To "Hamlet" or Not to "Hamlet: Notes on an Arts Secondary School Students’ "Hamlet"

Estella Ciobanu; Dana Trifan Enache

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.21.10

Authors

Estella Ciobanu Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania
Dana Trifan Enache Faculty of Arts, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.21.10

Keywords:

„Hamlet” (Romanian theatrical production, 2018), student actors, role doubling, collective character, gender identity, cross-cultural echoes

Abstract

This article discusses a 2018 theatrical production of Hamlet with Romanian teenage arts students, directed by one of the article’s authors, actress and academic Dana Trifan Enache. As an artist, she believes that the art of theatre spectacle depends pre-eminently on the actors’ enactment, and hones her students’ acting skills and technique accordingly. The other voice in the article comes from an academic in a cognate discipline within the broad field of arts and humanities. As a feminist and medievalist, the latter has investigated the political underside of representations of the body in religious drama, amongst others. The analytic duo reflects as much the authors’ different professional formation and academic interests as their asymmetrical positioning vis-à-vis the show as respectively the play’s director and one of its spectators. Their shared occupational investment, teaching to form and hone highly specialized professional skills, and shared object of professional interest (broadly conceived), text interpretation, account nevertheless for the possibility of fruitful interdisciplinary reflection on the 2018 Hamlet. This in-depth analysis of the circumstances of the performance and technical solutions it sought challenges stereotyped dismissals of a students’ Hamlet as superannuated, flimsy or gratuitously provocative. Furthermore, a gender-aware examination of the adaptation’s original handling of characters and scenes indicates unexpected cross-cultural and diachronic commonalities between the dramatic world of the 2018 Romanian production of Hamlet and socio-cultural developments emergent in pre-Shakespearean England.

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Author Biographies

Estella Ciobanu, Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania

Estella Ciobanu is associate professor at the Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania. She teaches Identity and Gender in the USA, Culture and Religion in the USA, Postmodernism, and British and American Cultural Icons. Her academic interests include iconization studies and gendered representations of the body in literature, medieval theatre, cartography, anatomo-medical practices and the arts. She is the author of Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), The Body Spectacular in Middle English Theatre (Bucureşti: Ed. Etnologică, 2013), The Spectacle of the Body in Late Medieval England (Iaşi: Ed. Lumen, 2012) and over fifty articles, and co-author (with Petru Golban) of A Short History of Literary Criticism (Kütahya: Üç Mart Press 2008).

Dana Trifan Enache, Faculty of Arts, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania

Dana Trifan Enache is associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania. Her academic activity and research concern teaching acting technique (speaking voice, stage improvisation skills, and generally the art of the actor) in the Professional Acting programme. She has supervised academic projects, workshops and student symposia, has participated in international conferences, and has also performed in Romanian productions of Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson, Vaclav Havel’s The Beggar’s Opera, Molière’s Tartuffe, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Euripides’s The Bacchae.

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