Hamlet Mortuus est at BABEL (by Dieter Topp)

Another new project by the independent ARTE FACTUM COMPANY from Timisoara, Romania, raised hopes of something exciting and particularly unusual after past years‘ highly acclaimed ‘Monologues of Solitude’.

This time, the team of Mona Donici (text) and Levente Kocsárdi (concept/director) has ventured into a new Shakespeare realisation.

After One Man/One Woman interpretations went around the world to frenetic acclaim, the tried-and-tested team delivers something profoundly new with ‘Hamlet Mortuus Est’ in this spacey extended cultural programme of BABEL 25

After entering the auditorium a winding, spacy corridor leads visitors into an underground depth.

Here we already encounter the protagonist in the form of Levente Kocsárdi on a quest.
He wanders through the darkness, groping around without recognising anything in particular. His eccentric appearance, filled with fragments of what he has experienced, continues in the following show (in Mihai Donici’s minimalist set design) when he, also a gravedigger, rummages through the remains of those steeped in history and realises that a worm can have eaten its way through the remains of anyone, good, bad, honest and dictator.

What remains is the dirt, a loamy earth with which the later (un)dead try to fill the holes in their bodies. Without success. Kocsárdi slips into the roles of those who moulded him.

Mona Donici goes even further, transferring and ‘sometimes reminiscent of Beckett – less of Godot than of Krapp’s last tape. Kocsárdi handles two pairs of shoes and votive offerings amid the eclectic main prop of a coffin as he mourns the mistakes and missed opportunities in his life’, according to the English critic Jeremy Malies (Plays International & Europe, 1.2.2024)

Dictators of the past and present, Alexander the Great or Hitler lie in their graves, while dictators such as Kim Jong Un, Erdogan, Orban, Lukashenko, … are projected onto the walls as a warning of living examples.

Sebastian Hamburger’s video mapping seems to enclose actors and spectators in the curvature of the space and unite them in the action: a contemporary Hamlet who (alluding to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) speaks of the impudence of public servants.

The multi-layered interweaving of Donici’s text and Kocsárdi’s performance/concept are equally fascinating, drawing the audience into the action with inspiration.
Sergiu Cătană weaves a tapestry of noise with live sound and music, flooding the play with space and time.

‘The production is peppered with … original ideas, and I undoubtedly missed many more. But what I did catch was a page-turner. A more interesting one-person Hamlet than Eddie Izzard’s last outing. Here, with one per cent of the budget and no fuss, a whole new light is shed on the play,’ enthuses Jeremy Malies (see above)

May a broad media response help this play find its way to international festival attention. It’s worth it!

Dieter Topp, german journalist & Babel board

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