 |
Ryhmäteatteri: HAMLET 150bpm"Story about the world where hearts beat 150 times in a minute." - Fear is a weapon, the one with you get people, even humankinds on your side, it is the instrument by which we are being controlled. With fear you rule the world, says Mika Myllyaho, the director of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Hamlet you can see fragments and feelings connected in the nowadays situation. It is a world of c ontrol. - In the end, the fear is probably in it that as long as we are not being bombed, we go and destroy the other civilisations; it does not matter as long as we are safe. All the time people are being intimitated that soon again the bomb will burst, that sort of gives the mandate to destroy a little bit more in somewhere else, says Myllyaho. Hamlet’s scenery is very interesting and unique. The set is dominated by a catwalk, a metaphor of power. The people who are in power want to show oneselfs on it - power does not exist if it is not to be seen. There are also cameras and televisions on the stage, the athmosphere is a sort of claustrophobic. Everybody is being watched so ’that the society would be more safe’. On the other hand, the cameras reveal to the audience the action that takes place outside the stage; thus the inner world is in the middle of everything. When we watch the play’s gravediggers holding the skulls - to be or not be - on the screen, in the same way as we watch bones from the news every evening. The border between reality and fiction blurs and the image turns into ironic. Television is a tool, through which we see the thematic of revenge, in the play as in the real life. There’s a lot of whispering and calculations in the court. In Shakespeare’s world the possession happens through conspiracy. One has to know more in order to have the power; knowledge is power. The sovereign wants to control everybody, yet also he is being controlled. The control actually creates more insecurity. - The controlling of people increases, it develops all the time, soon eyes are being scanned, we loose our identity, more and more they get into our skin, in some point we all have a bar code, and we become machine items which are needed just to to do something. - In the play of Hamlet, I am interested about the fear and holiness of anger. And how anger eats human, in the end it eats Hamlet himself too. Anger’s blade starts bec ome listless and little by little it clots. The swordplay fight is just compulsary evil, which have to be done, and that takes place in the catwalk, which is the centre of power, where the power is being changed. Fear and anger are the things which I have been thinking about and which also concerns me, how it occurs in world and also in people, and how people experience that. And is the violence here just a reflex of what happens in world. - In Finnish theatre the big topics which are seen, are the questions of how to feel well, how does the fear and violence of the world affects us, religious questions; spirituality, what is good life. But even if it is about how to manage in relationships in middle of all this chaos, how to cope in life, somewhere in the bottom there is fear. And also how we as a outsiders take a stand to all that what happens in a world. - I have correctly wanted to analyse fear and those role models which we have. For example Rosencrantz and Güldensstern are young and successful, they do not have own identity, they are completely being bossed around. And how the royal couple, King Claudius and Queen Gertrud are monumental and archetype like our real rulers. The Hamlet’s world is eternal, it speaks about the odd and the endless cruelty of man. In our world we find a lot of people like Claudius, who by killing his brother gets everything but ends up with nothing. Cold business men who make thousands of people unemployed… Do they hunger for power and success so much that they do not any longer see the results of their actions? Eventhough the play may seem hilarious, it is pessimistic. Myllyaho’s Hamlet proceeds in such tempo that you do not even realize that everyone will dissappear somewhere in the world of television. The end is silence. When people are afraid, their beat is hectic - 150 bpm. That is the pulse of our society.
|
|
Jani Volanen as Hamlet in Ryhmäteatteri ’s HAMLET-150 bpm (photo:Pirje Mykkänen) |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|||
|
|