Hamlet or The Soul Argued with the Body

William Shakespeare wrote his most famous tragedy sometime between 1601 and 1602, and since then the story has challenged theatre-makers around the world time and again to revisit it and try to find answers to at least some of the many questions it raises. Can fundamental moral rules be broken in the name of higher goals? And can an individual take justice into his own hands and justify his crimes to his own conscience? Is it possible to keep a clean slate amidst the moral morass? And what place does love have in the uncertain and doubtful human existence? Hamlet has thus become the most famous, albeit fictional, Danish hero and has immortalised himself in the history of literature, theatre and thinking about the world.

The famous Elizabethan playwright describes in Hamlet as carefully the inner world of his characters as he does the outer circumstances surrounding them. The story can therefore be viewed as a tragedy of one family, which soon develops into a detective story with a political context. Hamlet, feigning madness, searches for the truth about his father’s death and in the process he learns much about the society he comes from, but also, above all, about himself. But the crime must be atoned for, even at the cost of the filth into which such an attempt at redress plunges the protagonist.

It was only a matter of time before the director Stanislav Moša, after successful productions of other Shakespeare’s dramas (The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra), decided to stage this most widely read tragedy of his, again in an extremely poetic, yet comprehensible and theatrically impressive translation by Jiří Josek. Under the subtitle The Soul and Body Fighting, he decided this time to make a distinctive interpretive gesture: he entrusted the famously contradictory character of Hamlet, perhaps the most complex character in world drama, to two actors who will exist side by side on stage as a kind of dual being. One of them is a fresh addition to our ensemble, the young and exceptionally talented Martin Mihál, the other one the unique support of our ensemble Michal Isteník. In this conception, Hamlet’s discord will undoubtedly become an exceptional experience.