Libidinal Archaeologies in Wooster Group’s Hamlet

This paper will look at Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet (2009), a piece that engenders post-cinematic aesthetics by staging a ‘live’ re-construction of a digital version of Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production, in a manner of a ‘visual karaoke’. Jean-Françoise Lyotard’s concepts of ‘libidinal normalisation’ and ‘jouissance’, from his essay Acinema, will be used in order to investigate the ways in which Wooster Group’s Hamlet can be seen as an attempt to embody the pleasures and the emotional journey of spectating Burton’s piece. It will be
argued that the piece can be seen as a representation of what Marvin Carlson calls ‘ghosting’—‘trying to represent what happens in the mind of a spectator when they watch this new representation of something that they have seen several times’ (Carlson in Shevtsova 2013: 130). This removal from immediate representation into a representation of the ‘experience of representation’ (a ‘post-representation’) will be contextualised in relation to Lyotard’s theories and the notion of techno-nostalgia pertinent to a theatrical exploration of the
artifices of the film medium upon which the original Burton production was inscribed. Thus the paper will consider the following questions: In what way does Wooster Group’s Hamlet stage the representation of a past
spectator’s experience? How does this staging recuperate jouissance, consequently foregrounding a sense of techno nostalgia? And what kinds of ‘politics of perception’ are being foregrounded in this excursion into a past
libidinal experience of filmic mediation.