Hamlet

I have tried to introduce on the stage a kind of family story.
I personally am not interested at present in the social or universal connection of this play by Shakespeare. (...) I think that today there is the large number of the young people who suddenly find themselves happens in a world which is based on very weird rules. Our world works in an incredibly strange way. Out of joint. And young people have been trying in a number of way and place in this world. In order to survive, to do it with success...

Today there is a generation of thirty-year-olds who grew up with a very strong father. Or rather, under his hand and supervision. We can perceive this father as the communism, the party, or one's own concrete father. Suddenly the father dies. We have been invaded by freedom. And we are looking for ways to stand on our own two feet. To become ourselves. (...)

Róbert Alföldi, director of the production

 Alföldi has understood Hamlet as a tough struggle for power between ruling clans, whose methods are not substantially different from today's underworld. However, on the surface the court of king Claudius is dominated by technocratic elegance: grey, well-fitting suits, complemented by sexy corsets for the ladies, de luxe red gloves up to the elbows. The creations of Andrea Bartha are slightly perverse, arrogant and incredibly elegant at the right spots. The stage set by another permanent member of Alföldi's creative team, who calls itself Kentaur, is in the same vein: pretended sobriety, through which the arrogance of power shows, is incarnated by the tall walls paneled with massive blocks of grey stone, seemingly compact, gradually revealing doors and peepholes. When Hamlet sprays these intact walls of the royal grandeur with his “To Be Or Not To Be”, it sends a shiver down one's spine with a greater impact than the most hopeless human cry.

Since Hamlet starts and ends his life in the production at a computer, the Nitra variant of the Danish Prince's story could also be interpreted as an interactive computer game. As a stay of the hero in an unreal, virtual reality. However, that does not change at all the power of the ideas, emotions and passions which accompany him. That power is more than real.

Martina Ulmanová, theatre critic, Mosty, 3/7/2001

 Alföldi's directing approach is admirably consistent, it respects the spirit and in fact also the letter of Shakespeare's text. Each component plays its own role. There are no minor characters, only dramatic situations structured in a different way with different means of expression, and it is in them that the dynamics of the production, its impact and its final point are built.

Dagmar Podmaková, theatre critic, Práca, 18/6/2001