Who’s there?“ – Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the changing memory politics in the region of former Yugoslavia

Portmann, Alexandra (September 2016). Who’s there?“ – Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the changing memory politics in the region of former Yugoslavia (Unpublished). In: BSA Conference: Shakespearean Transformations. University of Hull. 08.-11. Sept. 2016.

As many Eastern European countries, former Yugoslavia experienced major political and economical transformation processes since the 1980s. Unlike countries from the Eastern block, these changes resulted in a Civil War in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s accompanied by a drastically changing memory politics.
My paper aims to investigate the ways in which these changing memory politics is reflected within different Hamlet performances in the region of former Yugoslavia after 2000. The main questions will be: What is the function of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a drastically changing political context? And how could the relationship between performance and memory be described? The paper will focus on two Hamlet-performances, namely the Serbian Hamlet production directed by Dušan Jovanović (Belgrade 2005) and the Croatian Hamlet production directed by Ivica Kunčević (Dubrovnik 2009). It will be shown, how both performances use the staging tradition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in two well-known institutions, namely the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and Dubrovnik Summer Festival, in order to negotiate the changing memory politics. Thus, Shakespeare and remembrance will be discussed on the level of the dramatic text as well as on the level of various intertheatrical references in both performances.

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