Shakespeare: HAMLET

"Act as if you were in front of a mirror", says Hamlet at one point to the actors in the most famous drama ever written. It's from the idea of actors in front of mirrors that Oskaras Koršunovas, young Lithuanian director and one of the brightest European directing stars, launches himself into the investigation of Hamlet's modernity. The play does not begin on the Elsinore walls, but in the actors' wardrobe where the actors, while putting on the make-up for the performance, scream at the mirror in front of them: "Who are you?" That is the basic question for the entire play, too: who are we indeed, or more precisely, who am I, who's the man in the mirror?

Such non-politicized "Hamlet" suddenly becomes essentially individualized: this question imposes itself as the key question of the modern man whose life is no more governed by the totalitarianism and fear of politics. The man of today bears his most serious enemy within himself and Hamlet's eternal dilemma, to be or not to be, bears contemporary connotations.