The Wooster Group’s HAMLET is a re-purposing of the famous 1964 Broadway
production starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud. In an attempt to adapt to a new era (film was supplanting theater as a dominant art form in the U.S.), the Burton production was recorded in live performance and shown for only two days in 2000 movie houses across the U.S. It was advertised as a new form called “Theatrofilm” made possible through “the miracle of Electronovision”. In the Group’s HAMLET we attempt to reverse this process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film. We “cover” the film, intentionally channeling the ghost of that legendary performance.