Gertrude (The Cry)

RAGUSA
I like the way you say exactly what you think where I come from nobody says what he thinks everybody's polite sure the feelings are the same but, oh my, how we do beat around the bush it's a real labyrinth not a conversation.
Howard Barker

Gertrude (The Cry): a double title which superimposes the name of a human being and the form of a voice, the singular evidence of a face and a phenomenon which is, in a way, impersonal. The play arranges and recounts the way the two meet. For theatre-lovers the face is almost familiar: it's Hamlet's mother's face, the face of his father's widow, of Claudius' wife. A woman who, in the Shakespearean original, defines herself in relation to the men around her. But to invent his Gertrude Barker has broken all ties, cast himself completely adrift. As Giorgio Barberio Corsetti puts it, "Gertrude has squatted in Hamlet." And in fact this is what immediately attracted the Italian director to the play. Ever since he began directing in 1976 Corsetti has always been interested in whatever challenges a certain kind of theatricality, either from without or within. Before drawing on the resources of the circus world, as he is presently doing, he had been one of the first to introduce video material onstage (La Camera astratta, dating from 1987, is emblematic in this respect). Curious about all forms of writing that are not aimed at the stage (his own adaptation of Kafka's The Trial won the UBU Prize in 1999), he is naturally sensitive to all the problems that can arise from the adaptation or appropriation of a text. Barker's gesture, the vision he has of Gertrude, couldn't help but fascinate him. Yet in Shakespeare's work the queen is already an enigmatic character: how is it conceivable, Hamlet wonders, that the widow of such a glorious sovereign could remarry his repulsive, unworthy double so quickly? Can one conclude from this hasty marriage that she may have contributed to the murder of her first husband? Barker answers these questions right from the start, as if he wants to clear the ground before getting down to business: yes, Gertrude was Claudius' lover: yes, she wanted the murder to happen, she was present at the deed, she let the dying king witness her adulterous ecstasy, getting all the more pleasure from this ultimate outrage. So, will the new Gertrude then be a completely transparent character, the extreme opposite of the original model? Quite the contrary. It is precisely by casting off the mask of the "mysterious" Shakespearian Gertrude that Barker's character attains her own enigmatic dimension. Her cry. And this empty sign of ecstasy or horror will now haunt all Ellsinore. By exposing her body now become the haunt of impulse, provocative and abandoned, elusive, Gertrude has become, thanks to her cry, the centre of the play around whom everything and everyone else revolves. Including herself. And her secret is no longer of a contingent nature, no longer something the public is unaware of because the playwright concealed it. Gertrude herself must explore it; a Gertrude who hides nothing. For it has become something that utterly escapes the dimension of that which is knowable, even if hypothetically we know all.