The first new production of Hamlet at Drama after nearly 20 years was directed by Eduard Miler and adapted to the stage by Žanina Mirčevska based on the translation by Srečko Fišer.

The starting point for Mirčevska's interpretation was the question who is the Hamlet of today. Miler described him as a "verbal revolutionary", with Mirčevska specifying that Hamlet wants a more regulated world, but lacks the initiative to do anything.

"He gets stuck at the level of reflection, while he keeps seeking his opposite of an active rebel," the dramaturge explained her interpretation of the play at Thursday's news conference in Ljubljana.

The Prince of Denmark will be portrayed by Marko Mandić, who said that Mirčevska in fact placed two Hamlets on stage whereby she opened up totally new dimensions of the play.

The latest adaptation introduces a new character as a combination of several different characters. It is played by Igor Samobor, who interprets his role as a "collective memory which is always present and confuses us".

This character is not Hamlet's usual interlocutor like Horatio and several other noblemen in the original, but embodies the main idea of the show - the intellectual's split.

Everyone involved in the production had to "kill all deep-rooted beliefs about what Hamlet is" before the study of the text began, Mandić said.

Instead of Hamlet's classic question of to be or not to be, the characters in the new production are mainly concerned with "to be" as everyone fight to survive, "to crawl out of their holes and not to be just worms burrowing through the muddy, rotten, filthy Denmark", Mandić said.

Hamlet was last staged at Drama in 1994 in a production directed by Janez Pipan and Jernej Šugman in the lead that won him the prestigious Borštnik Award in 1995.