Opheliamachine

Ophelia's story in a way you've never heard it before, and seven more ways as well. Ophelia is trapped, stuck inside the machinery that has created her consciousness, fighting to be heard. Hamlet, overwhelmed by the ceaseless flood of media, mindlessly watches TV, consuming a mish-mash of beauty and horror; a daily soup of innocence and violence. The two of them hopelessly confined, and separated by the Atlantic Ocean. A polemic response to Heiner Mueller's Hamletmachine, Opheliamachine is a postmodern tale of love, sex and politics in a fragmented world of confused emotions and global, virtual sexuality. Since its premiere in 2013, Magda Romanska's celebrated experimental play has been performed and studied around the world, with each culture and language feeding into and responding to Opheliamachine's collage of modern existence. This edited collection brings together eight different translations of the play, offering English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Romanian and Polish language interpretations of Romanska's original text. Along with two introductory essays, these different versions of Opheliamachine provide academics, artists and teachers the opportunity to study a fascinating intersection of Shakespeare, translation, adaptation, feminism and avant-garde theatre.

Magda Romanska is Professor of Theatre and Media at Emerson College, Boston, MA, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and a Principal Researcher at Harvard metaLAB, where she researches the relationship between art, science, and technology. She is the author of five critically acclaimed scholarly books, including The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012); TheaterMachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (2020); Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2016); The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, a leading and best-selling handbook of dramaturgy, and she has contributed a chapter to Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen, 2019). As a playwright, she is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, the Mass Council Artist Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, the Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from the Time Warner Foundation, and PAHA Creative Arts Prize. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, and Cornell University.

How to Lose a Guy in Ten Wars: Introduction to Opheliamachine by Ilinca Todorut From Elsinore to American Techno-Solitude by Maria Pia Pagani, translated by Margaret Rose Production History Opheliamachine (English) Opheliamaschine (German) Ophéliemachine (French) Opheliamachine (Italian) La Máquina de Ofelia (Spanish) Opheliamachine (Japanese) Opheliamachine (Korean) Opheliamachine (Romanian) Maszynofelia (Polish) Bibliography