Hamlet’s plan to “catch the conscience of the king” through performance – through players enacting the “ghost story” he earlier heard about his father’s death in “The Mousetrap”– reveals the significance of theatre’s effects within Shakespeare's play. Scholarly discussion around this critical moment has largely focused on structure and Claudius’ viewing of both “dumb show” and The Murder of Gonzago, and this thesis adds to this discussion but focuses on audience response at a different magnitude by applying Brecht’s ideas behind theatre, specifically the “alienation effect” to re-visualize this self-reflexive scene. This larger focus includes the reaction and perception of Gertrude, Ophelia, and members of the court, as well as the audience of Hamlet viewing this play-within-a-play. I also apply this method to an analysis of the cultural politics of “The Mousetrap” scene of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood film adaptation, Haider (2014), which further complicates our understanding of audience response by contextualizing it within politics and history. In Haider, the audience is bigger than Claudius; the audience now includes the people of Kashmir and India, and the viewer of the film, and the message is not merely a condemnation of a murder, but a critique on the current political climate and a call to critically engage with the issues of the “disappeared” in Kashmir. Looking at Hamlet and Haider through these lenses informs our understanding of thematic conflicts between action and acting, and between performance and reality, and it helps us rethink modern concerns like the surveillance state and the intersection of art, reality, and politics within our own lives.
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