Shakespeare, Authority and Hauntology: Postdramatic Performance in Walny Theatre’s Hamlet

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.17.03

Authors

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.17.03

Keywords:

authority, hauntology, Shakespeare, Hamlet, postdramatic performance, Walny Theatre

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the potential of hauntological theories to explain and problematise selected aspects of authority and performance in the context of Shakespeare’s drama. Referring primarily to Derrida’s and Abraham’s concepts of the ghost and the phantom and their connection to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the article discusses hauntological perspectives on performance, both deconstructing and reaffirming authority. The paper comments on the relation between text and performance (Brook, Lehmann), memory and repetition (Carlson), disappearance and perpetual present (Phelan), as well as archive and repertoire (Taylor) in order to highlight the contradictory yet productive ways of understanding performance. The final part of the article, focusing on the significance of the ghost figure, examines experimental appropriations of Shakespeare’s play in Walny Theatre’s Hamlet (2015) in the light of postdramatic aesthetics.

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Author Biography

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland), teaches British drama and theatre as well as literary, cultural and gender studies. She is the author of The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (Toruń, 2003) and Hauntologyand Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (Toruń, 2013). Recently, she co-edited (with Katarzyna Więckowska) the themed issues of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum (Spectrality and Cognition: Haunted Cultures, Ghostly Communications) (2017) and AVANT. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (Haunted Cultures / Haunting Cultures) (2017).

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