Mise en scene of postmodern groundlessness: Perception and subjectivity in Robert Wilson's 'Hamletmachine' (Heiner Mueller)

This study of Robert Wilson's theatre investigates how some of the theoretical and historical challenges of postmodernism emerge in his comprehensive deconstruction of mainstream theatre practices. Wilson's landmark production of Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine (1986) is examined as a primary example of how the confluence between artistic practice and critical theory manifests itself in the director's treatment of the visual, acoustic, spatial and kinetic sign-systems of the stage. The mise en scene displays highly sophisticated variations on most of the recurring artistic techniques the director had previously used for the mises en scene of his own texts from 1967 to 1987. Wilson's approach to scenography, the performer's body, the recitation of the text, the intertextuality and metatheatricality of his works, and his visual-spatial resistance to linear narrative and historiography are all examined. The discussion will bring unresolved oppositions between modern and postmodern concepts of space, time, subjectivity and agency and his typically postmodern cultivation of simultaneity and collage, irony, paradox and aporia into focus. A final comparison between the director and the dramatist will comment on their chief differences. Wilson's aesthetics is founded largely on a poststructural view of the subject and of agency. For him, "the subject" is essentially ideological in constitution, and the performance text of Hamletmachine essentially elaborates a sophisticated and nuanced argument with the historicist perspective of the dramatist. Here, the discussion sheds light on the political ambivalence of Wilson's work. He has often been attacked for creating an elitist and solipsistic theatre, and one discovers a risk of political complicity in his insistence on non-closure, in the machine-like inertia of his performers and in his own reluctance to exercise his agency politically.