Hamlet Prince of Denmark. A tragedy by William Shakespeare. Translated into German by Elisabeth Plessen

There he stands in the shadows of a container: loose hair, a dagger stuck in his belt, looking around restlessly as though he were fleeing from his enemies. It is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a student at Wittenbergand a practising existential philosopher. With his critical method of always calling every action into question he is one of those responsible for the project of the modern age. His speeches, his metaphysics of questioning have influenced large sections of western literature. With Angela Winkler in the title role, Hamlet is Zadek’s 20th Shakespeare production and his second version of Hamlet.
In his first Hamlet production in 1977, he relocated the court from Elsinore to a factory building in Bochum-Hamme. The raw look of the industrial architecture and Ulrich Wildgruber as the Prince of Denmark both helped free the work from all the levelling out it had undergone as a result of becoming a classic of world literature.
In this respect, events will be coming full circle at Bochum's Jahrhunderthalle this October, when Angela Winkler's acting produces a tension that makes both the completely unexpected and the extreme possible at any moment. She uses an old piece to articulate quite contemporary experiences. Her Hamlet and all that he goes through, his melancholy, his disgust at the world, the narrowness and fragility of his existence, can no longer be kept at a distance. And, fleeing from his enemy is not quite wrong. The enemy is the animal lying in wait – reason.