New “HAMLET” Shakes Up GTown – Heading Straight for Cape Town

Acclaimed author and director Boris Nikitin rewrites the most famous of all theatre pieces, “Hamlet”, and transforms it into a contemporary performance for audiences who love the avant-garde.

Featured as an opening attraction at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on 28 June with shows continuing on 29 and 30 June, “Hamlet” then heads straight to Cape Town hot off the Festival circuit on 4 and 5 July at The Little Theatre, University of Cape Town.

In a mix of experimental documentary play and music-theatre, the enigmatic performer and electronic musician, Julia*n Meding, takes over the part of a modern Hamlet who revolts against reality. Supported by a baroque-quartet, Meding takes himself on a tour de force on stage by introducing and exposing identities of himself to the public. Meding, giving details from his personal life story, revolts against the audience, like Hamlet against his royal court he attacks the public, agitates, flirts with them, mocks them and tries to seduce them.

Time and again he seizes the microphone, he starts to sing: raw electropunk, sketchy cover songs, and ballads – Words, sung as fragments of emotions. Meding’s/Hamlet’s performance dazzles between offensive jestering and vain jokes, exaggerated gestures and confrontational pose. Is this Meding? Or Hamlet? Is he serious? Or is it all a game? “Is he or isn’t he”? Is he not both at the same time, eventually?

The performance crossfades documentary and fiction into a contemporary version of Hamlet in which the conflict zone interplays between illusion and reality, individual and society. Challenging audiences to approach the themes of “Hamlet” in new ways, the energetic 90 minute performance confronts the traditional theatre aesthetic through camera work broadcast live on to stage. “Hamlet” is poetic rebellion: raw, coarse, confrontational, anti-social, captivating.

“Nikitin’s Hamlet brings the debate on reality in contemporary theatre to a new level.” – Theater der Zeit

“It’s an evening that holds us while making us swing … There are only a few directors who lead theatre to such a critical point as Boris Nikitin currently does.” – Theater Heute

No under 16s | 90 min | German with English surtitles.

For more information on this upcoming event visit our events calendar.