Directing Towards Freuds Hamlet in Y2K

A detailed Summary of Directing Towards Freuds Hamlet in Y2K

Before we begin, I would like to congratulate you all on getting selected for the various parts in this production of Hamlet. My name is Glenn Close, and I will be directing this production from today until it closes in Tokyo next May. I have played the role of Gertrude, as many of you know, in the Hollywood production starring Mel Gibson. I also played Ophelia twice in high school and once my senior year at UCLA. This is my favorite Shakespeare play, one of the best of all time. Recently I was reintroduced to Freud's notable commentary on Shakespeare and his relation to Sophocles in The Interpretation of Dreams. From this I have pulled the essential pages and copied them for your perusal. In fact, each of you received those pages one week ago and were asked to come prepared to discuss its important aspects and to help me create a clearer vision of what we can do to make our Hamlet more like the one that Freud envisioned in 1899.

As the director of this play, I have gathered you all here today to explain what this particular version of Hamlet is best representing. I decided to try to help Hamlet become more overtly repressed by his intellect so that Freud's vision can come to light in the minds of our audience

The setting will be present day Athens, Greece. I chose Athens because Freud refers to Oedipus Rex as the basis of Hamlet's character. Since Oedipus is Greek, putting Hamlet in Athens makes the connection between these characters more direct. There are two reasons why I moved the play to the present day. The first one is the difficulty that modern audiences have with Shakespearean English. My goal is get the audience to hear Freud's Hamlet as clearly as possible without getting lost in Shakespearean language. The second reason has to do with the poor habits of American theater audiences. If the play takes place in another time period than the present, the audience members tend to see the lessons of the story as unrelated to them. Only in bringing the play to the modern day can Freud's lessons connect directly with the repressed lives of the modern theatergoer. I also feel that most men living in the twenty-first century will not admit that during their formative years, sexual desires arose and were naturally directed towards their mother, the object of their most fond love.

According to Sigmund Freud, the story of Oedipus Rex and the story of Hamlet have the same underlying theme. In both stories, the character of the prince, Oedipus and Hamlet respectively, is caught in Freud's Oedipus Complex: "Being in love with one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time [childhood] and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of later neurosis." (294) Hamlet's neurosis is manifested by his inability to act. The story of Oedipus is different from that of Hamlet because Hamlet never acts on the feelings he has for his mother and never avenges his father's death. Hamlet represses the feelings he has for his mother, and feels that if he kills his father, he is killing the embodiment of his own repressed wishes. According to Freud, " Hamlet represents the type of man whose power of direct action is paralyzed by an excessive development of his intellect." (298) By altering certain scenes, I can bring the repressed Hamlet out and show our modern viewers that dealing with these Freudian issues is acceptable in today's society.

At this point I would like to look at a couple of specific key portions of scenes in order to show you what I mean by bringing the Freud out in Hamlet. Let's turn our text to act three scene four, please. I would like Hamlet and Gertrude to try out a few key lines here. This is the scene where Hamlet and the Queen Gertrude are in the Queen's private chambers. Hamlet, Gertrude, hurry up on stage here so that we can get to the heart of what Freud was talking about in his treatise. (Changing focus back to the group, Glen Close con

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Approximate Word count = 1868
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Arts