Hamlet Hallucinations

In this new re-envisioning of Hamlet, Dario D’Ambrosi makes the Prince into a young, insecure, childish man who emerges from a grave where he has been buried in a pile of skulls, companions of his past. The script, purged of the political references of the original, focuses on his obsessions, phobias, Oedipal complexes and misogyny. In Part 1, Hamlet (played by Giacomo Rocchini) is crystallized in an eternal rehearsal of his tragedy, having completely lost his sense of self. He hears the voices and experiences the discontinuous thoughts and catatony of a schizophrenic. His text includes big slices of the monologues, but has its meter broken and sometimes brutalized by direct, immediate, raving language. Another character (played by Mauro F. Cardinali) keeps changing his physiognomy to embody all the characters in Hamlet’s story, including Ophelia and Hamlet’s father, mother and uncle. The audience is kept guessing about which character is hallucinating.