OpheLiLiaHam&Led - Theatre
OpheLiLiaHam&Let transforms the summer air of Graz into an open-air stage: when evening descends and the air above the hospital grounds is warm and heavy, the Luftgarten at the LKH University Hospital Graz becomes a theatre under the sky. The summer theatre of the Acting Institute at Kunstuniversität Graz invites audiences in 2025 to a unique theatrical experience.
This production is a free, bold reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, retitled OpheLiLiaHam&Let created by and performed with actors and students of KUG.
Rather than simply retelling Hamlet, the piece seeks to view the drama through the eyes of Ophelia — to imagine what happens when Hamlet’s story is refracted through her experience. What if we interpret madness and clarity, desire and despair, power and vulnerability through a different lens? What if memory and trauma are not endings, but moments of resistance, of reconstruction?
This “free adaptation” is not a remix, but rather an attempt to let Shakespeare speak again in the present: raw, alive, fragile, a kind of nostalgic science fiction. The creative process involved deconstructing and reassembling the original text, questioning and stretching its meanings, and engaging with the source in a critical, generative way
Direction: Ute Rauwald
- Premiere: 3 July 2025, 19:30, Luftgarten (LKH University Hospital Graz)
- Further performances: 4, 8, 9 and 10 July 2025, each at 19:30 — open-air, weather permitting.
