Hamlet

"The riddle of Hamlet in Poland is this: what is there in Poland - to think about". These are Stanisław Wyspiański's words from his feverishly written "Study on Hamlet" - an extraordinary work which has been a source of inspiration for many Polish directors. In it, Wyspiański expressed his fascination with the phenomenon of theater, his love for the brilliant text and his great desire to read it so acutely as to shock the conscience of his fellow citizens. Director Bartosz Szydłowski reaches for Hamlet and reads Shakespeare's most famous drama through Stanisław Wyspiański's world of ideas contained in Studium..., or Liberation. Wyspianski was dying for a petty, egocentric Poland, enchanted by the slogans of nationhood. He reached for Hamlet because in it he saw the struggles of the Polish intelligentsia against the world of lies, triumphant laughter, and the grotesque which, from an aesthetic category, had become a category for describing the real world. The contemporary Polish Hamlet is the Hamlet of post-truth times. The last loner of decency.