The Hamlet Machine [by Heiner Muller] is a mechanism that starts by looking at history using someone else’s glasses to cast over our Time a personal and critical look using essentially the strategy of flashback. Hamlet looks at the sea and it is the possibility of dialogue as well as language itself that foretell the flashback. Hamlet travels back from the stage of political action, to the loss of identity until a state close to physical dissolution: “I withdraw to my guts”. The same seems to happen to Ophelia. She, whose heart saw Hamlet’s tears, can no longer be the missing pole in an impossible union. Ophelia is the matrix of our destroyed identity: “I destroy the battlefield which was once my life.”

João Carneiro