Winner loses all in the games people play

Two eagerly anticipated German-directed productions of Shakespeare arrived in Tokyo last week, each the product of its director's extensive experience and deep deliberation on the play's contemporary relevance, and each given a polished reinterpretation as a result. ...

The first to open, on Sept. 7, was Hamlet at the New National Theater in Shinjuku, with Peter Stein directing. Born in 1937, Stein built his reputation with contemporary European drama during the 1970s and ‘80s as the artistic director of the Schaubuhne Theater in West Berlin. He resigned from the Schaubuhne in the mid-‘80s, but continued working as a guest director while also turning his attention to opera and collaborations with Russian dramatists.

In 1993 he caused a sensation with his radical, grand-scale production of Aeschylus' fifth-century B.C. tragedy Oresteia, staged in Moscow with a Russian cast. This Hamlet uses many of the same cast and crew members, with thirtysomething human dynamo Yevgeny Mironov as the Prince of Denmark. Stein believes that Mironov, who played Orestes in Oresteia, is his "ideal and only Hamlet."

And Mironov and Stein together give us a Hamlet unlike any other. This production begins with the solemn tolling of a bell, as if summoning the young, wise prince to fulfill his onerous duty: to avenge the murder of his father by his uncle Claudius, his adored mother's new husband, and in doing so to go against his own nature to purify this world of fraud and scheming.

Mironov's prince is up to the task. Incisive, active and artistic, he is far from the naive, delicate young man with a mother-complex that many directors portray on stage. He moves swiftly and athletically, his innate love of life expressing itself in energetic fencing and a love of music – he picks up a saxophone, and its sound is a blast of human warmth amid the gloom of the conspiring Danish court. It's obvious that this young man is motivated by a sincere passion to improve the lives of those around him – a passion that, tragically, ends in death not only for his mother and Claudius, but for himself as well.

Stein's Hamlet concentrates, then, on the conflict between youth's life-loving ambition – though this sometimes seems ridiculous to "commonsensical" adults – and Hamlet's active resistance to corrupt, established society. For example, Stein's translation of "To be or not to be" renders its dilemma as "to take action or, by doing nothing, to stay as we are." This prince is alive to the subjectivity that governs notions of right and wrong.

Other characters, too, are crisply reinterpreted. Even Ophelia is less a spurned innocent, the victim of others, than an immature girl whose dependent nature leads directly to her death.

Stein sends a clear message about the dire consequences of plots and dissembling – a message with relevance for the modern world, although the look of this production is Scandinavian and medieval. In this director's sharp reading of the play, what happens onstage is entirely the consequence of people's actions – not the working out of a preordained tragedy. With the play staged in the round and actors roaming the whole auditorium, not simply the simple, black wooden stage, the audience, too, is drawn into this complex moral universe. ...