Theatre as Intervention: Christoph Schlingensief's Hamlet in Zürich and Berlin, 2001

Abstract

Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) was a filmmaker, theatre director, and performance artist. In his Hamlet at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in 2001 – his only staging of a classic – Schlingensief deployed the strategies of intervention typical of his whole work. In this article Thomas Irmer focuses on the actors' troupe in the play, performed by former neo-Nazis. Schlingensief was asking whether an audience would accept the reintegration of people who were determined to leave this extremist group with the support of the German government. At the same time, Schlingensief referred to a historical performance of Hamlet by Gustaf Gründgens, whose career in Nazi and post-war Germany is played in counterpoint against the neo-Nazi outsiders potentially to be reintegrated. Schlingensief's ambivalence here challenged ready-made opinions about overlap between political and aesthetic experience. Thomas Irmer is a scholar, theatre critic, and co-director of four documentary films on theatre, including Die Bühnenrepublik: Theatre in the GDR (2003) and Heiner Müller: a Biographical Portrait (2009). He teaches American theatre at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a regular contributor to Theater Heute, editor of the book Castorf's Volksbühne (2003), and author of the forthcoming Life and Times of Andrzej T. Wirth.