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    ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

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    Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Lars Eidinger Might Be the Greatest German Actor You’ve Never Heard Of

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      He might be the greatest Shakespearean actor you’ve never heard of. At last, New Yorkers will get to see his no-holds-barred portrayal of Hamlet in Thomas Ostermeier’s production at BAM.The German actor Lars Eidinger could not have been more easygoing at the photo shoot for this article. After arriving sans entourage in front of the Plaza Hotel, he clambered up a couple of stacked N.Y.P.D. concrete barriers, precariously posing like a gigantic besuited stork. As the photographer eyed a gurgling fountain nearby, Eidinger casually asked: “I go in?”It was a chilly, drizzly October afternoon in New York, but he took off his socks and shoes, pulled up his pants and waded into the water. Afterward, he stripped down to his underwear and changed into the sweats he’d brought along (just in case), unfazed by gusts of wind and gawkers on the street.That go-with-the-flow spontaneity won’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Eidinger onstage. His Richard III at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017, for example, was a chaotic-evil rock ’n’ roll goblin, the performance simultaneously illuminating and unhinged. This monarch was “a bogeyman guaranteed to haunt your nightmares for weeks to come,” Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review of Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne theater company.Now New York theatergoers will be able to take in another Eidinger tour de force when he and Ostermeier bring their “Hamlet,” also from the Schaubühne, to BAM on Oct. 27. (The short run concludes Nov. 5.) By the end of the gripping, delirious show — which includes a hip-hop interlude, cross-dressing and Eidinger stuffing dirt into his mouth — you might be tempted to call an exorcist on this prince of Denmark.Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne company debuted in 2008, and finally arrives in New York with its star ready to wear the upside-down crown.Arno DeclairYet the actor does not set out to get a rise out of audience members. Rather, he uses a good old technique to draw them into the world of the play by creating a highly physical, no-holds-barred performance.“This has much to do with my love for Bertolt Brecht,” the jovial 46-year-old actor said in between sips of a latte outside a Midtown cafe. “Brecht said, ‘Zeigt, dass Ihr zeigt’ — ‘Show that you are showing.’ I’m all the time showing that I’m an actor onstage in a play. It’s the opposite of the understanding of a Method actor: I never become somebody else.“The only thing I try to achieve is to become myself,” he continued. “Maybe I’m more myself when I’m onstage as Hamlet than I am right now talking to you.”Eidinger has toured the world with the Schaubühne, and his charisma and all-in approach have earned him far-flung fans. This may help to explain why in recent years he has become a familiar presence on international screens — chances are you’ve seen that really tall guy with the wide jaw line and narrowly set blue eyes without knowing who he was. He has played his share of extremists, including an industrialist plotting against the Weimar Republic in the Netflix series “Babylon Berlin” and an ice-cold Nazi officer in the BBC alt-historical show “SS-GB.” He has also effectively mined restraint in naturalistic dramas, most notably as a newly separated dad visiting his parents in the German film “Home for the Weekend,” and as an actor dying of cancer in the affecting Swiss film “My Little Sister.” (In that film, his character portrays “Hamlet” in a staging by a director played by … Ostermeier.)“Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said of the actor who starred in the HBO series “Irma Vep.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesTellingly, our conversation took place while Eidinger was in town for the New York Film Festival, where he helped introduce Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, “White Noise,” in which he stars alongside Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver. The in-demand actor then had to leave our interview in a mad rush because he was running late for a meeting with the director Shawn Levy, for whom he has been starring in a series adaptation of the Anthony Doerr best seller “All the Light We Cannot See.”One of Eidinger’s recent (and most memorable) screen turns was in the HBO series “Irma Vep,” in which he portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons. “I liked the idea that Lars carries the torch of the madness of 1970s German cinema,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said this summer in a video chat about his show. “Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage. It’s stuff I grew up on and I think that’s something that’s missing in contemporary cinema.”It’s missing on contemporary stages, too, giving Eidinger’s self-aware hyper-theatrical performances a unique power. But if they resonate with theatergoers past the initial shock to the system, it’s because he never loses sight of his characters.EIDINGER GREW UP in Berlin, where he still lives with his wife and daughter, and studied theater there. He became a salaried member of the Schaubühne ensemble in 1999, though he admits that it took him a while to find his bearings as a professional actor. A production of “Troilus and Cressida” with the British director James Macdonald, in 2005, proved to be a turning point. “I was really lost as Troilus, and I asked James, ‘Can you please help me understand his situation?,’” Eidinger recalled. “He said, ‘Lars, just the words. Just the words.’”Eidinger with Alicia Vikander in “Irma Vep.” He portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons.Carole Bethuel/HBOEidinger confessed that at the time he didn’t quite get what Macdonald meant. It hit him a few years later, when he started to rehearse “Hamlet,” which premiered in 2008 and has been touring on and off ever since.“Suddenly I thought, “OK, he was absolutely right — it’s just about the words,’” Eidinger said. “Just try it at home: Say the line ‘To be or not to be’ and try to understand what it means for you. I guarantee that there will be an emotion coming up. I don’t have to go onstage with any kind of preparation for the way I go into a mood or to a certain kind of emotion. I go onstage and try to be as open and blank as possible, and then it’s just about the words.” (Eidinger is so attached to “Hamlet” that a forthcoming documentary about him is titled “To Be or Not to Be.”)While it takes some preparation to achieve that state of readiness, Eidinger claims that he doesn’t start from high concepts. “There’s a very nice quote from Helene Weigel: ‘If you have an idea, forget it,’” Eidinger said, quoting Brecht’s wife and the director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble. “I believe in the genius of creation out of the moment. You invent something out of an impulse because you are open-minded, but you are not aware how meaningful it is. For example, in ‘Hamlet’ I wear the crown upside down,” he continued. “We tried several crowns and then we had one that was a bit too big for my head and always fell off. So I put it on the other way around, and then it worked.”It probably helps that he and Ostermeier seem to have a complicated relationship that involves trust but also a degree of one-upmanship. Speaking about their rehearsals in a video conversation, the director said: “We were constantly competing on who has the more crazy idea, who is more funny, who is more inventive, who is more creative. Because we know each other so well, it’s often, ‘OK, but I know even better, it can be even more crazy.’”“I’m aware of everything,” Eidinger said of his acting onstage. “I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAnd this does not stop once a show reaches the stage. Jenny König, who plays Gertrude and Ophelia in “Hamlet” and Lady Anne in “Richard III,” knows all too well that acting with Eidinger requires being constantly on alert. “I think he’s really good at creating an illusion that it’s happening the first time right now — he can’t just play the scenes like he did it a hundred times before,” she said in a video chat. “It’s always this special moment where something else could happen. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s the risk, but the aim is to be in the moment and to experience real reactions.”Onstage, Eidinger is in a heightened state of consciousness that allows him to experience a hyper-awareness of his environment. That, in turn, helps him modulate and adjust his performance on the spot. “Some actors describe acting like being a tunnel, but it’s the complete opposite for me: I’m aware of everything,” he said. “I’m standing onstage, maybe I’m emotional and crying real tears, but at the same time I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. I can think about bringing my daughter to school. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”This openness to his surroundings is also expressed into an interest in exploring other mediums. Eidinger, who mentions music as a primary inspiration, released a trip-hoppy album, “I’ll Break Ya Legg,” in 1998; quotes the rapper Tyler, the Creator as freely as Brecht; and has been deejaying for decades, including regular gigs at the Schaubühne. (“I’d say his taste of music is much too commercial,” Ostermeier sniffed. Someone needs to write a play à clef about these two.) He also loves taking photographs and has directed a few shows — this fall he is reprising the adaptation of “Peer Gynt” that he hatched with the artist John Bock and starred in.“For me, there’s not a big difference in how I express myself, so I’m completely satisfied just doing photography, I’m completely satisfied just directing or doing music,” Eidinger said. “Acting is something I stick to because maybe I’m most talented. In all the other art forms, I feel limitations; when I act, I feel no limits. And that’s very attractive, of course.” More

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      After a Winter of Discontent, a Glorious Summer in Salzburg

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      The theater offering at the Alpine festival features reworked classics by Shakespeare and one of the event’s founders.SALZBURG, Austria — “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” Those lines, perhaps the most famous opening in all of English drama, go unspoken in the Salzburg Festival’s new production “Richard the Kid and the King,” a cradle-to-grave chronicle of the Bard’s most ruthless monarch. Yet the monologue was ringing in my ears as I left the theater after four hours of greed, betrayal, hypocrisy, infanticide, decapitation and disembowelment.As Salzburg warmed up in late July, the arrival of “Richard” was an electrifying theatrical jolt to jump-start the event’s second pandemic-era installment, which features four new dramatic productions, six fully staged operas and scores of concerts. Forsooth, the winter of our discontent has been made glorious summer by the Salzburg Festival.The acclaimed German theatermaker Karin Henkel was originally onboard to direct “Richard III” in 2020. Postponed a year by the coronavirus pandemic, the production has been enlarged and expanded for this year’s edition. Henkel and her creative team have incorporated portions from “Slaughter!,” a 12-hour compression of Shakespeare’s eight War of the Roses plays that was first performed in Salzburg in 1999.In the evening’s first half, “Richard the Kid,” which largely deals with the adolescent sons of York, the production uses the “Slaughter!” mix of German and profanity-laden English gangster slang.Much of the colorful patois is rendered with vulgar hilarity by Kate Strong, a British actress and dancer who has been a fixture in German-language theater for the past 25 years. She is one of only four actors onstage before intermission, who divide nine roles among themselves. The heroic Bettina Stucky (as Clarence and Elizabeth) and the fearless Kristof Van Boven (as the entire house of Lancaster) show similar nimble dexterity in bringing this most dysfunctional and tragic of royal families to life.Kristof Van Boven and Lina Beckmann in “Richard the Kid and the King,” directed by Karin Henkel.Monika RittershausEven if the show’s busier and more populous second half, “Richard the King,” is less riveting than the beginning, the glue that holds the grim production together is Lina Beckmann’s astounding performance as Richard. It is as much an interpretation of the charming psychopath as it is a treatise on the nature of acting itself, as Beckmann slips into Richard’s misshapen body and mind, allowing us to watch with uncanny intimacy the dissembling, scheming and feral ambition that animate the arch-villain.Witnessing Beckmann’s brazen performance put me in mind of another captivating Richard III of recent memory: Lars Eidinger.In 2015, the prolific Berlin-born stage and screen actor — best known internationally for his role in the hit TV series “Babylon Berlin” — first performed the conscienceless king at the Berlin Schaubühne, where he has worked since 1999. Thomas Ostermeier’s shattering production, which bored inside the murderous monarch’s blood-soaked brain with upsetting perversity, has been performed everywhere from Avignon, France, to Adelaide, Australia, and came to New York in 2017.Now Eidinger, 45, has become the latest in a long line of German and Austrian acting greats to tackle the main role in “Jedermann,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 version of a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition and possibly its strangest.In August 1920, the first Salzburg Festival opened with an outdoor performance of this “Play About the Death of the Rich Man” in a production by Max Reinhardt, who, along with Hofmannsthal, was one of the event’s founders. It has been performed almost every summer since, with the likes of Maximilian Schell, Klaus Maria Brandauer and, most recently, Tobias Moretti in the title role of a hedonistic rich man visited by death, who offers his victim a last shot at salvation.The local enthusiasm for the play is difficult to explain to outsiders. To say that “Jedermann” lacks the popular appeal of “The Sound of Music,” another famous Salzburg cultural export, is putting it mildly.For a tradition as deeply entrenched as “Jedermann,” productions here tend to be, well, traditional. Given this fact, the new production, by the director Michael Sturminger, is practically avant-garde, or at least tries to be: There is a largely abstract set and eclectic costumes, comic-surreal moments, including an expertly choreographed boxing match, and interpolated texts and songs. But the production fails to establish a consistent tone, and Sturminger’s varied theatrical effects are ill suited to Hofmannsthal’s lofty and archaic rhyming couplets.I don’t mean to suggest that a ritualized parable like “Jedermann” resists daring approaches, just that many of this production’s ideas seem tentative or not fully thought through.“Richard the Kid and the King” delivered an electrifying jolt to the Salzburg Festival.Monika RittershausEidinger approaches the lengthy role with focused sobriety that seemed intended to invest the character with unexpected psychological shadings, but the performance seemed to ignore, rather than engage with, the inherent naïveté of Hofmannsthal’s text and the archetypical nature of its protagonist. (It seems misguided to treat Jedermann as a character as richly drawn as Richard III or Hamlet.)The “Jedermann” premiere was supposed to take place outside, but persistent rain forced the show indoors, to the Grosses Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest opera house, which is where I saw the third of 14 planned performances. That cavernous venue seemed to have something to do with the loss of up-close-and-personal immediacy: I found myself wondering how different my experience of the show would have been from the stadium-style bleachers set up on Cathedral Square, watching the performers strut and fret their hour on a stage whose vastness did not threaten to dwarf them.Eidinger is a distinctive actor whose ferocity and intensity come through in performances that are as grippingly psychological as they are dazzlingly physical. His pugilistic and choreographic feats notwithstanding, much of his Jedermann had a note of studied, at times ironic, understatement. From my seat in Row 15, 100 or so feet from the stage, I felt that the subtlety of his performance failed to transmit.Initially, Salzburg Festival organizers said they would leave it up to the audience whether to wear masks during the performances, as was the policy last year, during the festival’s socially distanced installment. Last year, the festival venues were filled at half capacity. In 2021, I sat elbow to elbow with my fellow theatergoers.The new production of “Jedermann,” a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition.Matthias HornBut after one of the 2,179 audience members who had attended the “Jedermann” premiere tested positive for the coronavirus, the organizers reversed course and mandated face coverings for all indoor performances. (My impression from the opening week is that festivalgoers are mostly complying, although I’ve seen unusual ways to wear a mask: A bald man sitting in front of me at “Richard” wore his mask on his head like a birthday hat.)The “Jedermann” infection, and the festival’s swift response, was a sobering reminder for Salzburg, which has now successfully opened not one but two pandemic-era installments against staggering odds, of the health emergency that continues to ravage the world outside this sheltered oasis in the Alps.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 30. More

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      ‘My Little Sister’ Review: Sibling Dependency

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘My Little Sister’ Review: Sibling DependencyA cancer diagnosis only strengthens the bond between adult twins in this perceptive Swiss drama.Nina Hoss in “My Little Sister.”Credit…Film MovementJan. 14, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMy Little SisterNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Stéphanie Chuat, Véronique ReymondDrama1h 39mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“My Little Sister,” a tender domestic drama from the Swiss writers and directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, faces terminal illness with a refreshing emotional candor.Lisa (Nina Hoss), a gifted Berlin playwright, stopped writing on the day that her beloved twin brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), a celebrated theater actor, received his leukemia diagnosis. Since then, she’s been living in artistic limbo in Switzerland, where her husband (Jens Albinus) teaches at a prestigious boarding school. But the demands of Sven’s illness, and Lisa’s inability to accept his decline, only tug her closer to her brother and further from her fracturing marriage.[embedded content]Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, “My Little Sister” offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism. The photography is bright and lustrous, the tone vital and purposeful. Eidinger plays Sven entirely without self-pity, a man furiously seizing public-restroom sex as if willing his depleted body to perform. And Hoss makes Lisa a ball of anxious industry, her denial and distress keeping her in constant motion. Both siblings, more than anything, want Sven back onstage; they have always been each other’s muse.Absolving the film of any shred of sentimentality, the indispensable Marthe Keller, as the twins’ testy mother, delivers her sometimes shockingly unfiltered remarks with a pique that softens their cruelty. Small in scale and big in heart, “My Little Sister” believes unwaveringly in the palliative power of art: When medicine can’t heal you, sometimes words can fill the breach.My Little SisterNot rated. In German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Film Movement.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More