A free adaptation of William Shakespeare’s timeless play ‘Hamlet’ directed by Arash Dadgar will be staged at the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival in Poland soon.
A product of the Iranian theater group Quantum, the 2-hour play was the winner of the 32nd Fajr International Theater Festival in Iran in 2014 and has since had successful performances in Tehran and Milan, Honaronline reported.
Adapting classics - theater, stories and novels - for the stage with a contemporary eye and also taking into account modern theories of physics (as is evident in the very name of the company) is the inspiration for the group which finds in Shakespeare a privileged interlocutor.
“Shakespeare is for me the universal compendium on the contradictions of human nature,” Dadgar said. “I find him astonishing, mysterious, and dramatic. He is my contemporary playwright. To stage Shakespeare means to put oneself to the test, to highlight what one knows and that which, regarding life, still evades us”.
Quantum Theater Group was founded in 2009 by Dadgar. ‘Hamlet’, is the group’s latest production and was born from “a rewriting project which lasted four years.
Mehran Emambakhsh, Vahid Rad, Khosro Shahraz, Amin Tabatabai, Shabnam Farshadju, Sanaz Najafi, Behruz Kazemi, Rasul Makvandi and Mehrab Rostami are among the cast.
The Gdansk international theater festival is devoted to the works of Shakespeare. First organized in 1993, the event is held annually during the first week of August. It aims at presenting and popularizing the output of Shakespeare by presentation of his plays, but also by other means. After the performances the public can meet with directors and actors. Within the framework of the festival an educational program for students is organized as well.
This year the festival is slated for July 29 - August 7 in Gdansk, a city on the Polish Baltic coast.
