Lukasz Barczyk's Hamlet (2004), a "Pearl of the Millennium" for a New Millennium Audience

On March 29, 2004 Polish national television's "Channel 1" presented a television theatre production of Hamlet directed by the young and promising Łukasz Barczyk. The production was part of an artistic project "Pearls of the Millennium," featuring a selection of outstanding works of art considered to be specifically meaningful for the new millennium. With an established cast and crew (Janusz Gajos, Grażyna Szapołowska, Paweł Edelman), shot in an ancient salt mine in Wieliczka near Kraków, a famous tourist site, this TV theatre production can be seen as exemplifying some methods in which Shakespeare is made a marketable commodity for contemporary audiences. The production presents a fragmentary story set in an undefined historical period against an abstract and eerie background, its temporal and spatial indeterminacy suggesting an attempt at building a bridge between the past and the new millennium. Shot in experimental, almost art-house way, it visually offers a universal, timeless space evocative of cyberspace. The director claims that for him Hamlet is a story of becoming an individual human being. In Barczyk's production the slightly hysterical Hamlet , forced by external circumstances to grow mature, is lost in a world where an old-fashioned politician marries into an exquisitely modern state, and where the dead are cremated and the living walk on their ashes. The tragedy is in that he fails to effectively confront the chaotic, inconsistent, illogical and irrational world, and is replaced by a very young and frighteningly mature Fortinbras.