Hamlet Fool by Ovlyakuli Khodjakuli

Ovlyakuli Khodjakuli is one of the most distinctive Central Asian directors. His astonishing metaphors grow out of straw and sand, fire and clay, water and sheep wool, wheat seeds and silkworm cocoons. Being deeply rooted, he temperates forces of nature and the most inconceivable appears to be human’s soul. Ovlyakuli Khodjakuli belongs to this rarest breed of directors, which stubbornly seek the universal theatre language. That’s why addressing the eternal play is not accidental. The director stages “Hamlet” as a street performance of a fool, a witness of real Hamlet’s death: an actor-drifter sets up his unsophisticated belongings on stage, calls for spectators, then infatuates into action and distributes parts among them.

He performs Hamlet’s tragedy, which he witnessed, on his own behalf. Respectively the attitude and emotional coloring towards these events belong to the comedian, fool.

The leading part is played by russian Anastasiya Zinovieva, who is familiar to London audience by the part of Little Prince. A bifacial hero appears in front of us. Perhaps only an actress is in power to play happiness and despair at the same time. The show draws the audience close to the stage and literally brings Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Ophelia, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of the audience members. Therefore every next show differs from the previous one – all the participants apart from the actress are new every time.

It’s a show parable, where the actor finds himself on the brink of collapse, face to face with entire Universe, with himself what’s even more frightening. Together with the fool participants and audience reach this brink and are forced to look at themselves. Ovlyakuli Khodjakuli deprives the audience from comfortable indifference, non-involvement, makes them to live through this tragedy again and again.

In Russian

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Source: lionandunicorntheatre.co.uk