This study examines the intercultural meaning of Korean Hamlet productions focusing on their ways of representing Hamlet’s madness. As an interpretative approach, it purports to revise the existing production historiography of the play, most of whi... This study examines the intercultural meaning of Korean Hamlet productions focusing on their ways of representing Hamlet’s madness. As an interpretative approach, it purports to revise the existing production historiography of the play, most of which has been either descriptive or prescriptive. Confirming the necessary gap between text and performance, this study is to investigate what the specific gap in the translation staging means. Hamlet’s madness, one of his major characteristics throughout the text, is a useful subject matter in exploring the gap because of its distinctive dramaturgy: uncertainty. After a brief examination of previous studies on the topic, I investigate the pattern of difference and repetition found in the speech, suggesting that Hamlet’s mental status is deliberately configured as ambiguous by the playwright’s subtle use of language. The antic disposition is not only a shield that protects Hamlet from his enemies, but also an opponent by which he struggles not to be overwhelmed. By depicting Hamlet’s mind with the strategic opacity, Shakespeare achieves an artistic balance which would allow the fictional character a lifelike personality. The mediation of the literary translation between the text and the performance has a crucial effect on translation staging: the original system of uncertainty constructed by vocabulary and metrical device cannot avoid distortion in Korean translation. Chapter 4 examines the difficulty in maintaining the device of difference and repetition in Korean translation, confirming that the uncertainty of madness is a conundrum of translation staging. Thus staging Hamlet in Korean fails to sufficiently represent the ambiguity of madness, even if the whole text is delivered. It is this untranslatable condition, however, that invites stage directors to find alternative ways of productive reception, seeking the contemporary meaning of madness. The faithfulness of staging can be achieved by the agreement on the consistency between text and performance among artists and spectators. The performance analyses in Chapter 5 aim to investigate the intersubjective compatibility in the way madness is interpreted in Korean Hamlet productions. The result shows that most productions tend to present Hamlet’s insanity in a certain way rather than maintain the textual ambiguity. It is also common that metatheatre is chosen for the representation of madness, because filling the gap with the contemporary matters could allow the directors to have a double view between reality and fiction. The analysis begins with a unitary investigation of text rearrangement, exploring how a performance relates with the text. Productions in general make room for interpretive emphasis with textual condensation and displacement, which creates the gap as a potential place to insert new elements supporting their own interpretation. Hae-rang Lee’s rendition of Hamlet’s madness is an attempt for the reconciliation between his theatrical style and the Shakespearean dramaturgy. Considering him to be lacking logical coherence of action, Lee excludes from Hamlet’s monologues the self-reproach for the procrastination of revenge. Although it allows the production to avoid the stereotypical interpretation that he is indecisive or contemplative, Lee’s modification magnifies the inexplicability of Hamlet’s attitude toward vengeance. While Shakespeare dramatizes Hamlet’s inner conflict with the uncertainty of madness, Lee makes his mind more abstruse by muting the inner voice. Stressing the unity of action, reducing soliloquies and asides, and stimulating illusionism by employing ravish Elizabethan costumes all inform that Lee tries to adjust the play toward a realist style he has been pursuing throughout his career. In spite of the rearrangement, however, Hamlet’s madness still remains blurred, and makes Lee come to conclusion that Hamlet’s uniqueness is in the liberation from playwright’s dramaturgic control that leads the audience to feel him like a real person. Presenting Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost as a shamanic possession, Yun-taek Lee proposes the structure of possession as a Korean way of understanding his madness. As shamanic possession empowers the prince to directly communicate with the supernatural being, play-within-the-play is no more a device to verify the suspicious message of the Ghost but the center of revenge. It is also noticeable in Hamlet of Street Theatre Troupe that textual ambiguity is rendered with the productive discord of nonverbal signs. For the “Korean but not too Korean” staging of Hamlet, Lee juxtaposes Korean traditional elements with the western ones and let them collide with each other. Lee’s strategy to perform consciously the task of the translation staging, ‘doing Hamlet here and now’, has activated metatheatre in the subsequent productions. Gut performances that Jung Ung Yang introduces to Hamlet contribute not only to the transcultural interpretation of the original dramatic elements but also to the renewal of what the rituals mean in the play. Gut not just corresponds to one of the major themes of the text, the lack of mourning, but provides compensation for it. Yang’s strategy to fill the textual absence with his imagination relates to the matter of perception that madness in the text constantly deals with. As a device of metatheatricality, gut performances in Yang’s Hamlet raise questions to the audience on topics ranging from the relationship between reality and fiction, to the national identity of Korean theatre. Reading the play in the context of the contemporary Korean social environment, Vibrating Jelly combines the real and the fictional by inviting lay-off workers to act Hamlet. The uncertainty of madness is used to depict the unstable living conditions of workers in the time of a flexible labor market. By performing Hamlet, the lay-off workers are to lay a “mouse-trap” to the reality where economic justice is not realized. The rehearsal video clips inserted between the scenes demonstrate that the inexperienced actors tried hard to project their emotions to the characters. The external explanation of the actors’ poor impersonation in some degree would help the audience experience catharsis. What is more important about the inset videos, however, is that they provide the audience with a double perspective which shows both content and form, and the process and the result. The lay-off workers’ performing Hamlet invites the audience not only to intensify the feeling of solidarity but also to reflect on the act of acting itself. Modern theatre directors are no longer simple messengers of the playwrights, but interpretive artists who provide the audience with their own thoughts and visions about the text. The limitations of literary translation would call for more active interpretations and even transformations of the text. Performance analysis, therefore, is an act of double interpretation to figure out how the directors understand the text and what their modifications mean. As Hamlet translation staging grants a new meaning specific to the current age and area, the key subject of the analysis is to investigate the significance of the specificity. Theatre translation is always an intercultural act, the product of which is inevitably a hybrid.
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