Alienating Hamlet Precarious Work in Jenny Andreasson's Teatern Per Sivefors

The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel Teatern (2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet at the Swedish national stage fails to have its planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital - embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play - and economic. The result-ing precarious work situation is reflected in the protagonist's yearning for sta-bility, in her recurring assertions of class privileges vis-a-vis her co-workers and in her increasing sense of alienation from both them and her own work. While not strictly paraphrasing Shakespeare's play, the protagonist invokes parallels to both Hamlet and Ophelia, and Teatern, instead of locating these parallels in an 'existential' reading of Shakespeare's play, anchors the theme of alienation in the economic and social strictures of the theatre institution.

Automated summary

The novel "Teatern" portrays the story of a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet fails to have its planned premiere at the Swedish national stage. This article argues that class structures and precarity, rather than misogynist structures, are the main reasons behind this failure. The financial difficulties of the theatre create a discrepancy between cultural capital and economic circumstances, leading to a precarious work situation for the protagonist and a sense of alienation from both her co-workers and her own work.