Shakespeare’s new contemporariness,or Hamlet in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre of the 21st century

Ghosting the ghost: Negotiating memory politics in Hamlet, directed by Dušan Jovanović

Dušan Jovanović’s 2005 Hamlet was a co-production of the Grad Teatar Budva festival in Montenegro, the international theatre festival MESS ¹¹ in Sarajevo, and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. As a result of decreasing state subsidies during the 2000s, such forms of cooperation between different institutions were quite common in order to guarantee cultural work. ¹² Nevertheless, despite this economic aspect, the production also marked one of the first instances of large-scale interregional cultural cooperation after a long period of time, attracting different audiences within a festival context. The interregional circulation among important regional festivals, the well-known cast of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre ensemble, as well as the Slovenian director, known for his experimental plays such as Play a Tumour in the Head and Air Pollution (1976), promised a theatrical highlight and offered an adaptation of the play within the sociocultural context of a modern post-war country, full of correlative expectations.

Even though the mise en scène was minimalist in terms of set design, lighting and costume, faithful in this to an established aesthetic of dramatic theatre (Figure 1), the director offered an unconventional reading of the play with his interpretation of the ghost.

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Figure 1.

Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet in Hamlet, dir. Dušan Jovanović, 2005. Photograph courtesy of Nenad Petrović.

Two strategies of cultural appropriation need to be differentiated for this production in order to analyse the key image of the ghost. ¹³ Firstly, Jovanović was working with a musical concept, a mix of background sound and various leitmotifs from popular music. The ghost, Hamlet and Ophelia were each marked by a specific musical theme, a song by either the pop singer Zdravko Čolić or the rock musician Momčilo Bajagić (Bajaga). These musical choices clearly located the performance within the larger cultural context of former Yugoslavia since both musicians have been very popular since the 1970s and 1980s. The choice of music refers to former Yugoslav popular culture and covers a broader historical period of a shared history in this specific cultural context. Secondly, cultural appropriation became visible at the level of the cast, which reflected various intertheatrical references. Jovanović not only worked with well-known actors from the Yugoslav Drama Theatre ensemble, who were also members of the cast in a widely known Hamlet directed by Gorčin Stojanović in 1992, but he cast them in a blatantly referential way. While Branislav Lečić played Claudius in Jovanović’s Hamlet, he was also well known as Hamlet in Stojanovic’s mise en scène. As a major figure during the student protests at Terazije Parlament in 1992, Lečić became a member of the Democratic Party and active in Serbian politics. Even though there may be no intended political cross-reference, this casting allows a reading of Hamlet as a negotiation of changing power relations. These localized strategies inform the dramaturgical choices concerning the representation of the ghost, which seems to be the most significant characteristic of this production.

According to Stephen Greenblatt, ghosts have different functions within Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre and can be divided into ghosts of memory and ghosts of revenge. ¹⁴ Even though Greenblatt’s new historicist reading of Hamlet is located within the context of the reformation in Early Modern England and addresses the issue of protestant and catholic religion in particular, the ambiguity of the dramatic figure of the ghost provides a potential for adaptation within different historical, cultural and political contexts. In Jovanović’s performance, the ghost does not refer to religious discourses, but the director links the figure’s ambiguity to memory politics: In the very first scene, the ghost (played by Vojislav Brajović) is staged as a multiple presence on stage. While the guards stand on a high stage, highlighted by a blue filtered light, the main ghost appears accompanied by six other ghosts dressed in a similar manner on the lower level. They appear on a darkened stage accompanied by muted sound elements, which eventually become recognizable as Čolić’s song ‘Ti si mi u krvi’ (You are in my blood). This multiple appearance of the ghost, haunted by six ghosts of himself, resembles a moment of anachronism, as ‘time’ being ‘out of joint’, as well as a mise en abyme, and characterizes the ghost’s presence through different dramaturgical agents: While Hamlet ‘is assigned by who or what came before him’, ¹⁵ in this performance this statement is also true for the ghost. Therefore, the logic of haunting dominates the ghost from his first entrance and draws a direct line between the protagonist and his deceased father. Even though all phantoms look similar, they take on different functions within the performance. On the one hand, the six ‘revenants’ haunt the present (Hamlet) as well as the past (ghost) and lead to an understanding of the ghost as a symptom of a recurring history. Not only are they catalysts for many of Hamlet’s actions (for instance, during the Mousetrap scene), but they also encourage him to take revenge at the end of the performance. This multiple representation of the ghost plainly represents a figure of revenge, referring not only to family issues but to a cyclic history which threatens to be repeated in its full violence.

At the same time, the ghost of Hamlet’s father takes on a completely different function. He is a silent witness in many scenes, holding a mirror towards Hamlet and the audience. By appearing with the prop of a mirror at decisive moments of decision, he influences Hamlet not to act violently, notably in Claudius’s prayer scene. Hamlet does not want to kill anyone, and it is precisely this slightly changed plot that finds its climax at the end of the play. The six ghosts are also on stage during the fencing scene, inciting Laertes and Hamlet to fight. But in contrast to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet refuses to follow the ghost’s demand for revenge – instead, it is Laertes who kills Claudius. Hamlet’s active refusal could be read as a resistance to fulfil his duty of avenging his father, interrupting the cyclical history of revenge. At the very end of the play, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears for the last time and points his mirror towards the audience. This particular gesture not only positions the audience in relation to the protagonist, who finally decides to refuse the demands for revenge, but also highlights the doubled function of the ghost’s dramatic structure in Jovanović’s production: In contrast to the six revenants, the ghost of Hamlet’s father does not claim revenge, but rather invites self-reflection. Even though most of the characters, including the protagonist, die as a result of Claudius’s actions, which makes reconciliation impossible, Hamlet remains a sign of hope. The decision of which ghost to follow, revenge or memory, is clearly connected to the question of how to deal with conflicting memory discourses in the region of former Yugoslavia. Should there be revenge, in terms of a policy of retaliation, or rather an interruption of the cycle of violence?

Thus, interweaving knowledge about the play Hamlet with its dramatic agency turns its performance into a political statement about changing memory politics and becomes an effective strategy in political theatre. Although the conflict between the ghosts of revenge and the ghost of memory finds its bloody resolution with the death of all the characters, the ghost’s last appearance leaves room for interpretation that such tragedy does not have to repeat itself. The ghosting of the ghost as an uncanny, oppressive, even usurping cycle of history can be interrupted in the future: a future represented by the audience. The intersecting with cultural knowledge about a play, its dramatic conflicts, as well as its staging tradition turns classical texts into attractive platforms for political theatre and such is the case in Sonja Vukičević’s approach towards Shakespeare.

Ending the cycle of violence, Hamlet in Circus of Histories, directed by Sonja Vukčević

In contrast to Jovanović, Sonja Vukičević combines several tragedies by William Shakespeare in a single production, Cirkus istorija (Circus of Histories), through which she reflects upon history as a repetitive cycle of violence. She experiments with the agency of the main characters of Titus Andronicus, Othello, Macbeth, Richard III, King Lear and Hamlet and combines their key monologues with citations from Jan Kott’s influential Shakespeare our Contemporary (1963). This unique adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedies was a co-production of the BITEF ¹⁶ and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade in 2006 and it travelled to various international festivals such as the Wiener Festwochen (Austria) and the International Festival in Rijeka (Croatia) after its premiere. The production constitutes a milestone in Vukičević’s engagement with Shakespeare and is clearly related to her performance work on Shakespeare during the 1990s. I argue that Vukičević’s former performance practice not only influences her specific aesthetic language but also reveals how her latest Shakespeare adaptation is a political statement about changing memory politics in the new millennium. Various critics define Vukičević’s approach to the classics as ‘dramas in motion’, which are a hybrid form of dance, music and visual theatre, using the agency of classical texts to locate them within a specific cultural and political context. ¹⁷ How this localization works is analysed in the following paragraphs, against the backdrop of the director’s former approaches to Shakespeare.

Vukičević started to work on Shakespearean topics as early as 1992 when she designed the choreography and for Stojanović’s Hamlet. After this production, Vukičević began her independent career as a choreographer and director at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade. This non-governmental organization, established in 1994, was (and still is) engaged in programmes of political education offering counter narratives, especially to those circulated by the Milošević-controlled media in the 1990s. The centre was also very active during the student protests against the elections manipulated by Milošević, which took place in Serbia in 1996 and 1997. Vukičević produced four projects for the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, two of them inspired by Shakespeare: Macbeth/IT in 1996 and Midsummer Night’s Darkness in 1999. Both productions invite a clear political reading of Shakespeare: Macbeth/IT is a 50-minute contemporary dance piece focusing on Macbeth and his wife with strong allusions to Slobodan Milošević and his spouse Mira Marković. Furthermore, Vukičević performed Macbeth/IT in front of a police cordon during the student protests in 1996–97, giving the play a central role in this particular anti-regime movement. ¹⁸

Midsummer Night’s Darkness is, of course, an allusion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and premiered at the 33rd BITEF in September 1999. Here again, Vukičević appropriates a classical text, in order to apply it to the sociopolitical situation in Serbia. The choreographer and her ensemble rehearsed this production for 8 months, starting before the NATO bombing of Serbia in March 1999 and finishing after the bombing. ¹⁹ This crucial war experience influenced the director’s reading of the comedy, which she turned into a tragedy about power relations and the freedom of choice. In both productions, Shakespeare’s text was used as material for performance, intermingling with other elements such as dance, music, lighting or scenography. ²⁰

Vukičević’s portfolio of directed performances encompasses a specific and refined aesthetic language. For example, in Macbeth/IT, she worked with musical collage (various techno beats from Great Britain’s The Prodigy) and in Midsummer Night’s Darkness, she experiments with puppet-like body language, two elements which can also be noted in her Circus of Histories, her latest Shakespeare adaptation to date. The variety of her repertoire of movement might be read as an experiment with various modes of representation, through which she probes depictions of history and memory politics: While in the first two productions these presentation strategies were connected to the social and political vacuum in the 1990s, in Circus of Histories they target a specific understanding of cyclic history. Consequently, Vukičević espouses Kott’s diagnosis of history as a Grand Mechanism and questions whether a new beginning is possible in 2006 and on what terms. Like Jovanović, she intermingles layers of knowledge and works with overlapping memories: a familiarity with Shakespeare and a familiarity with her work during the protests. Through the repetition of dramatic structures and intertheatrical references to her former productions, she invites this performance to a broader reflection on cultural history through performance history. Using the agency of dramatic structures in Shakespeare to infuse them with her own aesthetic language, she makes these interrelated connections visible and turns the play into a history of protest and political activism.

In Circus of Histories, Vukičević worked with established structural elements, such as dominant musical breaks between the scenes, costumes, video projection and lighting: Every sequence, each of which is an extract from one of the above-mentioned Shakespearean tragedies, is framed by a central musical leitmotif – a mixture of waltz and ‘gipsy punk’ – and a choreography involving all the actors. Not only does she work with a choreography involving the whole cast, with choric parallel groups of actors who are uniform in appearance: they wear the same costumes, a combination of a black tailcoat and white crinoline, leather boots and white gloves. Most of the staging elements, the costumes, the stage set – a white tent – and the dominant music, evoke circus aesthetics (Figure 2). This association is even emphasized through the organization of the scenes, which are more reminiscent of sequences of acrobatic acts than a psychological or dramatic exploration of character. The pace of the performance, especially the revue-like structure of the scenes and the physical approach towards acting, breaks with a psychological representation of character and with the conventions of dramatic theatre.

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Figure 2.

Cirkus Istorija, dir. Sonja Vukičević, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Vukica Mikača.

Like Jovanović, Vukičević presents Hamlet as a symbol for hope. Not only does her pasticcio of Shakespeare’s tragedies end with Hamlet, whose main character is played by a female actor, but the cyclic structure of violence is partly interrupted in the last scene. Hamlet’s monologue, a mixture of the protagonist’s soliloquies and newly written parts, stresses her existential crisis, similar to the beginning of the first act. While Shakespeare’s Hamlet quarrels with how to act after the ghost’s demand of vengeance, Vukičević’s Hamlet questions whether she is able to act at all. Not only does she accuse the world of being cruel but also bemoans the fact of being desperately left alone with her mission: ‘Our time is disjoint and out of frame. O damnation, shame that I was born to fix it alone!’ ²¹ Hamlet wants a change, she wants the cycle of violence to end, but she cannot fix it by herself. After her monologue, all of the performance’s protagonists appear and dance to Johann Strauss’ ‘The Blue Danube’. The scene ends with a collage of questions, sentences and citations, which create a despairing image of deadlock and idleness. Within this horror cabinet of violence, Hamlet is the only one willing, albeit unable, to break the cycle and therefore is to be read as a weak sign of hope. Like Jovanović’s Hamlet, she signifies the will for change but remains without any effect. How change may be achieved remains unclear and is left to the audience.

In Jovanović’s and Vukičević’s adaptations, repeated intertheatrical references support the agency of certain dramatic structures, or key images, and form a crucial precondition for actualization. Against the backdrop of the specific historical situation at the beginning of the 2000s, Jovanović’s and Vukičević’s versions of Hamlet represent the protagonist as a hopeful contemporary who refuses to become part of the bloody cycle of violence. Following the economic, historical and theoretical argument, using well-known dramatic structures in political theatre provides a flexibility to negotiate different, sometimes even contradictory political memory discourses. Furthermore, staging a classical repertoire affords the possibility to connect the current performance with the play’s staging tradition and link it to different historical moments, that is to say, in both these case studies, the shared history of former Yugoslavia and its ferocious disintegration

Aleksandar Popovski’s Hamlet staging Hamlet

Jovanović’s and Vukičević’s productions work with the potential of a repetitive dramatic structure while interweaving networks of intertheatrical references. Aware of the ambiguity of certain dramatic structures and the discourses around them, both directors facilitate the actualization of the play and transform Hamlet into a hopeful contemporary at the beginning of the new millennium. Bearing the different preconditions in mind (repetition, intertheatricality and agency), Hamlet turns out to be a completely different contemporary in 2016. Aleksandar Popovski’s version of Hamlet, which premiered at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, foregrounds the play’s metatheatrical potential. The director worked with Brechtian distancing effects and the playwright Goran Stefanovski radically adapted the plot by relocating Hamlet’s speech to the actors (2.2) at the very beginning of the play and by dropping the character of Horatio and replacing him with the gravedigger. These changes are symptomatic of a production in which Hamlet himself stages Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One crucial element for increasing the awareness about Hamlet’s theatrical quality is the division of two levels within the performance: the level of the Shakespearean plot, which turns out to be the play within the play; and the level of Hamlet’s directing of Hamlet. These different levels are differentiated by a changing scenography and lighting. The stage designers Numen and Ivana Jonke worked with a white canvas as a main element of scenography which either constructs a fantastic aestheticized landscape on stage (for the play within the play) or hangs from the ceiling as a screen on which to project quotations from the original text. While Hamlet (played by Nebojša Glogovac) follows more or less the Shakespearean plot on the first level of performance, he clearly distances himself from his character, as a self-reflective philosopher, on the second level of performance. Through those multiple levels, Hamlet takes on the role of narrator, manipulator, master of the ‘game’. Like an omniscient narrator, he is the only one who sees and understands the metatheatrical structure of the play. Only the playful virtuosity of the theatre can enable the protagonist to survive the predetermined plot. But the awareness of the play within the play, the theatricality of the situation and its determinism turn Hamlet’s revenge into a repetition of an already familiar history. Even though the protagonist tries to change the plot, for instance, by killing Claudius three times in the prayer scene, he has to admit that he cannot escape from it. Hamlet’s predetermined world could be compared to hegemonic historiographical narratives, the evil and tragic ending is meant to happen, no matter what. Using the agency of the Mousetrap scene with its metatheatrical structure and self-referentiality to theatre not only locates this production within the staging tradition of the play at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre – Vlasta Velisavljević, one of the best-known actors in this ensemble, is cast as the ghost of Hamlet’s father; it also marks a significant break with Jovanović’s and Vukičević’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in this particular theatre, with their propositions of hope. In those earlier performances, the protagonist is granted the ability to interrupt the cycle of violence and represents a sign for change, whereas Nebojša Glogovac as Hamlet is doomed to fulfil the logic of the cruel plot. Against the backdrop of Serbia’s movement towards a national conservative society under the leading Serbian Progressive Party with its highly problematic memory politics, Popovski’s Hamlet may be read as a direct comment relating to a wider discourse about the questions of how to deal with cultural memory politics in the region of former Yugoslavia in the new millennium. This Hamlet shows how the repetition of certain historical narratives drives a memory politics towards nationalism, creating a moment of standstill and resignation.

Returning to the initial questions about the conditions for an actualization of classical texts and its benefits for political theatre, the results of these three analyses might be summarized briefly: The repetition of a dramatic structure within theatre repertoires enriches knowledge not only about the play but also the various discourses around its interpretation. As demonstrated in the case of Hamlet, the act of interweaving a classical play with various intertheatrical references informs a staging tradition that allows the agency of a dramatic play to be connected to theatre history and, more widely, to historical discourses. Therefore, the adaptation of ‘sponge’-like key images and dramaturgical structures, with respect to specific cultural contexts, provides (and remains) a fruitful and effective potential for political theatre, which constantly reasserts the ever-new contemporariness of Shakespeare.