“The rest is silence”: Censorship and conflicting Memory Politics in Ljubiša Georgievski’s Hamlet, 1989

This paper examines the production of Hamlet directed by Ljubiša Georgievski at the Macedonian National Theatre in Bitola in 1989 as an example of how the staging of classics in times of political upheaval can serve as a means for political theatre. In the context of the drastically changing political situation in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s, this production serves both as an expression of a memory politics in the process of changing towards a nationally-oriented historiography and as an example of how the staging of repetitive dramatic structures has the potential to criticise repertoire politics in established cultural institutions. Accordingly, this paper is also an argument against a reduction of classics to an expression of an escapist repertoire politics in the region of former Yugoslavia in the 1980s and early 1990s.