HAMLET DOMESTICUS - THREE DIRECTORS'
PRODUCTIONS OF HAMLET ON THE MODERN
CROATIAN STAGE
Ana Penjak
Abstract
Each text has always been rhetorically treated as a memory (conscious or
unconscious) of previous texts and discourses, incorporating various elements such
as paraphrases, imitations, adaptations, translations, variations and reconstructions.
In recent years, Shakespearean criticism has reasserted the value of the dramatic
text 'in its context', i.e. in its performativity act whether on stage or screen. This
paper investigates three different theatrical versions of Hamlet, Ivo Brešan's
Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja (The Performance of Hamlet in Central
Dalmatia), Slobodan Šnajder's Gamllet and Luko Paljetak's Poslije Hamleta
(Hamlet Aftermath), in the Croatian culture. Examining the shifts between times,
cultures, peoples and languages, the paper investigates the process of adaptation,
raising several interesting questions about the dramatic creation: how Hamlet has
been altered; how the adopted plays relate to contemporary social and political
conditions prevailing at the time of their creation; what kinds of dramatic
techniques are being used in the plays. Finally, by comparing the three abovementioned modern adaptations of Hamlet with the original we should obtain some
idea about the spirit of the modern Croatian stage.
Key words: Croatian Hamlets, domestication, transformation, transposition,
rewriting, visually.
Introduction
Evoking Shakespeare
‘The Mona Lisa of literature, as Hamlet was unkindly called by Eliot, has attracted
many disciples anxious to unriddle its secret or at least, in their inability to scale it,
and in their envy of its beauty, to put moustaches on it.’ 1 In fact, there is a whole
library of attempts at interpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from centuries ago
to the present day. Why is that so?
Well, each text has always been rhetorically treated as a memory (conscious or
unconscious) of previous texts and discourses, incorporating elements such as
paraphrase, imitation, adaptation, translation, variation and reconstruction. Every
staging and adaptations of a text enables a new exploration of the play’s conflict. In
recent years, Shakespearean criticism has reasserted the value of the dramatic text
‘in its context’, i.e. its performativity whether on stage or screen. What happens
when a Shakespearian play is performed is a kind of an encounter, an invitation to
move into a play world, to see it generally and with the eyes of particular character.
At times the varying focus controls, on the one hand, the social relevance of the
action and, on the other, the opportunities for actors to reveal the emotional and
intellectual strength of their characters. Play’s language, themes, plot, situation and
characters should be added a consideration of these techniques. Furthermore, in
Shakespeare’s time the drama of human consciousness was something new and the
most admired element in play. But today we see Shakespeare’s texts thwarting his
audience and, at times, it seems to allow its members absolute freedom. This is
because the most deeply felt moments rely on subtextual exposure, on changes of
rhythm, tempo, and texture, and on a particular view of the whole variety of
characters. So, after the first dozen Hamlet’s there are still surprises, new guises for
the old masterpiece.
Here I focus on three Croatian theatrical versions of Hamlet: Ivo Brešan’s
Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja (The Performance of Hamlet in Central
Dalmatia), Slobodan Šnajder’s Gamllet and Luko Paljetak’s Poslije Hamleta
(Hamlet Aftermath). What connects all three plays, apart from the obvious literary
pattern, is the very present question of national politics in different periods of time,
i.e. the way in which the three plays relate to social and political conditions in
Croatia in the 1990s.
Hamlet: The Subject of Various Performances
Three Kinds of Hamlet on the Croatian Stage
Crisis is a key word that has been describing Croatian everyday life and culture
in general from the early 1990s onward.2 One might expect a certain conflict on
local, regional and national levels that tries to diverge the ideas coming from the
theatre as to please their own aspirations. Their arguments fizz with importance and
energy as if it were something of the global interest. Vjeran Zuppa, the eminent
Croatian literary critic, tries to diagnose the ‘illness’ afflicting Croatian theatrical
institutions. He claims that the old customs remain unchanged and only theatrical
activities are apparently different. The new never becomes old, for it is constantly
being replaced, it does not depend on artistic reputation but on the enthusiasm of
the people involved in and around the theatre.3
One of the enthusiasts involved in and around theatre is Ivo Brešan. Ivo
Brešan's play, Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja (The Performance of
Hamlet in Central Dalmatia), according to many critics, represents one of the most
influential Croatian plays in recent Croatian literary history. Božidar Violić
undertook the production of The Performance of Hamlet in Central Dalmatia at the
ITD Theatre, in 1971. Brešan’s ‘grotesque tragedy’, as described by the author
himself, is a travesty of Shakespeare's famous tragedy Hamlet, but enriched by a
description of the Croatian post-Balkan war situation. Brešan’s principal idea was
to place a well-known literary text in a contemporary context to create an original
work that testified to the primitivism, foolishness and wickedness of one system
and time. The Performance of Hamlet in Central Dalmatia is composed of two
parts and five images. The plot, set in the 1950s, is not located in Denmark but in
the the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. in a small, primitive rural
village in the central part of Dalmatia, Mrduša Donja, in Blatnik municipality. In
fact, at the very beginning of the play, we find a description of the plot:
National Front's meeting room in Mrduša Donja. There are paper flags on
the walls, printed slogans written in clumsy handwriting – Long live the
National Front, Forward to new victories, All in peasant labor unions,
etc.
Furthermore, the plot does not exactly follow the aforementioned ideology.
What Brešan does is to localize Shakespeare's text, translating it into the speech of
the Dalmatian hinterland, i.e. into the dialect spoken by the locals of Mrduša
Donja.
After the National Front's meeting in the village where its memebers discuss the
revival of cultural activities, farmer Šimurina begins to tell a story called Hamlet
that he once saw when he was in Zagreb. Bukara,4 the village cooperative manager
and secretary of the Local Party Assets, orders Škunac, a village teacher, who is
also the only educated person in the village, not only to direct the eponymous play,
but also to adapt it to the village customs and dialect as the villagers would not
understand the language in which the original text was written. According to
Bukara:
Amlet should be one positive partner and manager, who fights for the
rights of working people. He can't be some Prince, a heir to the thorne,
because, as far as I know, the only one who could and was a king was
King Peter.5
Despite the teacher's initial reluctance, he begins to rehearse the play. He hires
local villagers, who are mostly peasants, to be amateur actors. But the original text
does not go just through those changes. Instead of Shakespeare's verse and iambic
pentameter, the scene echoes decasyllabic meters, ojkanje6 and political
phraseology. However, scenes from rehearsals fully correspond to the events and
relationships among individuals in real life not only in Mrduša Donja but also in
the whole state.
‘There is something rotten in the state of Denmark’ is one of the many famous
lines from Hamlet. The political situation - that something ‘rotten’ - is the catalyst
that moves forward not only Brešan's play but also the new version of Hamlet
played by the locals. The power Shakespeare usually brokers for his characters is
that of absolute rule and command of others. Straying from his focus on the powerhungry main character, Brešan gives his principal character, Bukara, power to ruin
everyone's lives. Mate Bukarica, known as Bukara, is in fact unjust, untrustworthy,
an usurper and tyrant, fake fighter and embezzler, lecher and heavy drinker. He is
someone whome the locals do not want to oppose; they fear him, beliving
nonetheless that what he thinks and does is the best for all of them. In the new
version of Hamlet Bukara gets to play Claudius because they are two very similar
characters. Claudius is making a grab for power as shown in his concentration on
the foreign polices, an attempt to mask his lust for power, and his marriage to the
queen, and we can see the same lust for power in Bukara's words:
First peasant: Well, well! You honour yourselves up there as real royals
do, while we here remain dry throat. [...]
Bukara: You Šime, listen! Do you understand that we here represent the
monarchy, while you represent the last hole on the flute. The order is,
brother, that we are well-fed and you have to browse around ... Come on!
Where did we stop ...
Furthermore, Puljo, another amateur actors from the village, gets to play a
henchmen and Anđa, despite being in love with Amlet, remains faithful and
obedient daughter. Hamlet, i.e. Amlet, is played by Škoro. Like Hamlet, Škoro is
also a victim of a powerful villain. When Škoro hears that his father has been
sentenced to five years in prison because of his father's inability to act, he
withdraws from the scene calling himself a rotter, staring at the floor, all the result
of the political force that will, eventually, be responsible for the death of his father.
But unlike Hamlet, Škoro's acting Amlet gives no appropriate presentation of
the character. His acting reveals no passion, no complexity, it does not show an
intensity of the character that draws attention for a moment, nor does his speech
encourage the auduence to attend him. Škoro in the play fails to see some of the
very obvious devices by which Shakespeare gave his plays quality of 'humanity' in
favour of simpler ways of chatching the audience's attention. It seems as if Škoro is
just presenting silhouettes instead of Shakespeare's characters.
As we can conclude, the major difference between the two Hamlets, the Danish
one and of Mrduša Donja, is that in the latter there is no revenge, no punishment of
the guilty, and no Fortinbras. The play ends with a feast, an orgy, a wild party at
which, through song and dance, the actors celebrate food and drink, sex, gambling,
violence, disorder and selfishness; in two words they celebrate physical pleasure
and nihilism. The prince of Mrduša Donja represents the cruel, fundamental evil of
the people in the village that destroys ideals by means of the ruling political and
social paradigm.
In Luko Paljetak’s play Poslije Hamleta (Hamlet Aftermath) (1992), as in Brešan’s
play, we can discern a certain deflection from the well-known pattern of the
original, but not a complete break with the original dialogue. However, Paljetak’s
play has the fewest of all contacts with Brešan’s buffoonery and the simple shift in
time and space. It is neither a travesty nor an avant-garde re-evaluation of Hamlet.
It cannot be reduced to an a priori concept, being rather a serious and sober
interrogation of what comes when all values collapse and when postmodernism is
not an intellectual pose but an existential actuality. The question posed by the play
is not what comes after Hamlet, but what will happen when Hamlet can no longer
be performed because the questions he raises are no longer relevant. The play,
composed of five acts, is set in Elsinore, Denmark, twenty years after Hamlet’s
death. In the play, Paljetak accepts almost all the Shakespearean premises,
alternating between drama and lyric, vulgar speech, meditation and joke, ecstasy
and discipline. Although there are mostly new characters in the play, Paljetak has
retained some basic relations: Fortinbras, who survived, takes over much of the
power of Claudius since he, Fortinbras, now plays the role of the Danish king,
married to Wiltrude. However, a much more important role is played by Horatio. A
character who ought to be the guardian of tradition, qua interpreter of Hamlet’s
words and of his message and truth, is now aged, senile and confused. In a world
without Hamlet, Horatio is now the one who asks questions. Every night at
midnight, for twenty years now, Horatio has been waiting for Hamlet’s ghost to
appear so that he could impart news of events in Elsinore. Ophelia, before
drowning, gave birth to a child whom she gave to a fisherman who then gave the
child to a gravedigger. The illegitimate son of Hamlet and Ophelia, the
gravedigger’s nephew as he is called, will not be able to bring any kind of order to
the world and thus the performance will end with an anti-catharsis. In this way,
Paljetak creates a new Hamlet in the guise of a gravedigger’s nephew. Paljetak also
creates Helia, Horatio’s daughter and a counterpart of Ophelia, who falls in love
with the new Hamlet. He creates her to show the fidelity of the new characters to
those in the old play. Also, the emblematic play The Mousetrap ‒ the play in which
Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of the king – is here turned into The Cage
Trap, a performance in which all will be trapped.
At the end of the performance we are left with Yorick’s Ghost, a correlative to
Horatio in Shakespeare’s play, who, bringing with him a mirror, orders the cannon
to be silent and Mistress Worm to wait, for the feast is as yet but fraudulent.
The parallel with the situation in Croatia in 1991-1992 is quite clear and yet
Paljetak’s play is not an allegory about the political situation at that time. In 1992,
after the siege of Dubrovnik ‒ the first impact of the war ‒ the initial belief that
Europe would not allow such destruction to happen and the idea of freedom in
Croatia were destroyed. Individuals and their interrogation of their own point of
view and the purpose of the world in which they lived suddenly vanished from the
scene. Instead, looking around, all they could see was a graveyard, an inability to
act. The same is happening in Paljetak’s play. In the world to which Fortinbras has
brought his system of values and Yorick has brought a lost mirror, the questions
come from the gravedigger nephew’s perspective. The only one who can offer a
way out from our dilemmas is Yorick with his mirror of the past in which the
characters find their identity. Thus, Hamlet in Paljetak’s play becomes no longer an
interrogation of time, but a symbol of all those Hamlets who have become an
integral part of a culture, the values of which have been washed away without the
culture even being aware of it happening.
Slobodan Šnajder’s play Gamllet (1987) is also an example of a dialogue with
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Gamllet, subtitled Fantazija na temu (Fantasy on the
Theme), Šnajder stages one historical character, Branko Gavella, whom he
describes with a few unflattering words: ‘No magic.’7 The plot is set in 1942 in
Sarajevo where we follow Gavella’s staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Šnajder’s
Gavella is a very perplexed character – he constantly fears a nervous breakdown: ‘I
will not make it ... I will not make it. Maybe I cannot do it anymore.’8; he
constantly talks with Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević’s ghost; he works with actors
who constantly complain that they do not understand ‘that’ Hamlet and how
Shakespeare’s play leaves them cold. In the prologue of Gamllet, Šnajder
characterizes it as the ‘play of fear’, later on descibing Gavella as a member of the
‘Fear Party’.9 Although in real life and in his work we cannot say that Branko
Gavella was the type of person who would be so frightened, Šnajder insists that the
play is about an artist who carries a model of Elsinore in his suitcase, is almost
paralysed by the fear that he will soon be ‘killed like a dog’10 by the ‘rights’ or the
‘lefts’. Here is how Šnajder writes the well-known soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be’:
Gavella: The show is not possible. [...] I cannot go
against myself. A man can kill himself, but he cannot bury himself. And
in the earth I would hide, like an old mole. To kill myself, of course, the
thought is equally strange to me as to kill somebody else. To take
Silvije’s advice and to disappear in the fog, smoke and into nothing, that
would be the best. [...] To sleep, and dream no more. To sleep in the dawn,
while the others
Arise. How does it go: “Arise, the contemptible ones...” But,
if the show is not possible, then I am too the impossible man!11
Gavella’s show is ‘impossible’ because he is trapped between two opposite
ideologies – the one represented by the character of Maks Luburić and the other by
the character of a Partisan (both characters in the play), each asking of him revenge
and human sacrifice. Lada Čale Feldam believes that Gavella wondering, in certain
moments, whether he should pull out the real or wooden sword, whether to stage
and act in fictional, theatrical or real bloody scenes, and whether the mousetrap is
still possible on the stage, dominate the whole of Šnajder’s play. Furthermore, Čale
Feldman continues, we live in a world that is like a dump ‒ a dump of fragments,
moral questions, political exiles, torture and war ‒ a world in which actors do not
believe in theatrical performances.
Šnajder’s play is closely connected to his own view of an intellectual who has
to choose between the reds and the blacks, intellectual paralysis and a mind set on
the feeling of being incapable and not on revolt. Gavella’s last words in the play
explain the whole atmosphere in those years: ‘And maybe I cannot do it anymore,
maybe my time is out ... and maybe there is nothing to be done anymore?’12 It is as
if the rottenness and putridity present in state politics has transferred to the theatre.
So, in a place where we would expect to see confrontational courage, we see
multiple confrontational fears, resulting in Gavella’s retreat from theatrical life.
I should also mention that, in Gamllet, actors standing in front of a children’s
graveyard have to decide whether to leave or to stay inside a town under siege. It is
as if they knew that in the 1990s Sarajevo would again become one of the most
fearful war zones.
In Šnajder’s play, on the one hand, we read about the destruction of a myth
about Gavella; on the other hand, Gavella is compared with Hamlet.
I have presented three different, but I would say quite similar, versions of
Hamlet. The similarity lies in the fact that in each of them there is a certain
Fortinbras. His, Fortinbras’s actual moment, runs through the whole of history as
human patterns, unfortunately, repeat in history too often. In Croatian literature and
on Croatian stages, Hamlet presents as a play whose characters are forced to be
aware of the crime – the dilemma faced by Gavella, Joce and the gravedigger’s
nephew does not lie in the judgement of whether ‘to kill, or not to kill’, but in how
to stop the killing. Through the performance? Through the confrontation with
Claudius? By putting the theatre into a suitcase? The power of tragedy here comes
from the acceptance of loss. In other words, to play Hamlet means to split oneself
between state violence and the risk of freedom. So:
The game of strangeness comes back to its beginning – the spectator is
identified with Škunca, reality cannot be influenced, for everything has
already been written in – Hamlet.13
Conclusion
To try to discover the stage life that suits the text of any one of Shakespeare’s plays
is a challenging and fascinating pursuit. Thus a director’s shaping hand, on the one
hand, and skilled, subtle and imaginative performances, on the other hand, have
great influence over its production. Changes between wide and intense dramatic
focus are also very important elements when a Shakespearian play is performed.
As in many European countries, Shakespeare's Hamlet is an important part of the
cultural repertoire in Croatia. Not only was Hamlet performed almost every year,
the plot was also adapted within the political context. In all three versions of
Hamlet, directors – Ivo Brešan, Slobodan Šnajder and Luko Paljetak, blend the
ingredients of tragedy and the theme of how the lust for power can corrupt into
bubbling brew of deceit, shame, and ultimately the tragic demise of nearly every
principal character in their plays. These three matured performances of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet were made possible by years of familiarity with the text and
with the practical problems of each role in performance. Although ‘there is no
substitute for Shakespeare, not even in the handful of dramatists, ancient or
modern, who can be read and played with him or against him.’, 14 as believes
Harold Bloom, the desire for an authentic direction will not be satisfied easily.
Those who try to respond to it will grow more aware of the wealth of Shakespeare's
imagination and prehaps more expert in their attempts to give his masterpiece its
theatrical life.
1Notes
Luko Paljetak, After Hamlet (Zagreb: The Bridge, 1999), 10.
2 Darko Lukić, Koristiti ili trošiti proračunski novac? In: Dragojević S, Žiljko T Organizacijski razvoj i strateško planiranje
u kulturi: Grad Zagreb (Zagreb: Pučko otvoreno učilište, 2008).
3 Vjeran Zuppa, Teatar kao schole (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2004).
4 Noun bukara translated in English would mean wooden jug. The name in the play has a symbolic meaning because
Bukara, in the play, is a heavy drinker.
5 Ivo Brešan, Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja (Zagreb: Prolog, 1979), 35.
6 Ojkanje in folk tradition means to sing with drawn-out two-part calls of “o-o-y!” in typical mountain-country fashion.
7 Slobodan Šnajder, Izabrana djela (Zagreb: Prometej, 2005), 182.
8 Ibid., 183.
9 Ibid., 187.
10 Ibid., 189.
11 Ibid., 198.
12 Ibid., 225.
13 Čale Feldman Lada, Brešanov teatar: aspekti Brešanove dramaturgije (Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo kazališnih kritičara i
teatrologa, 1989), 100.
14 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 50.
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Ana Penjak works at Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Split, Croatia. Her
professional interest is focused on the picture of women in literature with the particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s
presentation of women in his plays, i.e. on the analysis of the female body in his plays.