Avant-Garde Hamlet Text, Stage, Screen [Hardcover]

There is certainly much to welcome in this new study of Hamlets afterlives.... White writes with real felicity, and he has done us all a service in providing so much useful information so intriguingly packaged.... This is a hugely worthwhile and abundantly provocative book.Revolution, rebellion, absurdism, the right to mourn: these are all expressions of Shakespeares Hamlet. But in R.S. Whites Avant -Garde Hamlet, the author doesnt posit these as expository universal qualities: rather they are driving energies, powering productions in a diversity of ways that makes each production real, vital, experimental, worth staging for more than the power of the beautiful meditations therein. A recent review of The Bell Shakespeares Hamlet suggested: 'When companies approach Shakespeare without a clearly defined vision or a genuinely contemporary take on the text, it makes the very notion of the Bards 'universal truths' look increasingly tenuous.' R.S. White knows this, and he infuses his understanding of it into the very architecture, the living blood-flow, of Avant Garde Hamlet. In his hands, Hamlet is ever-now, ever-new.Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world.Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspectlce