“Hamlet mortuus est”, Levente Kocsárdi and Mona Donici

Arte-Factum Theater Company
Jeremy Malies in Romania
1 February 2025

Hamlet within castle ramparts at Timișoara in the west of Romania with a free-for-all on the photographic front as everyone (professional and amateur) takes pictures throughout. So far, so eminently logical as to location and the idea of melding spectators into the theme of a surveillance state in a brilliant adaptation written by Mona Donici.

It’s an inspired free treatment as opposed to close translation and remains compelling throughout drawing on the prodigious technical resources of actor Levente Kocsárdi who has also had conceptual input.

Photo credit: Mona Donici.

Cowled stage right like a meditative yogi on the mixing desk is composer and percussionist Sergiu Cătană who is responsible for the original minimalist and Indian-influenced soundscape. It’s an elastic, intercultural fusion music that is full of wavelike tones as though this brick structure is on the shore at Elsinore. Cătană is tactile in his occasional interaction with Kocsárdi, but it would be a stretch to see him as Horatio.

“Such a vile decay, a den of sin and incest” spits Kocsárdi. You fancy that Claudius and Gertrude’s unseen incestuous bedsheets are true shockers here. Kocsárdi’s distaste for his mother is palpable, but it’s the wretched Ophelia who he conjures up most thrillingly with help from video design by Sebastian Hamburger that throws the wretched girl’s flower garden and riverside grave up onto the walls as chalk line drawings.

Mona Donici’s approach is Beckettian at times – not so much Godot as Krapp’s Last Tape with Kocsárdi fussing over two pairs of shoes and votive offerings among the versatile main prop of a coffin while he bemoans mistakes and spurned opportunities in his life.

Photo credit: Ika Rodica, Artefactum.

He has made his entrance from blackout sporting a headtorch, glittering cowl, and an incongruous pair of Y-fronts. You feel he has indeed undergone enough horrors to make his hair stand on end like quills. Kocsárdi is empathetic when he says that he has forgotten who he once was, and you feel his mother’s hasty remarriage has turned his young life upside down. This is a Hamlet who doesn’t need to put an antic disposition on; he is mad north-north-west already.

I’m seeing the monologue as English surtitles from Donici’s Romanian original. The surtitles translation is the work of poet André Ferenc.  The set which might be seen as a catacomb or ossuary is by architect Mihai Donici. He has the sense and discipline to treat the performing area as essentially found space. You can almost smell the decaying lilies.

Donici makes much of Hamlet’s meditation on how anybody of any social rank might fish with a worm that has eaten a king. The adaptation underscores the meaningless of social hierarchies faced with mortality. And my favourite lines about life’s transience, Gertrude’s at times lyrical homily on the cyclical nature of life, survive but come unaccountably late.

The text asks us how Alexander the Great or Hitler might have looked in the grave, as the projection shows dictators including Kim Jong Un and Ceaușescu. This is very much a post-Ceaușescu Hamlet that (as a dig at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) speaks of the insolence of civil servants.

“I am the undead” says the ghost of Old Hamlet. It’s the first time I’ve had a toy skull as a gift in my goodie bag. And as First Clown/Gravedigger (like many of the characters) reflects on social class, Yorick’s jawbone is briefly detached to make a crown. The production is bejewelled with these inventive touches and I no doubt missed many others. But what I grasped transported me. A more interesting one-person Hamlet than Eddie Izzard’s recent sortie. Here, with one per cent of the budget and no hoopla, there is new light shed on the play throughout.