“For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now was and is, to hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
These are the words of Shakespeare and the motto of an event show that premiered at the Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre under the stage directing of master Liviu Ciulei. The play is the third adaptation of Shakespeare’s work. The first two were made across the ocean by the famous director, in Washington in 1977 and New York in 1984. This time, the intentions of the director were to construct a very strict show. It was not the director who was important, but his wish to allow the show he created with the help of the Bulandra team to convey to the audience as much as possible of the infinite nuance richness of the text. The directing interventions were kept to a minimum and so were those effected on the translation that Nina Cassian made 20 years ago. In his show, Liviu Ciulei preferred to place the action in a different period than the Elizabethan one. He went with the Wilhelm I period, the prince who later became the emperor of Germany, the so-called Bismark period. The somber decors designed by architect Octavian Neculai and the simple but elegant costumes made by Nina Brumusila only serve to amplify the basic idea the show’s creator wanted to impart. The numerous light changes clearly suggest the dramatic tension. The most important fact is that this “Hamlet” gathers exceptional actors belonging to several generations: Marcel Iures (the lead), Valeria Seciu (Gertrude, the incestuous queen), Victor Rebengiuc/Dan Astilean (Claudius), Dan Pavlescu (Polonius), and the younger Andrei Aradits (Horatio), atefan Banica jr. (Laertes), Adriana Titieni (Ofelia), etc.
Surely it is a show worth seeing, especially by the young generation that missed the past adaptations of “Hamlet;” it was also at the Bulandra Theatre, 15 years ago and featured Ion Caramitru, directed by Alexandru Tocilescu.