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Not to be: Hamlet rages in Stockholm against the political closure of a cultural institution

The experimental annex of Sweden’s national stage, Elverket, has fallen victim to severe government cuts. Its final play is a powerful protest against being forced to leave its homeSomething is rotten in Swedish theatre. In front of Elverket – a former power station that for much of the last 30 years has been at the centre of Stockholm’s experimental dramatic output – posters proclaim that theatre is dead. Inside the former turbine hall, either side of a red chandelier-lit platform surrounded by contorted bodies, Hamlet and Ophelia, brilliantly played by Gustav Lindh and Gizem Erdogan, are furiously channelling the rage of a generation, loudly hitting the walls with bars. In the play’s final seconds, gravediggers give way to builders dressed in high-vis come in to cover the stage in tarpaulin and start work.This adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, not so cryptically subtitled The Death of Theatre, is the venue’s last ever theatre production before it is shut down. Dramaten, the roy...


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