Hamlet

Accompanied by Marius von Mayenburg, associate playwright at Berlin's Schaubühne, who translated and adapted the Shakespearean text, Thomas Ostermeier embarks on a journey through one of the English playwright's masterpieces. The inexhaustible Hamlet, the first in a series of tragedies written in the twilight of Elizabeth I's reign. Here, on the verge of paranoid madness, grappling with his visions, his anxieties and his inability to decide, to choose, to assume his status as a man and his status as crown prince, Hamlet plays, hides, wants to manipulate those around him, hiding behind a freely chosen madness a murderous plan supposed to save him, to free him from the "putrid swamp" that surrounds him. Caught in the trap of the court, caught in the trap of the political world, and now truly insane, he turns against himself the weapons that were supposed to liberate him. Searching for honesty and truth in a world of dissimulation and lies, Hamlet loses himself in his powerlessness to act, in a growing dilemma that overwhelms him and condemns him to death. To refocus Shakespeare's work around his hero, played by Lars Eidinger, Thomas Ostermeier has chosen a reduced cast; six actors to play some twenty roles.