by Bernard-Marie Koltès
Friday, February 6th. 7pm.
Translated and directed by Isma’il ibn Conner
Le Jour des meurtres dans l'histoire d'Hamlet (The Day of Murders in the History of Hamlet) is a "condensed" adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Yet, more than just an adaptation, Bernard-Marie Koltès has rendered a youthful, energetic, and modern re imagination of Hamlet. Using a translation of Yves Bonnefoy from English to French, Koltès has concentrated his version of Hamlet on four characters only: Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius. This is their story of the breakdown of the family unit rife with lust, greed, ambition, revenge, murder, incest, self-doubt, and death. This play is an attempt to murder what we think we know of Hamlet; the history and the myth.
This staged reading is an Emory Founder’s Week event and is part of, “Autour de Koltès/About Koltès”, an interdisciplinary series of events on campus that offer opportunities for rich dialogue across disciplinary and professional boundaries, organized by the Emory European Studies Project.