Ad usum Germanorum : le regie shakespeariane di George Tabori e il teatro di lingua tedesca (1978-1990)

After a brief discussion of George Tabori’s career as a translator, a director and a playwright in American and European post-war theatre, the contribution outlines his Shakespeare productions, beginning in the United States ('The Merchant of Venice As Performed in Theresienstadt', 1963-66), going through Tabori’s off theater labs in Bremen (Theaterlabor: 'Hamlet' 1978) and Vienna (Der Kreis: a 'Shakespeare-Collage' and three 'King Lear' productions in the late 1980es, 'Hamlet' 1990) and culminating in the Vienna 'Othello' with Gert Voss (Burgtheater 1990). Then, Tabori’s intense work on the “Hamletism of Germans and Germanism of Hamlet” is examined, both in its explicit discussion in the seminal essay 'Hamlet in Blue' (1976) and in its theatrical pendant, the Munich production 'Improvisations on Shylock' (1978). In this second Taborian 'Merchant', a typical example of his “theatre of embarrassment”, the German audience is directly confronted with present and past antisemitism, since, in Tabori’s words, “it is impossible to come to terms with the past without experiencing it with skin, nose, tongue, bottom, feet and belly”.