MEDIATHEK

Ophelia/Abyss

OPHELIA/TIEFSEE explores the psyche of a young woman through deconstructed male gaze. Ophelia, brought to self-destruction as she is engulfed in the male-driven games of power at court, loses her voice to her eloquent lover Hamlet who keeps on stealing the stage. We explore these themes through the original material by Shakespeare, the decadent fin-de-siècle perspective of Jules Laforgue, the political lens of Heiner Müller and a French theatre review from 1827 that took issues with the representation of female madness. All of these sources are performed by a male actor (as in Shakespeare's time) in the original languages, as to make the interplay of perspectives visible. A viola player serves as a doppleganger and mirror-male figure, in a setting that is mainly occupied by an orchestra who is both landscape and chorus, playing with the form of spoken voice / instrumental music interaction explored by Berlioz as 'melologue'. In this kaleidoscopic retelling, we observe the inner workings of submission and try to invent a theatre that is not Hamlet's, in search of what the dream theatre of Ophelia could be if given a chance to blossom, without for once speaking in her name. We include here material about the broader performance in which we are planning on including this work we created and premiered, VIOLENCES, which sets this story against the parallel tale of destruction of Katharina Blum (Heinrich Böll / Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, H.W. Henze).