Wearing a red cloak, morning walks through the dew, and leaves in her wake what looks like blood.
or
HAM AND EX. BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
AN HAMLET CABART BY MATTHIAS LANGHOFF
ON A MUSIC BY OLIVIER DEJOURS
If everything were perfect, I don't see why I would continue with theater.
Matthias Langhoff
« What a pleasure » Jean-Pierre Thibaudat recently wrote, « to wake up and find Langhoff in bed with Shakespeare, a writer he has sniffed out like a dog his master. Unforgettable and unforgotten is his King Lear with Serge Merlin. His Hamlet will be the same. If not even more so. » Created at the end of 2008 for the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, this « Hamlet Cabaret », Wearing a red cloak, morning walks through the dew, and leaves in her wake, what looks blood or Ham and ex.,by William Shakespeare - a whole program - or a promise that Langhoff keeps in his own, personal way : that of a disciple of Brecht and a friend of Heiner Muller, for whom theater can only continue to exist if it blithely and joyfully kills off its own lofty, institutionalized status. Because for Langhoff, « theater is the art of organizing scandal » it must unveil the scandalous and the obscene that the world struggles to hide from us... » And in order to carry this off, theater, according to Langhoff, freely carries along all of the debris and wreckage of the century that it snags on its way : and as the director states again, « a theatrical performance is not a product, it is a bricolage. »
Langhoff is therefore, a bricoleur, and one who totally accepts this definition. The play was not the object of a « theoretical » reflection before being handicrafted by the actors : « who is sitting on the back of whom », the director asked during their work together, « is the cabaret sitting on Shakespeare's back, or Shakespeare riding on the back of the cabaret ? I will only know at the end of our experiment. » The stage is like a workshop-bazaar-dance hall where machines are built and then destroyed, where substances are mixed together and occasionally explode and where, especially, all sorts of old attempts and obsessions are stacked and stored, where chance discoveries and spare parts and orphaned fragments lie waiting to be used again. This light-hearted construction/sabotage work, whose mixture of surrealistic music hall performance and gloomy vaudeville, has enthralled audiences from Strasbourg and Sartrouville, before bringing its uplifting chaos into the Grande salle de l'Odéon, has the energy and the « raging good health of a theater that is trying with its very life, to stop the world from spinning around in circles. » (Gilles Costaz). This princely cabaret has seen the most famous monologue in the history of world theater, sung by a chorus while handing out advertising fliers, the paternal ghost emerging from a garbage can (because Langhoff's Shakespeare has read Endgame), or the hero's confidant having a sex change in order to metamorphose into Horatio - all of these transgressions powerfully proclaimed by François Chattot and a magnificent troupe of actors, with the accompanying music of the Tobetobe-Orchestra.
