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Hamletmachine (in German, Die Hamletmaschine) is a postmodernist drama by East German playwright and theatre director Heiner Müller. It is based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare but set during the end of East German Communism. It was written in 1977. Müller later incorporated the text of Hamletmachine into his Hamlet/Machine, combined with his translation of Shakespeare's play.
[edit] Overview
The play, like Hamlet, takes place in five acts, though the script is highly condensed: the whole text is roughly eight pages long. Moreover, after Act I (which rushes through the first three acts of the original play in a page and a half) the characters depart almost entirely from the original work, actually stepping out of the context of the theater itself in Act IV. The script itself is extremely dense and open to interpretation; recurring themes include Feminism and the Ecology movement.
The play remains Müller's most-often performed and (arguably) his best-known today;[citation needed] Müller himself directed a seven-and-a-half hour performance of Hamlet (in which Die Hamletmaschine was the play-within-a-play) in Berlin in 1990.[citation needed]
[edit] Performance History
The play has been performed as a radio drama, including music by Einstürzende Neubauten, that was later released as a compact disc. Blixa Bargeld played the part of Hamlet and Gudrun Gut played Ophelia. It had its American premiere in Tampa, FL with the Freiese Theatre of Munchen in 1984, and was subsequently revived by Robert Wilson at New York University in 1986 [1]. It has also been set to music by composer Georges Aperghis as Die Hamletmaschine-Oratorio and by Wolfgang Rihm.
[edit] Recordings
[edit] External links
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The Plays of Heiner Müller |
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Ten Days | The Scab | The Correction | The Resettled Woman | The Construction Site | Oedipus | Philoctetes | Lancelot | Prometheus | Macbeth | Cement | The Horatian | Mauser | Tractor | The Battle | Germania Death in Berlin | Gundling's Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing's Sleep Dream Scream | Hamletmachine | The Mission | Quartet | Despoiled Shore Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts | the CIVIL warS | Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture | Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Shakespeare Commentary | Death Destruction & Detroit II | The Road of Tanks | Mommsen's Block | Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man
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