Hamletmachine

There’s something rotten in Denmark. This is the basis for HAMLETMACHINE, Heiner Mueller’s seminal postmodernist meditation on the decay of an individual’s national pride. Hamlet’s conflict arises not out of familial betrayal, but out of a festering disappointment, he feels toward a country he once loved. 

What happens to the individual’s sense of self when his country betrays him? 

In this world, Hamlet becomes fragmented, and his relationships with others come to embody various aspects of his national identity – he feels betrayed by the Denmark that has been at one time or another his mother, his father, his friend, his lover and his self. When Hamlet engages these living metaphors directly, the consequences 

are as harrowing as they are cathartic.

Driven by explosive, erotic, incandescent imagery, The Hamletmachine teeters in multiple dimensions of politics, sex and identity as seen through the eyes of two of literature’s greatest anti-heroes, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia.