Hamlet

The King of Denmark is dead. His brother Claudius has poisoned him, married his widow Gertrude and seized the throne. Hamlet, overcome with grief, is soon visited by his father's ghost. He reveals that he has been murdered and demands revenge. Sandra Hüller's Hamlet is neither mad, nor cynical, nor detached. He is lucid. He strides wide-eyed towards the abyss, aghast at the moral collapse of the world around him. Torn between the desire to flee and the will to stand firm, he is an ordinary person driven by a quest for justice.
"He's alone": the phrase recurs like a refrain, repeated throughout the show by one of the gravediggers. And it is this absolute solitude that guides Johan Simons' staging. Hamlet no longer believes in anything or anyone. Around him, his family is consumed by hypocrisy, cynicism and lust. To be or not to be" is no longer a question: it's a condition - one of doubt, of solitude, in a disintegrating world. Johannes Schütz's set takes the form of an arena, "a white tomb for all", where a luminous sphere and a large suspended metal wall embody this imbalance. When the actors cross the boundary between stage and auditorium, sit in the front row and watch each other perform, then we are all Hamlet, traversed by the same doubts.