About This Project

William Shakespeare and Irena Kraus

IN THE SHADOW OF HAMLET

Set and Costume Design: Ivana Vasić
Music: Igor Gostuški
Photo: Sonja Žugić
Production: Children’s Cultural Centre, Belgrade, Serbia, April, 2011

Contemporary “Hamlet”, adapted by the Swedish dramaturge Irena Kraus, inhabits a nocturnal space, or rather a space between dream and reality, the space between childhood and youth, between generations…

 
Unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a bit older one, this Hamlet is on the threshold of adulthood which, for him, is still an unknown and mysterious territory. The entire performance is built upon the question if the threshold should be crossed or not and if remaining on the safe side, the side of childhood, is possible at all.

 
Is there a safe side today anyway? The performance revolves around the plays performed among the protagonists; the plays which spans from a harmless one, played by Hamlet and Ophelia, to the dangerous ones played by adults in Hamlet’s world but also in our own, who thus manipulate their children.