`The play's the thing" for Hamlet - but not for Heiner Muller. The radical German playwright, polemicist and poet - now artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble - has spent the past few decades interrogating traditional forms of theatre, creating a series of theatre texts ("plays" isn't quite accurate) that set out to create "disturbance". With this short text, Hamletmachine (1977) he "tried to destroy Hamlet" because it had obsessed him for so long.
Drawing on T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as well as Shakespeare, Muller's fragmented text sketches a series of short scenes, in which history is experienced by the "Hamlet per former" as a nightmare.
Snapshots of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of aspects of 20th century totalitarianism, are evoked in words and images whose relationship to each other is associative rather than direct.
In its hour-long production, the Argentinian company, El Periferico de Objetos, has added specific allusions to Latin American dictatorships, to imprisonment, disappearances, torture, mutilation and murder.
Using dolls, puppets and life-size mannequins, the performers enact a sinister danse macabre against a backdrop of photo-projections of turbulent political events, while Muller's text is intoned in voiceover, accompanied by subtitles and scene-headings. Although the puppets and dolls were expertly manipulated and delicately formed, they seemed an overly literal and somewhat obvious interpretation of the metaphor of helplessness in the face of political terror. Used throughout, they became repetitive and added to the relentlessness of this production, overloading an already nihilistic text.
By its heavy-handed determination to make the audience witnesses of the atrocities portrayed, Maquina Hamlet created the opposite effect: of disengagement. While obviously utterly sincere and committed, its intensity was overly insistent; the audience was beaten into a weary submission, in which other possible responses - of empathy or pathos - were overshadowed.
