Interweaving Stories. Hamlet in Jerusalem by Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini

Abstract

In march 2016, playwright and director Gabriele Vacis, together with Marco Paolini and a group of young Palestinian and Italian actors staged Amleto in Jerusalem, the last production of a “school of theater” for adolescents, directed by Vacis and Paolini. Moving from a brief introduction to the pedagogical and aesthetic philosophy that inspired this educational experience, this article offers a critical description of the structurally complex performance, in which two different theatrical genres, storytelling and tragedy, are continuously intermingled.  In the performance the text by Shakespeare is revisited, deconstructed,  and represented through fragments, which becomes the fundamental dialectical reference for a reflection on problems crucial to the young Palestinian actors, as identity, relations, vengeance, oblivion. Situating this extraordinary theatrical event in relation to the reception of Hamlet in the Arab world, this article explores the narrative development of the reflection urged by an always contemporary Hamlet.