The play is an exploration of the well-known Shakespearean story from Ophelia’s perspective, set in the present day, where the real and digital worlds merge. Hamlet is merely a minor character here; the focus is on Ophelia’s coming-of-age story. Her mother has died under unclear circumstances, and a security camera video suddenly appears on Ophelia’s cell phone. Her father, Polonius—a corrupt politician—seems to be hiding something and begins a relationship with Ophelia’s aunt, Claudia, immediately after his wife’s death. Silence, incest, deepfakes of her brother Laertes — who sells Ophelia on the OnlyFans platform —numerous moles burrowing through the earth in search of compromising material, and other dark secrets shape the play, which skillfully and satirically revolves around the themes of Hamlet. As a DJ, Ophelia plays her sets at Denmark’s hottest club, Else I Snore, searching for the right BPM for sadness.

The play, which features both poetic scenes and grotesque exchanges, was presented as a staged reading in the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. For director Eberhard Köhler, this was already his third encounter with a play by Tomáš Ráliš (following Sorex in 2023 and Ausgewohnt in 2025). He utilized the entire space of the Grüner Salon— from the stage to the central area and all the way to the bar. The four actors — Thea Rasche, Naomi Abukha, Sascha Vajnstajn, and Henning Bochert — changed their costumes and roles after the prologue and did not return to their original cast assignments until the very end. This created a frame for the plot, which drifts into the digital realm and ultimately returns to the initial situation, as if in a loop.

Danila Korogodsky was responsible for the set design and costumes; he developed colorful patterns for each role and hung nets full of apples throughout the entire space. Only when the moles burrow their way through to the kompromat are the nets cut open, and the apples flood the room. With their bites taken out of them, they serve as Yorick’s skulls or as juggling props. A staged reading by Eberhard Köhler is always a small-scale production—the audience very quickly forgets that the actors are still holding scripts in their hands.

In the panel discussion that followed, festival director Barbora Schnelle spoke with the playwright Tomáš Ráliš and his translator Maira Neubert. Ráliš explained that his play was a response to a flood of Hamlet productions on Czech stages and that he wanted to examine the material from the perspective of a different family. Maira Neubert spoke about the role that verifying the translation plays in the rehearsal process. The audience asked many questions about the original production, which is currently running at the Divadlo Komedie theater in Prague under the direction of Tomáš Ráliš and is attracting a very young audience to the theater.

The evening ended with an afterparty where DJ Liarosa played her sets. Liarosa, also known as Rosalie Malinská, is a Czech actress and musician with the band Viah, who plays the role of Ophelia in the Prague production. This gave the Berlin audience a very vivid sense of the kind of beats you can hear at Club Else I Snore.