Hamlet in Performance - Adaptations

Adaptations

Hamlet has been adapted into stories that deal with civil corruption by the West German director Helmut Käutner in Der Rest is Schweigen (The Rest is Silence) and by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa in Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemeru (The Bad Sleep Well). In Claude Chabrol's Ophélia (France, 1962) the central character, Yvan, watches Olivier's Hamlet and convinces himself—wrongly and with tragic results—that he is in Hamlet's situation. In 1977, East German playwright Heiner Müller wrote Die Hamletmaschine (Hamletmachine) a postmodernist, condensed version of Hamlet; this adaptation was subsequently incorporated into his translation of Shakespeare's play in his 1989/1990 production Hamlet/Maschine (Hamlet/Machine). Tom Stoppard directed a 1990 film version of his own play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The highest-grossing Hamlet adaptation to-date is Disney's Academy Award-winning animated feature The Lion King: although, as befits the genre, the play's tragic ending is avoided. In addition to these adaptations, there are innumerable references to Hamlet in other works of art.