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''Opheliamachine'' is a postmodernist drama by the Polish-born American playwright and dramaturg, Magda Romanska. Written in the span of ten years, from 2002 to 2012, the play is a response to and polemic with the German playwright Heiner Mueller’s ''Hamletmachine'' (in German, Die Hamletmaschine). Like ''Hamletmachine'', ''Opheliamachine'' is loosely based on ''Hamlet'', by William Shakespeare. The play originated in relation to Romanska’s doctoral dissertation on representation of death and femininity. Some critics believe that in ''Hamletmachine'', Mueller deconstructs the impossible position of an Eastern European intellectual at the peak of the Cold War as well as the seemingly disappearing agency of the author. Likewise, ''Opheliamachine'' captures the current historical moment with all its entrapments: the dissolution of national and gender identities, the loss of agency and the solipsism of contemporary lives in an increasingly fragmented—if connected—world, the brutal, animal-like quality of modern relationships, the collapse of a social order and its distinction, the chaos and violence that follows. == Overview == Written in the tradition of such experimental texts as Pablo Picasso’s ''The Four Little Girls'' (1946–47), Antoni Artaud’s ''Jet of Blood'' (1925), or Alfred Jarry’s ''Ubu Roi'' (1896), ''Opheliamachine'' is a collage, pastiche, conglomeration of images that rule over our modern, global, virtual sexuality. The play doesn’t have a plot as such. It is a postmodern tale of love and sex in a fragmented world of questionable values. Hamlet and Ophelia are represented by multiple characters, each in conflict with him- or herself and the other. ''Opheliamachine'' captures the dissolution of the national (local, sexual, etc.) identities leading to the kind of physical and psychological displacement that used to be the traditional immigrant, diasporic condition and which now has become the new normalized global mode of being, a new human condition. The play was inspired by Witold Gombrowicz’ concept of "filistria: the realm of displaced persons of uncertain gender and sexuality living in a postcolonial - and now postideological – world." In a modern global world of unstable national and sexual identities, Hamlet and Ophelia are both what Fouad Ajami calls "children of the fault lines," "rootless residents" for whom "home is neither in the lands of their birth nor in the diaspora communities where people flee the fire and the failure of tormented places." Hamlet from ''Opheliamachine'' is the postmodern "nowhere man," who finds the comfort of belonging in the virtual reality of TV and the Internet, and "who () risen to war against the very messy world that forged ()." Ophelia is split between contradictory drives and desires, turning to self-violence in a grotesque gesture of gender mockery. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Opheliamachine」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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