"Olmak ya da olmamak" değil, "birlikte olmak:” Teatro La Plaza'nın Hamlet'i üzerine*
Not "To Be or Not to Be," but "To Be Together:” On Teatro La Plaza's Hamlet
Published in Turkish at https://tiyatrodergisi.com.tr/olmak-ya-da-olmamak-degil-birlikte-olmak-teatro-la-plazanin-hamleti-uzerine/
While reviewing the program for the 29th Istanbul Theatre Festival, the adaptation of Hamlet by the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza inevitably stood out. The knowledge that eight actors with Down syndrome would be staging Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy triggered, to be honest, a series of prejudices and questions in my mind. We have seen so much "social responsibility" work that sacrifices aesthetics in the name of "awareness," where the individuals on stage are turned into "project objects," exploiting the audience's feelings of pity and compassion, that I had my guard up as I sat down in the Harbiye Muhsin Ertuğrul Stage.
However, only a few minutes after the lights came up, I realized how misplaced this guard was. What stood before us was not a therapy session or a "disability performance." Before us stood, in the words of The Guardian, a "joyful, impressive, full of humor, and shining with imagination” production—a radical dramaturgical choice and structure with high artistic claims. Director Chela De Ferrari had taken the four-hundred-year-old question of "to be or not to be" out of its philosophical dilemma and transformed it into the most pressing political question of our time: "How do you exist in a world that ignores you?"
As the festival's official page description underlined, the actors on this stage were neither a "project" appealing to conscience nor a "fable" romanticizing equality; they were holding a mirror to the audience. This was, in the truest sense of the word, a "dramaturgy of visibility."
The Exclusionary Nature of Theatre and a Challenge
The art of theatre, for both its producers and consumers, has often possessed an exclusionary structure. The bodies we are accustomed to seeing on stage are "normative" bodies; the "ideal" actor mold—aesthetically flawless, with smooth diction and a perfect memory—dominates the entire process, from theatre education to stage practice. Individuals who are developmentally different, whose bodies function outside the conventional, or who exhibit neurodiversity are generally pushed offstage for falling outside this ideal.
Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet, however, shatters the myth of the "ideal Shakespearean actor"—the taboo of Laurence Olivier—to reveal the aesthetic potential of neurodiversity on stage. De Ferrari’s direction "deconstructs" the classic text. This is not a representation of Hamlet; it is a meta-theatrical commentary on what it means to have Down syndrome, using the Hamlet text as a "cultural tool."
The structure avoids following Shakespeare’s plot in a linear narrative, instead rearranging the famous soliloquies and scenes into a collage woven with contemporary experiences. The director constructs not a "singular genius" on stage, but a "plural subject;” the role of Hamlet is not fixed in one body but circulates and multiplies among the eight actors. One moment we watch one actor's Hamlet, the next moment another's, and at times we even witness multiple Ophelias.
This collective performance draws striking parallels between the actors' personal life stories and Shakespeare's text. For example, Polonius's advice to his daughter Ophelia suddenly transforms into the experiences of an individual with Down syndrome regarding the difficulties of being "special." King Claudius’s accusation that Hamlet is in "such a dreadful state" that he "cannot inherit the throne" evolves into a powerful critique of the coding of Down syndrome as an "illness" or "deficiency."
This radical dramaturgy is also supported by technical choices. The "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the play's most iconic moment, is stripped of its usual tragic tone and becomes a declaration of rebellion, delivered to a rap rhythm while images from Laurence Olivier’s classic interpretation appear in the background. This intertextual gesture establishes an open dialogue between the canon and "today," and in the finale, the audience is invited onto the stage to join the dance: tragedy transforms into a ritual of togetherness in shared joy.
Hamlet's Riddle and Vygotsky's Solution
So, what makes this structure so aesthetically powerful? The phrase "the authenticity of actors with Down syndrome" often, without realizing it, betrays a perspective that equates the norm with "pure" technical mastery and aestheticizes everything else as "sincerity." Yet, what we see in this production is not a "compensatory aesthetic;” it is an aesthetic that re-establishes theatre's foundational tension—the dialectic between form and material—directly through the actors' struggle for identity.
This is precisely where the Marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky's 1925 masterpiece, The Psychology of Art, comes into play. Vygotsky argues that to understand a work of art, we must look not at the psychological states of the author or the audience, but directly at the work itself—at the "system of stimuli consciously organized to evoke an aesthetic response." According to Vygotsky, the power of a work of art arises from the contradiction between "form" and "material" (content) and the resolution of this contradiction.
This is exactly what Teatro La Plaza does. The material they have is one of the Western canon's darkest tragedies: betrayal, revenge, madness, and an inevitable bloodbath. The form they use is the existential energy of the actors with Down syndrome, their collective performance, and a "joyful" and "exuberant" direction that "deconstructs" the tragic structure. The collision of these two opposing poles (tragic material and life-affirming form) creates that special aesthetic moment Vygotsky calls an "affective contradiction," carrying the spectator far beyond their accustomed experience.
Vygotsky's writings on Hamlet offer a key to understanding this production. Vygotsky defines Hamlet as a "riddle." He rejects the superficiality of traditional criticisms (that Hamlet has a weak character or is constrained by external obstacles). He even takes Tolstoy's harsh critique—"Hamlet has no character, he does not know what he is doing"—and reverses it. According to Vygotsky, Tolstoy is right; Hamlet has no consistent character, but this is not a flaw, it is Shakespeare's intentional artistic device. The tragedy is built on the contradiction and "incongruity" between the hero's actions (or inaction) and his character (his strong, energetic appearance).
Chela De Ferrari embodies this abstract theoretical observation on stage. In this play, there is no single Hamlet. The role of Hamlet is shared collectively among eight actors. The question "Who is Hamlet?" remains unanswered, just as it does in Vygotsky's text, because Hamlet is not a person but the collective voice of "the ignored." Each actor on stage represents a piece of Hamlet, a contradiction. This collective performance is the most ingenious way to stage that "characterlessness"—that existential riddle irreducible to a single psychological structure.
"To Be" Through the Lens of Developmental Psychology
To read this artistic triumph solely as an aesthetic choice is to miss a large part of the picture. Developmental psychology offers us another of Vygotsky's legacies to understand how this success was possible. Down syndrome (Trisomy 21) is not a disease, but a genetic difference. When we look at the cognitive profile of this difference, we know that individuals often possess strong social skills, emotional sensitivity, and an aptitude for visual learning; however, they experience difficulties in areas such as abstract language, grammatical structure, and auditory-verbal memory.
So, how did individuals with this profile manage to cope with a text as linguistically and philosophically abstract and complex as Shakespeare's?
The answer lies in Vygotsky’s developmental psychology theory. As I discuss in detail in my new book, Yeni Bir Bilinç İnşa Etmek: Vygotsky’nin Psikolojik Gelişim Teorisi ve Diyalektik Yöntemi (Building a New Consciousness: Vygotsky’s Theory of Psychological Development and the Dialectical Method), Vygotsky's theory redefines the distinction between "difference" and "deficiency." According to him, our potential is constructed through "cultural tools" (like language, art, and play) and social interaction; and deficiency is an opportunity to become sufficient.
The secret to this production's success is a perfect application of Vygotsky's concept of the "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD). The ZPD is the potential space between what an individual can do alone and what they can do with the guidance of a "more capable other." Director Chela De Ferrari and her team took on exactly this role of the "more capable other." Instead of focusing on the actors' area of weakness, abstract text memorization (auditory memory), they started from their area of strength: social and emotional interaction.
The production's rehearsal process was not a traditional memorization rehearsal, but a collective creation workshop. The actors' personal stories (for example, bringing in their own birth photos), their improvisations, and their own "to be or not to be" experiences formed the backbone of the text. De Ferrari provided "scaffolding," allowing the actors to climb this difficult text.
The actors used the Hamlet text as a powerful "cultural tool" to express their own existence. Their delivery of Hamlet's soliloquy to a rap rhythm is proof of how this 400-year-old tool was transformed and used "to build a new consciousness." This tension, this "threshold" between emotion and expression, is not merely represented on stage; it is transformed into an aesthetic source itself. The support of dialogues with physical gestures, the conversion of repetitions into rhythmic elements, and the evolution of collective speaking moments into a "chorus" all meet the first principle of theatre: to think as one body.
The Victory of Art and Collective Catharsis
This play was the first production staged within the "Accessible Art Partnership" initiated by IKSV and DenizBank, and was supported by accompanying events like the "We Dance Together" performance by the Down Syndrome Association of Turkey. However, this went beyond being an "awareness" piece; it created, as El País put it, "a space of victory that shatters prejudices." It reminded us that inclusivity is not just PR; it requires a politics of programming.
Vygotsky defines the ultimate effect of art as "catharsis." But this is not an Aristotelian "purging of emotions;” it is a moment of "purification" or "elevation" that emerges from the structural transformation of conflicting emotions. It is the elevation of personal conflict to a more general human truth.
Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet functions in exactly this way. The audience approaches Hamlet’s question not by pitying his depression, but by re-establishing that question within their own regime of citizenship and representation. The play ends not with a bloody finale, as the original text does, but with a joyful dance party, with the audience invited onto the stage.
This finale is the pinnacle of Vygotskian psychology. Art ceases to be an individual experience and becomes a "social act." The invisible fourth wall between the stage (actor) and the house (audience) is broken, and a collective consciousness is created together. The hierarchy in the viewing space is suspended; the actor/audience division begins to dissolve, along with the "us/not like us" division.
We have become accustomed to measuring the authenticity of art by flawless technique; however, authenticity sometimes requires not perfection, but the structural courage to make conflict visible. This Hamlet has that courage. Vygotsky reads this transformation as the "generalization of individual emotion on a social plane;” thus, art turns personal ache into a matter of citizenship.
Teatro La Plaza not only showed what individuals with Down syndrome can do, but also proved what theatre should be—what a powerful transformative tool it can become when it is inclusive, not exclusive. Just as Vygotsky said, art is "the social technique of emotion," and in the hands of Teatro La Plaza, this technique proved to be the most effective way of building a new consciousness for all of us.
The final dance is not just a "happy ending;” it is an aesthetic decision: to bequeath the tragedy's closure to a common ritual, to place catharsis not on the stage, but in the relationships between us. The answer to "To be or not to be?" is given in that moment: Not just "to be," but "to be together." This is not the resolution of Hamlet's riddle, but of our prejudices.
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