The interdisciplinary field of theater and memory studies has recognized a special connection between Shakespeare's Hamlet and remembrance. Throughout the play, the Danish prince compulsively remembers the noble shape of his late father; at its end, he addresses a triple summon to Horatio to see to it that he is himself remembered in Fortinbras's new state. Somewhat more imaginatively, however, Hamlet can become a convenient medium to remember a vanished country, its political myths, suppressed histories, and theatrical traditions. The latter option is the central theme of Alexandra Portmann's book The Time is Out of Joint, the first comparative study of the late-Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav productions of Hamlet.
The architectonics of Portmann's study is rather complex in its balancing of theoretical, synoptic, and interpretive blocks. Yet, the argument is consistent and evolves in several logical stages. In the first, theoretical stage, Portmann sets the scene for the analysis by homing in on Schlüsselbilder (key images), dramaturgical frames which are anchored in the text but in successive productions act as tokens of the text's polychronic afterlife (Warburg) and as tenors of theatrical agency (Worthen). In the second stage, she proceeds to define what those key images might be in the actual case of Hamlet and comes up with a tentative list of three: the Ghost of Hamlet's father, the spirit of memory who spurs revenge and reversal; the episode of the mousetrap, which epitomizes theater's internal memory and capacity to reflect upon itself; and, finally Fortinbras, who problematizes the remembrance of political reversals post factum. In the third stage, Portmann activates these key images in a dynamic analysis of six theatrical productions from the late Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav periods, where socialist and nationalist memory narratives overlap and clash: Dušan Jovanović’s Hamlet (2005) and Slobodan Šnajder's Gamllet (1987) for the figure of Ghost; the Hamlet productions by Ljubiša Georgievski (1989), Gorčin Stojanović (1992), and Tomaž Bandur (1990) for the mousetrap; the production of Luko Paljetak's After Hamlet (1994) for Fortinbras. In the fourth stage, finally, Portmann pins down several contemporaneous strands of political and theatrical memory in former Yugoslav lands, which are found at two distinct levels: the thematic content (die inhaltliche Ebene), which has to do with narrative adaptations of the Hamlet plot, and the dramaturgical structure (die strukturelle Ebene), which encompasses the sundry dramaturgical tools to enact those alternative plots.
At its most productive, Portmann's method demonstrates the great variety and connectedness of creative adaptations of Hamlet in the cultural space of former Yugoslavia. Metatheatrical strategies involved play within play, which ranged from inserting Hamlet into a cognate contemporary plot (Šnajder), to inserting a contemporary plot into Hamlet (Georgievski), to the exuberant baroque allegory of theatrum mundi (Pandur). There were also occasional experiments with the audiences’ memories of actors’ previous roles, whereby an actor playing Hamlet would be asked to take on the role of Claudius in a subsequent production (Stojanović, Jovanović). Another coveted method was refocalization often combined with plot expansion: an ironic glance was cast on the victims by self-satisfied survivors, Osric or Fortinbras (Paljetak).
When it comes to demonstrating that the Hamlet productions were not driven only by theatrical memories but also by neuralgic political memories nourished in the former Yugoslav republics, Portmann's argument becomes more convoluted. Namely, it faces the dual challenge of making credible links to the external political context without appearing deterministic. In Portmann's view, the Hamlet productions ought to be seen as a reflection foil (Reflexionsfolie) for conflicting memories of different nations and different historical periods, but they are also assigned the more active role of a mediating site (Aushandlungsort) for those discourses (16, 57). To be sure, this works well in those productions where references to Yugoslavia are explicitly interpolated into Shakespeare's plot (the level of content): the most striking effects seem to have been achieved by blending external political memories with internal theatrical memories as in the case of Šnajder's and Georgievski's Hamlet. If, however, no such references are apparent―Stojanović’s and Pandur's productions were described as apolitical―the reader is invited to associate postmodernist ontological ambiguities (the level of structure) with more elusive concepts of the political, such as those formulated by Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin. Clearly, this leads to an entirely different type of argument that makes active mediation and subversion less likely.
Portmann's argument is most vulnerable when it ventures into one-dimensional political readings of isolated elements of the Hamlet productions. Suggesting that in Jovanović’s production six ghosts accompanying the Ghost of Hamlet's father necessarily refer to the six republics of former Yugoslavia (83) or that in Pandur's production of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueño as Hamlet's mousetrap has to do with the revival of Catholicism in Slovenia (194) means pushing the argument beyond what it can yield and would certainly need additional evidence.
In addition to this intrinsic tension between staging political and theatrical memories, the reader may get perplexed by a few other idiosyncrasies, for instance the somewhat outdated Structuralist apparatus that categorizes analytic findings according to predetermined levels and relatively frequent misspellings of South Slavonic words (especially proper names).
Nevertheless, none of these quirks can obscure the key qualities of Portmann's book: a thoughtful, interdisciplinary theoretical framework, a balanced approach to the conflicting memory discourses of Yugoslavia and an empathetic, comprehensive reconstruction of historical stage productions of Hamlet. Above and beyond its immediate context, the book will appeal to scholars of theater, performance, and memory studies. It is to Portmann's credit that she has outlined the areas for the future research of Hamlet productions: transnational exchanges, gendered memories, and institutionalization through festivals.
