Abstract
Portmann offers a critical investigation of political Shakespeare in Former Yugoslavia. Taking Jan Kott’s influential essay collection Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1961) as a starting point, she argues that a universal understanding of political Shakespeare in Eastern Europe risks reducing dramaturgical strategies in political theatre to Kott’s strategy of actualization and allusion. Drawing on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s and Jacques Rancière’s theories, Portmann analyses two Hamlet productions during the 1990s. She points out that there is a significant shift from performance’s content to its formal aspects, such as modes of representation, which are considered as political. By offering an alternative to such established strategies as Kott’s actualization, the chapter reveals a greater variety of approaches in political theatre.
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Kott was translated into Serbo-Croatian already in 1963, two years before the English translation, and he influenced young directors (Senker 2006, 126), such as the Croatian director Dino Radojević’s Hamlet in 1964 or the Macedonian director Ljubiša Georgievski’s Hamlet in 1966.
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The notion of political Shakespeare as a global myth is also central to Aleksandra Sakowska’s essay “‘Come, let’s away to prison’: local and global myths, and ‘political Shakespeare’ in twenty-first century Russia.” Emily Oliver’s essay on the myth of subversive Shakespeare in the GDR follows a similar path.
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This theoretical approach to the key image goes along with various studies engaging with memory politics and theatre, such as Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2001). Since Carlson’s understanding of memory in theatre is always connected to a certain institution, a play, an actor, or a building, memory in theatre is often reduced to its function of cultural representation. Although this understanding of memory in theatre covers some aspects of how memory is negotiated in theatre, it is at the same time reductive since it focuses only on one particular memory discourse. Warburg’s theoretical concept, in combination with Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, offers a wider perspective on memory discourse and moves away from its single function of cultural representation. This particular argument in reference to other theoretical approaches is made in Portmann (2016).
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Portmann, A. (2018). Hamlet in Times of War: Two Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Tragedy in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In: Mancewicz, A., Joubin, A. (eds) Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3_10
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