Reviews for Hamletmachine and other Texts for the Stage

The average rating for Hamletmachine and other Texts for the Stage based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-13 00:00:00 Sylvain Hamilton Reading this collection, it totally makes sense that Robert Wilson would team up with Muller on his gigantic the CIVIL warS project for the '84 Olympics. Overall, some very good plays (some clearly better than others). What is most apparent throughout is Muller's love for the word and his seeming desire to turn the imagery of dreams into allegories for our world. The success his plays depend on how successfully he melds these two seemingly disparate elements. Hamlet-machine, his most famous play, is possibly in this way the best in this collection, though each of them offer something exciting. Don't misunderstand me though: they aren't all full-stop winners, and they certainly aren't easy reads (per say), but they are all on the short side so even if one of them doesn't excite you it's not like you've lost much time. PS - a quote from Muller in the introduction about what a good playwright should be: "At bottom, playwriting always means to me that a picture is torn, a picture of myself too. In one play one picture is torn, from this a new picture originates. And that has to be torn again. That is actually the process."

Review # 2 was written on 2010-05-06 00:00:00 mario souilli Muller hemorrhages his ideas on Hamlet and the intellectual dilemma and while parts of the text might be an interesting jumping off point to explore some of those ideas, they ultimately come across as incoherent. Shifting through the mess of mastbatory ideas of philsophy and theatre seems a silly effort when so many other options are available.