in the history of media, too. Produced with the Group's habitual tenacity and critical rigor, HAMLET performs an inquiry into the intermedial work of performance, Hamlet as poem, as book, on stage, as film, through digital technologies. This is the kind of production that provokes discussion of the signal work of the contemporary theatre: the recording is essential to our thinking about, and teaching, performance - and Shakespeare performance - today." - W.B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Stylishly distilled in its uses of appropriation, simulation, fracturing, and repetition . . . The palimpsest of past and present, sound and image, makes it a Hamlet experience like no other." - Debra Singer, Artforum