Hamlet’s Face

Abstract

This essay asks who, what, or where is Hamlet's face in contemporary theatrical production. As a play, Hamlet evokes theatre as a technology constantly changing in its instrumental, social, and cultural mechanics, implying a tension between theatricality as medium and the evolving, intermediating and often remediating technology of theatre. The remedial thematics of Hamlet are foregrounded in the technicities of contemporary performance, in which the distinctively facemaking activities of the stage—acting—transpire across a range of performance media: the mediation of the trained actor's body, for example, and the mediatized image enabled by simultaneous digital recording and projection. W. B. Worthen draws on Bernard Steigler's account of the human arising in the dynamic of the who and the what—"the dynamic of the who itself redoubles that of the what: conditioned by the what, it is equally conditional for it.” Worthen also assesses the figure of performance—theatre, acting, masks, and puppets—in Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of the ethical force of the Other. Worthen considers how the technicity of contemporary performance engages the face as an ethical problematic that is inseparable from the technologies native to the stage at a given moment of articulation.