What is "opheliamachine"

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.