Robert Wilson Stages Heiner Müller's 'Hamletmachine' at Spoleto Festival

At the Festival di Spoleto, Robert Wilson directed a production of Heiner Müller's 1977 play 'Hamletmachine,' a caustic reworking of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' that critiques post-war Western society. Müller's text, described as a rock opera in its violent, schizoid tone, uses Shakespeare's drama as a springboard to explore the shift from individual doubt to mass thought, with violence as a surrogate. In Müller's version, Hamlet is a punk rebel consciousness in a war-torn Europe, while Ophelia embodies failed resistance, referencing Marilyn Monroe, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Frida Kahlo. Wilson's staging featured a sparse, apocalyptic set with a table, chairs, and a stylized tree, and actors from the Accademia Silvio d'Amico with white-painted faces, evoking Harold Pinter. Costumes referenced 1930s Nazi Germany, with a few punks indicating the 1977 setting. The score mixed Leiber and Stoller's music with mechanical noises, dictating actors' robotic movements. The production combined theater and dance into a political-circus-like performance. First staged in New York thirty years prior, the work remains relevant, reflecting on mass society dominated by television and advertising, echoing Saul Bellow's 'Dangling Man' and anticipating the end of Western civilization with Pasolinian despair.