Máquina Hamlet is a dramatic text divided into five acts, similar structure to that of Shakespeare. Müller Like any text, the work stems from an attempt to "destroy Hamlet." The momentum of destruction has always been one of the key drivers in the writing of Heiner Müller. "My main concern when I write theater is to destroy things. For thirty years I obsessed Hamlet, so I wrote a short text, Hamletmachine, with whom he tried to destroy Hamlet (...) my strongest impulse is to reduce things to their skeleton, tearing the flesh and the surface. (...) To penetrate beneath the surface to see the structure "(Müller 1996: 160). Statements like this could have been made also by Bertolt Brecht himself, other directors and playwrights of the twentieth century, who Müller is considered heir and successor in many ways, especially in the use of one of the fundamental devices Brechtian epic drama: the distance. For Brecht, this procedure is to remove the reality represented in order to perceive a new perspective to reveal its hidden side, as the start objects perceived several times not to be seen: we have lost the ability to see what that is before our eyes. Make visible what is invisible, it can not be because no hide, but because he is always present, in order to perceive the structure, the skeleton of the things referred to Müller. The distance back to this familiar, that by being in view of steadily longer perceived
About Hamlet Machine dramatic text might say that is a text of ideas. And yet that statement is a simplification extremely poor. In fact, "we have one of those rare examples of dramatic literature are pure. The idea is contained entirely on the word, perfectly attached to its surface and filling the whole volume "(Barks, 1987: 88). And as dramaturgical styles brought into play in the play, "the first, most obvious in parts 1, Family Album, and 3, Scherzo, is a surrealism that often recalls both the text itself as plastic content of the stage directions to "the public" by Federico García Lorca "(Barks, 1987: 88). The other style visible in the text appears in Act IV, Pest in Buda / Battle for Greenland, "and the two brief but decisive interventions Ofelia, Parts 2 and 5, which is distilled from those runs so typical theater German so often heard in the work of Bertolt Brecht and Expressionism appropriate. This mixture of expressionism and surrealism atmosphere consists of horror in which it develops the work "(Barks, 1987: 89). In that sense, the text of the work allows the appropriation of the poetic order: You may read that text and make a sort of personal journey. Is a very tight and, somehow, very proud of his own secrecy. From the point of view of its construction, consists of a sort of collage from a large number from diverse sources, "in Machine Hamlet there are many events: from words of Walter Benjamin, to various texts of own Müller which are imported from other works as well as texts of Shakespeare, John Reed, Theodor Adorno, Hölderlin, reports the Manson clan, and so on. "(De la Puente, 2007: 4). Although the experiences of the horror that portrays Hamlet Machine acquire global resonances, the staging of the work that the Argentine group "The Peripheral objects" held in Buenos Aires from 1995 to 1998 at the Theatre Alley wishes ", new meanings and reactivates the contents of the text. For the strength in violence-related images at times explicitly to the events that affected our country, "the assembly reference was directly to the artists and the audience that witnessed "the state terrorism in Argentina. Alejandro
Tantanián-actor, author and theater director and former member of "The Peripheral objects" - he explains the work done by the group in the process of adapting the text to the problem Müller Argentina: "What we did with Dieter Welke German playwright ¸ A specialist in the work of Müller, who came specially to assist in the assembly process was a work of deconstruction of the original text. We spent three weeks doing a work table. The idea was to start Müller text, try to understand it and break it down into a sort listing of minimum units. The text was then divided into forty units. These units were given by a central theme. Each unit will assign a title. Once done, these units traspasábamos certain images that had to do with the reality of Argentina. The assembly process and chose a sort of list of a certain amount of images that allude to the title of each of the units, the themes of the same and therefore certain parts of the text. On the surface of the dramaturgical work was a picture related to the Argentine. Not necessarily always related to politics, but with our situation at that time as a group, artists within the theater in Buenos Aires, as people of a certain age, sex, social class, etc. As the reality of Argentina, and our situation as a group of artists working under the conditions we did, were part of the fabric of the setting. This list we developed involved an anchor in our own daily lives. And those images somehow, ruled fairly in the process of staging "(de la Puente, 2007: 1). This reference to the looming reality of Argentina literally in Act IV of Hamlet Machine, when in the assembly of The Loop, "we worked specifically with the experience of state terrorism in Argentina. It is the act in Muller makes the jump from the drama-the drama in the literary, dramatic, theater-a case history with. When Müller's happening in the text of a Shakespearean drama of Western history, this description almost Entomological a demonstration: a public revolt that can be any revolt, all and none at once, which is also stated that all are not nothing, in the sense of its effects, no significant changes (...) In this act is clearly where we made an anchor in reality, especially in state terrorism in Argentina. And also look to expand further, we reviewed the horrors of the twentieth century. In this point in the play, the audience attending the slide show: there were pictures of the last military trial in Argentina, but we showed pictures of the English Civil War, both world wars, concentration camps, conflict in the Middle medium, etc. The tension that had built in mounting possible that such violence was shown in the display still images, was the same that was unleashed in the room. There was no difference between stage and audience, which was included in this spiral of violence. In fact the audience was armed, in the making, continuing the provision of the theater audience, then all we formed part of the film, and the violence was triggered by "us to us" because apaleábamos we manipulated the puppets that were both our own extensions: they were anthropomorphic and had our faces. There was an idea that the spiral of violence, which is a concept that is in Shakespeare and Müller-climax has almost no stops "(de la Puente, 2007: 2). What we hold here is that the experiences of horror, such as those conducted by state terrorism, are part of subjectivities, in the depths of the people, wounds, scars and wounds in the bodies of social subjects. And for that reason to Peripheral members Objects was necessary not only show pictures of the most horrific experiences of the twentieth century, but also take care of the resonances, echoes, the reverberations of these collective experiences in their daily lives. The staging of Hamlet Machine in Argentina of the nineties, booming neoliberal, should take into account what was happening to them in terror, or, put another way, how it's questioned. Subjectivities of the protagonists of the assembly-in the same way that the public who attended the function, it became subject, was problematized and questioned.
That which produces a play, in terms of their impact on the public is a vital aspect of authors such as Heiner Müller, as "a drama does not come on the scene, has no place in the scene, but between stage and spectators" (Müller, 1996: 155). The German playwright incarnate a theater to compel the public to take sides, to the extent that "the theater can no longer assume the role of clarification. In theater it is more (...) to involve people in processes, to involve them (....) That people ask: how I have behaved in that situation? And they come to mind that they are also potential fascists if a situation occurs such "(Müller, 1996: 156-7). A kind of theater that challenges the viewer intimately, a drama which accounts for the worst kind of fascism, one that is daily newspaper, which is invisible to the major historical processes, but exactly why it underpins them.
Maximiliano Ignacio de la Puente
Buenos Aires, Argentina (teacher, director and playwright)
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