That it should come to this is no shame

• Peter Craven
• From: The Australian
• December 28, 2009 12:00AM

Lars Eldinger as Hamlet in Thomas Ostermeier's reworking of the Shakespeare classic. Source: The Australian

IT sounds, on the face of it, like the Hamlet from hell.

The Prince of Denmark has his crown upside down and he straps on an artificial potbelly in front of the audience lest he look too glamorous. He does "To be or not to be" at the start of the performance, as if to get that cliched nonsense out of the way at the outset.

Lars Eidinger as Hamlet has been described as like a screaming golem. The text is shredded and performed by a cast of six: Queens and Ophelias seem pearls on the one string. People scramble about in dirt; indeed, they shove it in their mouths.

So why is the Sydney Festival bringing us the most famous play in the English language in a version that sounds like an atrocity, directed by Thomas Ostermeier for Berlin's Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz? Do we need the aggravation and the alienation? Is Hamlet so dead for us that we need to reduce it to a skeleton and then watch the old bones dance?

Then again, this is German theatre of a high, mighty, dynamic kind and all sorts of smart heads will tell you that progressivist theatre in Australia has felt the power of that eagle's shadow for years.

When Barrie Kosky directed Euripides's The Women of Troy and gave all the female roles except Hecuba (Robyn Nevin) to Melita Jurisic, when he had women raped in cupboards and the chorus sing Renaissance madrigals in Italian, he was acting stringently in the contemporary German tradition of allowing the text no life that is greater than the imaginative will of the director.

Kosky and another Australian director, Benedict Andrews, work regularly in Germany; Kosky will become artistic director of Berlin's Komische Oper in 2012 and Andrews is a guest director at the Schaubuhne.

In one of Andrews's most formidable productions, his daylong version of Shakespeare's history plays, The War of the Roses, we had Cate Blanchett as Richard II and Pamela Rabe as Richard III. Prince Hal indulged in oral sex for Falstaff's benefit and in Henry VI the characters spat blood as a way of killing.

Gold confetti fell on the stage (as it tends to in Andrews's productions), kings were anointed with body fluids, children played in sinister-looking fun parks as dynasties fell.

How German was it? As German as Wagner or Fritz Lang. But the most vivid parts of Andrews's Shakespeare were burningly alive, even if one deplored his method.

It's not simply a matter of method but of result. Ostermeier, some of whose work has been seen at the Adelaide Festival, takes to the classics with a scalpel as if mutilation were his birthright and his pleasure.

In his Nora, the German title of Ibsen's A Doll's House, the heroine asserts herself with a gun; Hedda Gabler smashes a laptop computer with a hammer; and in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof a raptor overlooks the action from an encased perch. All sense of period is burned up in the Gotterdammerung of the director's self-assertion.

Ostermeier would say that he doesn't care about letting the text bleed, that it is necessary surgery. He would rather go over the top than offer comfortable entertainment. He has a point, and we shouldn't be too pious. As Brecht said when he changed the ending of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the text is not burned.

The strenuous experimentalism of contemporary German theatre makes sense in terms of a history in which Brecht is a huge and looming presence.

Brecht's so-called alienation technique was a way of standing back from any automatic dramatic identification to allow for the political exposition of ideas.

Descriptions of Helene Weigel as Mother Courage suggest that for all the stylisation of Brechtian technique the emotional punch of his productions could be overwhelming. Anyone who saw Ekkehard Schall in his Berliner Ensemble days was aware of an acting powerhouse that could bear comparison with any great actor of the English-speaking tradition.

For a long time Brecht looked like the great innovator in 20th-century theatre and the one who had defied fascist spectacularism. The way Brecht tinkered with classic texts served as a precedent for Heiner Muller, who took them apart, then attempted to make the fragments come alive.

Last year, for example, director Michael Gow did Muller's Anatomy of Titus, which deconstructs Titus Andronicus and incorporates Muller's own scribbling poetic interpolations on top of Shakespeare's text.

It's all a matter of the upshot when you look at this concerted German wrestling and wrangling, all this homage and defacing of Shakespeare and the classics of the theatre.

The Germans have always thought of the Bard as Unser Shakespeare - our Shakespeare - and the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare has a status for them a bit like the King James Bible in English literature: they secretly believe it superior to the original.

Certainly the classic German theatre - the plays of Schiller, Schelling and Buchner - are made in the image of Shakespeare: something like Schiller's Mary Stuart are more effective imitations of Shakespeare than anything in English-language drama. And the German tradition is full of the memory of the achievements of classic theatre. Max Reinhardt did Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival as if that English medieval morality play, like Shakespeare, were German before it was anything else. Look at Maximilian Schell or Klaus Maria Brandauer do it, even in television excerpts, and you can feel the power and the glory of the tradition that Ostermeier wants to interrogate, if not slaughter.

The great German actors of the postwar period, the Schells and Klaus Kinskis, or someone like great Austrian actor Oskar Werner, did the theatre classics - Shakespeare and Schiller - as if they were carving the words on the tombs of the great dramatists. There was the effort in West German to renovate the cultural tradition World War II had soiled. And in the East there was a comparable effort, coupled with the Brechtian legacy. But Germans are always vigilant about dramatic rhetoric in the same way that they simultaneously agonise and exult over Wagner.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that the new German theatre of the "blood and sperm" school is a form of cultural fascism, and that its cult of the director as auteur and its assault on the expectation of realism as bourgeois is a form of totalitarian camp.

But that's just theory and, as Goethe said, "grey is all theory". What matters is the sap and energy of what happens on stage.

It's interesting that the British critics can baulk at the perversity of some of Ostermeier's interpretative choices yet they bow to his directorial authority.

It's natural to baulk at the prospect of Ostermeier's Hamlet, but in the end it's just a matter of how good it is as a piece of theatre. As always, the play's the thing.

The Schaubuhne production of Hamlet, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, is at the Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, as part of the Sydney Festival, January 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16.