Collide presented Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine; a collage of fragments, an orgy of deconstruction. We invited audiences to walk through the pieces of a broken civilisation and experience a grotesque wasteland full of beauty and cruelty. This provocative site-specific production invited audiences to enter a diseased crumbling world, and to experience the struggle for a new unspoiled one. 

The human body stands at its centre – fragile and yet capable of extreme destruction and pain. We live in a time when Europe is facing all sorts of crises – economic, political, social, humanitarian ones – governments are busy burying these problems rather than facing them with actual solutions, and young people do not know which way to go.

For Müller’s Hamlet to be a machine is to be free of cultural and personal memory, to feel no pain, to have no thoughts. With a disturbing energy Müller writes of the “ruins of Europe,” for a revolution that both reduces and elevates humans to machines. Hamletmachine is a harrowing portrait of the aftermath of a war, of life under crisis.

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