‘A questionable shape’: Anatomising Hamlet in Gertrude (Radu F. Alexandru/Silviu Purcărete,2023)

Abstract

In 2023, Silviu Purcărete engaged with William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the National Theatre in Bucharest through the mediation of a Romanian adaptation, Radu F. Alexandru's Gertrude (2012). In Purcărete's vision, Elsinore appeared as a burlesque, corrupt yet playful universe where a family drama unfolded under the eyes of a voyeuristic spectator. This article argues that by multiplying its self-conscious theatrical devices the production also reflected on the status of the adaptation, as a mediated, fragmented access to the work, mirroring the director's puzzlement with Shakespeare's tragedy.

Introduction

In 2023, Silviu Purcărete's decision to engage with William Shakespeare's Hamlet – by staging a contemporary Romanian adaptation ¹ of the tragedy at the National Theatre in Bucharest – came rather as a surprise to both spectators and critics familiar with his approach to theatre-making. Famous for his reluctance to big cities, the director had not worked in the capital for over 10 years. In an interview with Horia Ghibuțiu, he claimed that this comeback was determined by a promise to return he had made to the late Ion Caramitru, at the time Managing Director of the National Theatre. ² Despite his ongoing fascination with Shakespeare, Purcărete had never staged Hamlet, a play that he perceived as extremely puzzling: ‘Hamlet is a mystery […] I don’t know which door to go through to investigate it’. ³ The right door to Shakespeare's Hamlet appeared to be Gertrude, Romanian playwright Radu F. Alexandru's adaptation, a play with which Purcărete had been familiar since its initial publication in 2012. The director had even written an afterword to this text, where he qualified it as an ‘impressive and moving’ piece of writing and praised its ‘extremely cynical approach to the myth of Hamlet’. ⁴

This was not the first time Purcărete approached the Shakespearean canon through the mediation of a (parodic) adaptation. In 1990 he had used Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi as an exorcism to Shakespeare's Scottish play in Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth, which had toured internationally after premiering at the National Theatre in Craiova. In 2007, he had directed Eugène Ionesco's Macbett at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, a production that he subsequently staged at the Hungarian State Theatre, Cluj (2021). However, this was the first time when the director, famous for his preference for the classics, chose to approach Shakespeare through the lens of the (half-forgotten) adaptation of a contemporary Romanian author. ⁵ Indeed, despite meeting with enthusiastic reception when originally published, ⁶ Alexandru's version had only benefitted from a public reading (National Theatre in Iași, dir. Doru Aftanasiu, 2020) before Purcărete decided to stage it at the National Theatre in Bucharest. Performed (to a full house) in the Studio Hall of the National Theatre, Gertrude was a small-scale production ⁷ that featured a risible yet bizarre universe; a corrupt, toxic world where a family drama unfolded under the eyes of a voyeuristic spectator.

Alexandru's text is a bleak take on the Elizabethan tragedy, which reduces the number of characters to seven (Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Horatio, Ophelia, and the Ghost) and, while grounding its plot in Shakespeare's story, radically departs from the original sequence of events, focusing on the conflict in the family. There is no place for tragedy in this re-reading, where a helpless Hamlet finds out that he is the fruit of an adulterous relationship between Gertrude and Claudius and that the ghost of Old Hamlet, who asks for revenge, is urging him to kill his real father. Shifting the focus of the story to Gertrude (who becomes the leading partner in the couple and the source of the family drama) enables the playwright to propose a new perspective on Hamlet: puzzled by the intricate web of lies and treasons set into motion by his authoritarian mother, the Prince, who is far from idealising his late father, ends by committing suicide. However, in spite of the important reorganising of the plot and of the fact that Alexandru's script retains next to nothing of Shakespeare's language, opting for a colloquial, contemporary Romanian, the story of Gertrude keeps returning to that of Hamlet. Readers who are at least remotely familiar with Shakespeare's work can recognise, with a twist, several key moments (Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost, the nunnery scene, the closet scene, the report of Ophelia's death) as well as allusions to different events and motifs of the tragedy. According to Pia Brînzeu, these ‘frequent returns to the source’ represent some of the special moments of the adaptation, to be enjoyed by readers familiar with Shakespeare's play. ⁸

Purcărete rearranged the sequence of events and cut the text to fit a performance time of one hour and 25 minutes. He opted for an all-male cast so as to avoid excessive psychologising and to direct the spectator's attention towards ‘something else’. ⁹ As Oltița Cîntec pointed out, even though the actors playing Gertrude (Claudiu Bleonț) and Ophelia (Lari Giorgescu) were male, the cross-gender casting was exposed: although they wore dresses, the actors did not modify their voice or gestures to suggest female characters. ¹⁰ Purcărete's production opened in late October 2023, as part of the Romanian National Theatre Festival, where it was acclaimed by both critics and the general audience. ¹¹ Reviewers hailed it as ‘a perfect visual-cinematographic poem’, ¹² ‘a masterpiece’, ¹³ and even as ‘the highlight of the festival’. ¹⁴

Purcărete's staging of Alexandru's rewriting raised the issue of the status of this engagement with Shakespeare's work. The director did not adapt Alexandru's text, but made the changes that are customary in a stage production: he reshuffled the order of the scenes, conflated different sequences, inserted short fragments or allusions to the source text or created meaning through its casting choices and set design. However, his directorial choices prompted the spectators to rely on their memory of the absent Shakespearean text in order to understand how the adaptation responded to it, turning the production into what Linda Hutcheon, following Gérard Genette, would have called a ‘palimpsestuous’ work, haunted by an absent original. ¹⁵

This essay argues that by foregrounding the spectator's frustrated, controlled gaze Purcărete staged his own difficulty with Shakespeare's Hamlet and reflected on the role of the contemporary adaptation as a mediator opening doors into Shakespeare's work. In Purcărete's Gertrude, the obsession with peering into personal, intimate stories and the centrality of the grotesque, exposed body posited the adaptation as a surgical act ¹⁶ turning the spectator's idea of Hamlet into a very ‘questionable shape’ (1.4.22) ¹⁷ : the production used estranging techniques inspired by Brecht's epic theatre as a means to foray into the body of the source text, to turn its themes and motifs inside out, questioning the spectator's idea of Hamlet. ¹⁸

Through the peeping hole

One of the aspects which interested the director in Alexandru's reworking was the fact that ‘characters are never alone, isolated in a world of their own. They know that they are being watched, that they “perform” for us’. The reader or spectator is thus placed in the position of a ‘voyeuristic witness, contaminated by the infected substance of the debate’. ¹⁹ Gertrude foregrounded the audience's gaze through its main stage device (set design by Dragoș Buhagiar): a system of mobile panels that slid open in different areas of the platform, framing every sequence, cutting smaller or larger windows on a universe that was only partially going to be disclosed. After each sequence, the walls closed and the lights went to blackout until another ‘window’ popped open in a different area of the platform. The stage action was thus constantly framed and fragmented, reduced to a series of vignettes in between which the spectator listened to the haunting soundtrack (Vasile Șirli) of the production, a dramatic score performed on synthesisers, with added strings and vocals. The high-pitched sounds, suggesting birds’ shrieks, created the mood of a thriller and functioned as a commentary on the sequence that had just been performed.

According to Nicoleta Cinpoeș, one of the main features of Purcărete's directing style is ‘the spellbinding and uncanny metamorphosis of the production's set’, and this production was no exception. ²⁰ The audience could only watch the events through these ever-changing frames, like images taken with an old-fashioned camera, and thus experienced the different dramatic sequences as the fleeting pieces of a puzzle that would never be fully grasped. As one reviewer suggested, spectating Gertrude was like ‘peeping through a keyhole in a thriller’ where ‘answers remain stubbornly elusive’. ²¹ Buhagiar's set design, which shaped the audience's response to the play, not allowing for emotional identification, served as a commentary on the dramatic action, but also mirrored the director's playful approach to Shakespeare's play. It thus became a metaphor for Purcărete's difficulty to identify ‘the right door’ to Hamlet.

The spectator's gaze was a frustrated one in this production, as the panels seemed to have a will of their own. While they usually adapted to the scene being performed, allowing the audience to get a full view of the actors, the walls sometimes showed a playful stubbornness, choosing, for instance, to show only the characters’ legs or entirely cutting them out. Thus, in the opening scene, Polonius (Paul Chiribuță), on the threshold of the frame, bent down in order to whisper to the audience, in a conspirative tone, the latest gossip: Prince Hamlet had only returned for his father's funeral and would go back to Wittenberg right after the ceremony. In the following scene, Hamlet (Marius Manole) was reduced to a disembodied voice while he argued with an unseen Gertrude over his refusal to see his dead father and pay him homage. The spectators, who listened to two male voices, were at least slightly confused about the characters participating in the conversation.

Moreover, the sliding walls conveyed an uneasy feeling of surveillance, as they closed in the form of grates or bars and opened in unexpected ways, suggesting that every action onstage might be watched by somebody beyond the spectator's gaze. In several tableaux, the walls initially covered the left or the right half of the platform and at some point slid open to show yet another character observing the events. Thus, in what appeared as this production's equivalent of the ‘nunnery scene’, ²² when a desperate Hamlet enquired who was ‘the great puppeteer’, the one ‘pulling the strings’ (G. 220), the panels gradually opened to show Polonius and then Gertrude watch the action and react to it. However, Polonius and Gertrude were hidden only from the view of the spectators, and neither Hamlet nor Ophelia was shocked to find out that they were being watched, as if it were common practice in the kingdom, or as if they were familiar with Shakespeare's story and expected their parents to spy on them.

Polonius appeared to play the role of a pedantic master of ceremonies, helping the audience piece together Purcărete's version of Hamlet's story. He always seemed to be lurking somewhere in the unseen part of the platform, as a witness to everything that was happening onstage, providing advice or instructing the others on what had to be done. When Hamlet refused the crown, Polonius, (law) book in hand, appeared out of nowhere to draw Gertrude's attention to the fact that the throne must not remain unoccupied. During the funeral wake, when Hamlet asked to leave the country as soon as possible, Polonius, who sat at the head of the table, produced a bunch of flowers and prompted Claudius to marry Gertrude as he explained that an ancient Jewish custom required the widow to marry one of her dead husband's brothers.

Throughout the production, curtains rose to uncover different fictional spaces, as various layers of mystery being removed, culminating with the appearance of the Ghost (Marius Bodochi) halfway through the running time, when Claudius and Gertrude were already worried about Hamlet's strange behaviour. As Old Hamlet entered the stage, asking for revenge, the last curtain rose, uncovering the firewalls, and the whole width of the platform was fully displayed, suggesting that a secret was finally being revealed. Indeed, the returning figure only told Hamlet part of the secret, forgetting to inform him that he was not his real father. The complex system of panels and curtains that mediated the spectator's access to the fiction in this production mirrored the director's approach to Shakespeare's play. The audience, cast as a powerless onlooker, was constantly reminded that it was granted fleeting glimpses into the intimate lives of the characters, but that it would always remain just a curious outsider.

Family frames

The audience's feeling of peering into a secret, forbidden space was enhanced by the fact that the director (relying on Alexandru's version) cropped out of Hamlet's story moments of intimacy, focusing on the conflictual relationship between parents and children, seen as ordinary, common people rather than as tragic heroes. ‘I find it much more interesting to discover Man as he really is, frail and powerless, than to make him brave’, Purcărete explained in an interview. ²³ Both the playwright and the director had stated, on various occasions, their reluctance to establish connections with the immediate reality. ²⁴ However, I argue that if Gertrude made no direct references to social and political issues in Romania, Alexandru's text allowed Purcărete to read Hamlet through references that were familiar to the Romanian audience.

As elsewhere with Purcărete, the lust for power in a corrupt society was one of the major issues addressed by this production. ²⁵ Something was certainly ‘rotten’ in the kingdom (no explicit mention was made of Elsinore), a space that was not without suggesting present-day Romania and where delicate issues were solved mainly through bribery and corruption. Claudius commissioned a ‘smart officer’ (G. 179) to spy on Hamlet and suggested appointing ‘a panel of doctors’ that would provide ‘the necessary paper’ (G. 197) indicating that the King had died of natural death – a solution that certainly reminded members of the audience of common practices in Romanian bureaucracy not long ago. Polonius was well aware (and perfectly reconciled with the idea) that he would be disposed of when no longer useful or if he happened to speak his real thoughts.

The story was mainly performed in indoor, intimate spaces, not typically displayed to the public eye – a bathroom, a bedroom, a kitchen – and the characters were engaged in the most common, mundane activities. The spectator saw Claudius take a bath while Gertrude was putting on makeup at her dressing table, Ophelia submissively wash Polonius's feet, and the family sat down for Old Hamlet's funeral wake. Gertrude, the hostess, helped the mourners to soup, which they slurped in silence – a possible hint to the ‘soup scene’ in the Romanian New Wave cinema, referencing the (pseudo-)Shakespearean characters of Alexandru's rewriting as common inhabitants of present-day Romania. ²⁶

However, the ‘soup scene’ (and the realistic aesthetics it is associated with in the memory of the Romanian spectators) seemed uncanny in the dreamlike, surreal atmosphere created onstage, suggesting that the production would challenge the audience's feeling of familiarity. Once the banquet was over, Hamlet and Horatio (Alexandru Potocean) climbed on the table, on their knees, and slurped the remains of the soup while actively debating the recent events. This moment was not without echoing an image in one of Tristan Tzara's early poems, where the Dada poet tried to ‘recast Hamlet into an absurd play’ ²⁷ : ‘Hamlet often dreamt of people on their knees / Splashing like dogs in thick vegetable soup left over from dinner / Licking their muzzle eagerly for the matter still lingering there’. ²⁸ With Purcărete, the plot of Shakespeare's tragedy seemed to have been relocated into the nightmare of Tzara's Hamlet.

In Gertrude, parents were authoritarian and did not hesitate to infantilise their grown-up children, for whose high(er) education and personal feelings they showed little to no consideration. ‘You’ve been in Wittenberg for four years. Is this what they teach you there?’ (G. 156), an angry Gertrude rebuked her son in the opening sequence of the production. Polonius almost prompted Ophelia to prostitute herself, suggesting she should travel abroad with the young prince ‘as two students discovering the world’ (G. 211) so that she may comfort him for the loss of his father.

Old Hamlet, who was first introduced as a corpse in an upright coffin placed in full view of the audience (reminding spectators familiar with Purcărete's work of an iconic image of Ma and Pa Ubu in Ubu Rex, where the protagonists popped out of their coffins at the end of the performance), proved to be particularly material as he visited Hamlet – a common man in a brown overall, choleric and even violent, who kept asking for revenge and inspired little to no respect. When a disturbed Hamlet seemed slow in understanding its command, the Ghost slapped him, leaving a trace of mud on his face. Towards the end of the production, an angry Gertrude summoned her former husband onstage for the truth finally to be disclosed. The Ghost returned, not as a spectral force, but as an embarrassed, repentant criminal. The Queen claimed that Old Hamlet had been her master in crime and that young Hamlet was not his son. Even as the truth was finally unveiled, this did not prevent this rather selfish spirit from calling again for revenge. Hamlet struggled to charge his pistol (and the Ghost had to assist him) in order to accomplish his surrogate father's wish, but only succeeded in committing suicide – not as a gesture of revolt, but rather out of helplessness.

Far from the tragic hero seeking to avenge his father's death in Shakespeare's tragedy, Purcărete's Hamlet was a fragile young man, full of resentment towards his late father, whom he blamed for being too selfish and too strict, but also for loving his son less than he loved his wife. In his relationship with Claudius and Gertrude, the Prince weaved together the attitude of a (spoiled) child and an insidious irony, asking uncomfortable, brutal questions (‘How did my father die?’ [G. 35]) while crawling in their lap, like a baby or a puppy. This Hamlet had no desire at all to become a king and only wished for freedom: ‘I am neither a hero nor a martyr’ (G. 165). If in the opening sequence the Prince adopted a contemplative pose, sitting on the stage floor, his hands over his feet, throughout the performance he kept collapsing to the floor, in a fœtal position, as if tired of living, echoing the Shakespearean protagonist's musings in his ‘To be or not to be’ speech. Crawling in Ophelia's lap, Hamlet became the Christ of a strange Pietà, crawling on the hospital trolley where Old Hamlet's necropsy had been performed he seemed an old man, tired of life, a state of inertia he rarely quit during the last part of the production.

The Prince displayed no real opposition to the events taking place at the royal court, preferring to contemplate the risible show from the position of an outsider. If Shakespeare's hero bemoaned the swift remarriage of his mother, in Purcărete's production (departing from Alexandru's version), Hamlet was the one who hastily (mock-)married Gertrude and Claudius, as if willing to accomplish as soon as possible what had to be done (according to Shakespeare's script), before heading to Wittenberg. Thus, under the audience's gaze, ‘the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.177–8), as the funeral wake literally turned into a wedding banquet: a bunch of flowers and a round of applause sufficed to accomplish the metamorphosis.

In Purcărete's world, where the good king was as bad as the bad one, Horatio – whose protruding belly echoed Purcărete's Pa Ubu rather than Hamlet's friend – did little to assist the Prince in his quest for the truth, although the two characters seemed to be strangely connected. After the funeral/wedding dinner, while they slurped together the remains of the soup, Horatio rebuked Hamlet for refusing the throne and prompting Gertrude to marry Claudius. Later on, he met with irony Hamlet's report of his encounter with the Ghost (‘Your father killed your father?’ [G. 185]) and tried to persuade him that he was wrong to doubt Claudius and Gertrude. When Hamlet died, Horatio delivered the beginning of his ‘now cracks a noble heart’ speech (5.2.314), but Shakespeare's words sounded out of context, as the actor recited the lines on an exaggerated, declamatory tone, which provoked bursts of laughter from the audience. Horatio stopped short after ‘good night, sweet prince’, as if he had forgotten his part. There was nothing contemplative in the actor's tone, suggesting these were just lines he was due to deliver, as part of a theatrical ritual – just as there was no place for tragedy on Purcărete's stage.

In the end, Horatio did not live to tell Hamlet's story, but to make a political career for himself: after killing Polonius (on purpose, to punish him for having told the Prince who had murdered Old Hamlet), Claudius and Gertrude dressed him in Polonius’s coat and forced him to accept the counsellor's role: ‘there's only one way left: life together with us’ (G. 231), explained Gertrude as she kissed him, suggesting that he could become her next husband. As in the logic of the theatre of the absurd, in Purcărete's production there was no escape from the vicious circle of history.

The bald maiden and the earthly Ghost

The production's obsession with the idea of intimacy on display was particularly visible in the treatment of two key characters whose secrets Hamlet struggled to understand – Ophelia and the Ghost. Initially presented as uncanny body presences, exhibited to the audience, to be viewed from a distance, they subsequently made the object of brutal dismemberment, allowing Hamlet – and the offstage audience – to peer into their interiority. Paradoxically, when opened, these bodies turned into spirits, into ghosts that gave away not the truth sought by the protagonist but their inner feelings of frustration, culpability, and anger.

Both Ophelia and the Ghost first emerged on Purcărete's stage in still images with a picturesque quality, weaving together the idea of death as culturally coded and that of public display. Draped in transparent funeral veils, they appeared as untouchable, distant, as objects of aesthetic contemplation. Old Hamlet, placed in a vertical coffin decorated with maidenly white flowers, echoed a picture exhibited in a museum. The corpse, framed by the margins of the coffin, was wrapped in a transparent white mortuary veil, a possible reference to the Orthodox Romanian funeral rites, where it is common to have the coffin open until the burial. As Gertrude busied herself around the coffin, arranging the flowers and rebuking Hamlet for his unwillingness to pay his last homage to his dead father, Old Hamlet's corpse became a site of conflict, a disturbing presence, at the same time deranging and powerless, an open tomb that had secrets to tell.

Dressed in mourning, wearing a ‘bald’ headpiece, her face covered with a transparent black veil, Purcărete's Ophelia seemed a ghostly image of Shakespeare's character. ²⁹ She burst onto the stage on Polonius's cue, collapsed to the floor and then gently slid towards Hamlet, who, already cuddled in a fœtal pose, put his head into her lap. The director framed the first encounter between Hamlet and the girl that he loved as a Pietà-like image, a picture of martyrdom and compassion. Polonius's daughter sat upright, holding the Prince in her lap, her hand protectively placed on his shoulders.

When, after his four-year absence Hamlet asked Ophelia how she was doing, the young girl's answer presented her as doubly estranged. As she complained that her life was governed by the rules of the court, Ophelia spoke in the third person, as if distancing herself from the social role she was supposed to perform. To illustrate her statement, she quoted, in English, the second quatrain of her Shakespearean counterpart's ‘Valentine’ song, which she read from her smartphone: ‘Then up he rose and donned his clothes / And dupped the chamber's door / Let in the maid that out a maid / Never departed more’ (4.1.51–4). The lines appeared as displaced in this context, suggesting that Purcărete's Ophelia was confronting herself with Shakespeare's character, as if she had a foreknowledge of what was supposed to happen and hinted at her upcoming suicide. ‘High studies!’ exclaimed the Prince, in an ironic tone, suggesting that Ophelia had been reading a text studied in class – a possible reference to the digitised copies that mediate nowadays students’ access to Shakespeare's text.

With both Ophelia and the Ghost, these initial images of the untouchable body, veiled and framed, were subsequently replaced by images of the dissected body, forced to give away its secrets through recourse to violent, clinical instruments. In Purcărete's version of the nunnery scene – where Ophelia, upon her father's request, did not reject Hamlet, but insisted on travelling with him abroad – Hamlet physically abused her, in the presence of her father, when he understood that the girl's reaction was part of a plot mounted against him. ³⁰ Whereas Shakespeare's protagonist asked Ophelia to go to a nunnery, in this version Hamlet's command was a much crueller one: ‘cut out your tongue!’ (G. 221) – ordered the Prince, and provided her with the instrument with which to do so – a pair of scissors lying on the surgical table. Gertrude did not get the chance to provide a poetic account of Ophelia's death. Instead, a haggard Polonius entered the stage, his daughter's smartphone and scissors in hand, and bluntly announced: ‘Ophelia is no longer with us’ (G. 223). However, Ophelia's silenced voice did survive her, as an eerie audio message, which tumbled out from her phone, on repeat: ‘I thought you were better than them; you were not’ (G. 223). With Purcărete, Ophelia delegated to the modern device the bitter reproaches she could not address directly to Hamlet. It was Horatio who finally put an end to this ghostly surrogate of Polonius's daughter by turning off the phone.

The Ghost's dismemberment, performed in full view of the audience, had a very different meaning from that of Ophelia, as Hamlet's (surrogate) father delivered a message of repentance and shame. In Gertrude, Hamlet did not stage a performance, a ‘mouse-trap’, in order to find out if the Ghost's accusation was true, but opted for a much more practical solution: he requested a necropsy. The necropsy was accomplished by all the members of the cast, who ceremoniously put on white surgeons’ robes while the Ghost pushed a hospital trolley onstage, undressed and climbed on it to be examined. Thus, the necropsy became a sort of public performance, echoing Shakespeare's play-within-the-play and associating the spectators with onlookers but also to spectators of a painting displayed in a gallery.

Indeed, as observed by several reviewers, ³¹ the scene was a parodic reference to Rembrandt's ‘The Anatomy Lesson’ (1632), with Polonius in the role of Dr Tulp and the paying audience in the position of the Amsterdam citizens. ³² Just as with Rembrandt, the corpse was that of an executed criminal, only Hamlet didn’t know it yet. Old Hamlet's body was placed in the opposite direction to that of the body in the Dutch painting and the source of light was provided by an electric bulb with which the corpse helpfully assisted the doctors’ proceedings. As they ‘opened’ the body, Old Hamlet started narrating his death, telling his part of the truth: he had fallen asleep in Gertrude's arms, poisoned not by a ‘leperous distilment’ (1.5.64) poured into his ear, but suffocated by a ‘poisonous perfume’ (G. 214). This sequence condensed two moments of Shakespeare's tragedy: the Ghost's address to Hamlet in 1.5 and the ‘mousetrap’ in 3.2. Purcărete's Old Hamlet lamented that he had died in a sinful state – and, unlike Shakespeare's Ghost, made no secret of his sins, which were recalling the concerns of a present-day parent: he had not proved a good father, he had not cared enough for his son. Although the Ghost/corpse seemed only to address the Prince, the dissection did catch the conscience of the king who, just like his Shakespearean counterpart, cried for light. Just as with Ophelia, the Ghost spoke through a mediating device – the necropsy that ‘re-enacted’ a famous Dutch painting – not to tell an objective truth, but to express his inner feelings, to tell what he could not tell while alive. Hamlet listened to these voices set free by the opened-up bodies of his lover and his uncle, mirroring the director listening to the voice of Shakespeare's tragedy through the mediation of Alexandru's adaptation.

Conclusion

By choosing to stage not Shakespeare's Hamlet but a contemporary Romanian adaptation focusing on the conflict in the family, Purcărete echoed the perspective of contemporary audiences struggling to comprehend Shakespeare's universe. It was through the multiplication of visual metaphors of cutting, fragmenting and dismemberment that Purcărete's Gertrude staged its obsession with understanding hidden truths, with unveiling secrets. Hamlet asked for the necropsy in order to discover the truth about his father's death, while both Ophelia and the Ghost complained that they had misunderstood the Prince. The centrality of the opened-up grotesque body, put on public display and delivering partial confessions, foregrounded the spectating experience as a critical dissection of Hamlet's story. The production opened up Shakespeare's play with a scalpel just like the actors opened the Ghost's very material body, and the ‘dissection’ offered a lesson, a possible idea of Hamlet, a bleak, cynical yet playful engagement with Shakespeare's tragedy, grounded in the material and the burlesque, a Hamlet which seemed closer to us.

At the same time, the production multiplied the estranging strategies through which it prompted spectators to imagine what was left out, hidden, unsaid in the adaptation, calling attention to the different traces of Shakespeare's play which seemed to haunt Alexandru's universe: the frames which focused the audience's gaze, hiding different areas of the platform where something was supposed to be happening, or the quotations from Shakespeare's English text, misplaced and explicitly presented as quotations by the way they were delivered.

Today, one needs to distance oneself from Shakespeare's work in order to understand what it has to tell us, seemed to suggest Purcărete, who admitted that Alexandru's version ‘brought him one step closer’ to Shakespeare's tragedy. ³³ Purcărete's door into Shakespeare's Hamlet, mediated by Alexandru's rewriting, appeared as a series of shifting windows, composing a very ‘questionable shape’ that both seemed to bring Hamlet closer to us and forced us to watch it from a distance.