Review: HAMLET | COLLAGE at Istanbul Theatre Festival

Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts has a never ending set of festivals planned for the whole year. However, I cannot help but feel sad as we are coming to the end of my personal favorite that is Istanbul Theatre Festival. The 22nd Istanbul Theatre Festival started on 17th of November and it will be over tomorrow. Thus, I feel the time has come for me to pick my favorite show from this beautifully arranged festival programme and write about it. Generally, I am not good at picking favorites but when you have Robert Lepage in the list, you pick Robert Lepage.

Istanbul Theatre Festival has collaborated with Golden Mask Performing Arts Festival and added Hamlet| Collage to its festival programme. This masterpiece of a production, directed and adapted by Robert Lepage, is brought to us in a cube and with a Hamlet who plays all the characters. However, when it comes to this production, the explanations never mean one thing. When I say cube, I mean a cube that turns into new spaces in every scene change. Projections transform the cube into a garden, a padded cell, a library, a bedchamber and the interior of a ship. The cube also rotates, which makes the audience grasp the mental state Hamlet is in. The movements of the cube suggest the confusion Hamlet has. The play begins and ends in the same room that is a hospital ward. This suggests that Shakespeare's tragedy might be taking place inside its lead man's mind. And everything that happens in 135 minutes (that is the runtime) is reminisces of the past.

The main idea behind the cube was to bring the set to the actor, rather than the other way round. Then the spark became what Lepage describes as the "monolith" which is basically a surface held by industrial wires and the wires are connected to a set of motors so that the monolith can do all those impossible moves. Lepage calls the set "the machine".

So the one-man of the play, Evgeny Mironov, is never really alone. He simply has "the machine" as his partner. Besides, he has fifteen others assisting him throughout the play who make this madly complicated show possible. The audience meets these fifteen people in the curtain call. Personally, I was pretty shocked to see them. But as I stated before, nothing means one single thing in this production so, dear me, get on with it.

In conversation, Evgeny Mironov put an emphasis on the word collage and compared the production to mosaics since the 11 characters he plays come together and create an image just like the mosaics do. And what an image that is. I felt as if I found another answer to the question I have been asking myself for so long. "What is madness? What is the difference between a normal mind and a disrupted mind?" I guess the disrupted mind is fractioned in pieces and the brain forces itself to question every piece, every mosaic. And it goes on and on about it all since it is unable to solve them. I found myself drawing parallels between the way this production was directed, the mosaics Evgeny Mironow was talking about and a disrupted mind, and its mosaics.

Evgeny Mironov does a masterful job playing all these characters back to back. He is like a beetle on hot stone, very fast, and almost all his movements seem very dangerous in some way. This amazing actor manages to separate all these characters from one another and do not leave one single audience member in the back, trying to catch up. He sets the pace and we follow without stopping for a second and asking "Wait a minute, what?" thanks to his masterful way of interpreting all 11 characters.

Hamlet | Collage was a brilliant experience and if you did not have the chance to see it. Well, sorry because I do not have the words to soothe you.

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