SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …

SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW

A Story of Will and Love of Will (Shakespeare)

Yes, We Will was the motto of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova this year. It could well have been the same one 30 years ago, in 1994, when the Festival took off to a daring start. The incredible will to make Craiova a city of Shakespeare – on an international scale at that! – belonged then, as well as ever since, to Emil Boroghina – the irresistibly charismatic actor, director and manager of the Craiova National Theatre, who exudes the special aura of modesty characteristic only of the truly wise.

Importantly, in the beginning of the 1990’s, it was in Craiova and at its National Theatre “Marin Sorescu,” where the Romanian theatre at large could dream big and could turn its dreams into reality. It was there and then, where the director Silviu Purcarete, now an artist of highest world renown, started his career. His second show, Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth (1990), got invited to the Edinburgh Festival, in 1991, and became such a hit there that was immediately invited to Japan, Germany and Israel. “All of a sudden, Purcarete’s name became known, respected, sought after,” as the critic and scholar Octavian Saiu notes his essay on the director in the 2021 collection 20 Ground-Breaking Directors of Eastern Europe. Purcarete’s next productions – Titus Andronicus (1992) and Phaedra (1994) – followed suit, bringing high acclaim to him, to the Craiova National Theatre, and to the Romanian theatre alike, both at home and around the world.

It was exactly during the tour of that Titus Andronicus in Tokyo, in 1992, where Emil Boroghina first shared in public, and on the international arena, the ambitious goal that the Craiova National Theatre had set up for itself: to organize an international festival devoted to Shakespeare. Very symbolically, this announcement transpired in no other place but the local Globe theatre. Mind you, this was a time, when nearly everywhere in Eastern Europe theatre was losing ground. On multiple levels at that: in terms of its audiences, status, repertoire, and, most importantly, main focus. It was in search for a new face – a process which took, in some countries, nearly half a decade to be completed. The Craiova National Theatre obviously stood out as a glaring exception in this overall rather bleak picture and, thus, presented the most propitious conditions for putting into practice Boroghina’s conviction, as stated in the 1994 Festival Program, that “as actors test their mettle by doing Shakespeare, so do theatres.”

As You Like It. Photo © John Haynes

The first edition of the Festival was rather cautious: it consisted of six productions only, of which just one was foreign. However, the latter was no other but the all-male As You Like It of the British Cheek by Jowl Theatre – one of the hottest shows of the time which was in a process of traveling and introducing to the audiences around the world the typical finesse and inconspicuousness of Declan Donnellan’s directing signature style. It was not going to be a one-off visit of Donnellan and his Cheek by Jowl in Craiova. He remained truly involved with the International Shakespeare Festival there throughout the next decades. In 2006, he brought to Craiova his ephemerally beautiful Twelfth Night, done as a co-production between Cheek by Jowl and the Moscow International Chekhov Festival. The 2008 edition featured his Troilus and Cressida and the 2018 one – his Measure for Measure, another co-production between Cheek by Jowl and a Russian theatre institution, this time the Pushkin Theatre. And now, the Festival’s jubilee 30th year had as one of its highlights his Hamlet, done especially for the occasion with the cast of the very host – the Craiova National Theatre. Meanwhile, in 2014, one of the productions included in the “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” line of the Festival was Donnellan’s too: ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, by John Ford.

In 2008, the Festival cracked its door open for exceptional fully non-Shakespearean productions, not related to his time either. And the two exceptions then were, indeed, exceptional: Peter Brook’s The Grand Inquisitor, after Dostoyevsky’s novel (with Bouffes de Nord Theatre), and Robert Wilson’s Lady from the Sea, by Ibsen (with the Berliner Ensemble). Appropriately, the edition was entitled Great Shows, Great Directors. The brilliant late Romanian-French critic George Banu had remarked earlier that the Craiova Festival was “extremely courageous and extremely radical” and suggested that “if the festival in Sibiu were one of opening, the one in Craiova was one of focus.” The two aforementioned “detours” did not at all mean that the Festival had betrayed its focus. They rather indicated that there was already a two-way focus phenomenon: i.e. in five editions only, the Craiova Festival had managed to draw the attention of the biggest names in the world theatre. In the next editions, Robert Lepage, the Quebec director- extraordinaire, was the other rare exception in the program: with his Needles and Opium, in 2018, and with his stunning one-man show 887, in 2022.

The 2008 edition introduced yet another novelty: the International Shakespeare Festival Prize. Unsurprisingly, it went first to Declan Donnellan, and then, over the next years, has gone to the directors Silviu Purcarete (in 2010), Eimuntas Nekrosius (in 2012), Krzysztof Warlikowski (in 2018) and Robert Lepage (in 2022). So far the only non-directors among the Prize recipients have been Sir Stanley Wells (2014), the Shakespearean scholar and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Michael Dobson (2020), director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-on-Avon. These choices are not surprising either. For, the Festival is not only an artistic endeavor but is also a platform for critical and scholarly discourse, focused, naturally, on Shakespeare. The high-level conferences, gathering Shakespearean scholars from around the world in Craiova, have become a part of the Festival’s trademark and have acquired the patronage of the UNESCO chair of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). In 2010, the Shakespeare in Performance Seminar was launched there and later on it got the aegis of the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA). In addition to all that, in 2010, the Festival became a co-founder of the European Shakespeare Festivals Network whose meetings regularly take place there. And, in 2016, its high-level international status was further asserted by the fact that the one week of events accompanying the Europe Theatre Prize, the most important theatre award on the whole continent, was organized in the framework of the 10th Festival edition. Given all these developments, high-end additions, and already fully cemented reputation as a theatre institution of world-wide clout, a question naturally arises: could the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival get possibly further enriched in terms of content and format? The 2024 jubilee edition provided a firmly positive answer.

2024: New Entries in the Festival’s Profile

The Festival celebrated its jubilee with several substantial innovations which – notably! – were organically intertwined. In the first place, it acquired a new co-organizer: The National University of Theatre and Film Arts (UNACT) “I. L. Caragiale” (based in Bucharest), in addition to the Shakespeare Theatre Foundation, established by Boroghina in 1994. This enforcement of the organizers’ ranks has brought a whole new strand to the program, so far routinely consisting mainly of indoor and outdoor parts: UNITER performances and events. Their number was, indeed, startling: 106 altogether, ranging from theatre to film, to installations, research workshops, exhibitions, etc., and mounted in 22 alternative spaces throughout Craiova. An interesting detail of the jubilee Festival edition was that some of the participating students were accommodated in a camping place, especially created for them in the biggest park of the city.

This was not an ordinary camping place per se but part of another major new development of the Festival: the Shakespeare Village. Built as a traditional Elizabethan-era village, it was an alternative place for performances, workshops, children’s activities during the day, and concerts and parties during the night; with overall 70 events happening there during the 11 festival days. In turn, the Shakespeare village was not just a new entry in the jubilee program. It was a part of the most important change of the Festival that transpired already on a conceptual level. Namely, the very scope of the Festival’s audiences, or rather addressees, was substantially expanded to encompass not just the spectators of the invited shows but, in an equal measure, the local communities of Craiova. As Vlad Dragulescu, the person to whom Boroghina has meanwhile handed the baton – the current director of the Festival – put it in the catalogue: “This time, perhaps more than ever, we will understand that most of all, Shakespeare is not about theatre, but about people. A Shakespeare for everyone.”

Lady from the Sea. Photo © A.J. Weissbard

The emphasis on the local communities’ involvement and on the two-way relations between the festival and the people outside of the theatre halls was best reflected in the Pop-Up Shakespeare strand of the program. “Festival Communities Build the Festival” was its motto. Together with the Outdoor strand, they involved 50 locations in the city, where shows and improvisations took place. As the catalogue described it, “Our actors have the mission, at this edition, to talk to the people who live there and to involve them with the actual production. With a ladle, with a pot, with a chair, with a table, with a hanger. This year, the whole of Craiova is a stage and all the people are actors.” In brief, the aim was to transform Craiova from a city with a festival to a full-scale festival city. The new, communities-oriented, concept was actually put into practice long before the Festival started, in something like a prelude to it, with the so- called Shakespeare caravan. It brought for the first time The Complete Works of Shakespeare (in the shape of a 45-minute open-air show) to 30 cities in Romania and drew over 1200000 spectators. After all this, how could one not eagerly anticipate what the Craiova Festival had prepared for the audience for its jubilee?

The 2024 Highlights

Out of the overall more than 300 events and nearly 30 main indoor shows, the Festival organizers had taken out of the brackets several names: Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Declan Donnellan, Robert Lepage, Andrei Serban. It was with Wilson’s Tempest, a production of the National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” of Bulgaria, the jubilee edition took off. The show met the expectations of all the incorrigible fans of the famed director’s oeuvre. It is a manifestation of impressive moving images, created with impeccable taste, in terms of colors and composition, and animated via stylized acting, where actors are more like puppets, clad in correspondingly imposing costumes and bringing in a pinch of a special humor – somewhat from a distance and, to be frank, not readable to everyone. In brief, beauty as from another planet, to a large extent warmth-free, and humor that is rather a form of a shield lest we dare try to penetrate underneath the striking surface of all we see on stage in search for something else there.

While Wilson’s show could not be considered a surprise either for better or for worse, Donnellan’s Hamlet with the Craiova National Theatre was, for me, a true disappointment. Although I was in fact somewhat prepared by his Spanish Life Is a Dream, which visited Sofia a year ago and which was not a sample of his best directorial work. The springboard concept of Donellan’s Hamlet is actually very worthy. The action takes place in a very intimate environment. The spectators are seated on two parallel amphitheatre constructions on the big stage itself. The space for the actors’ movement is further narrowed by placing of several sorts of cubes between them and the audience. It is on one of these cubes where Hamlet’s Father sits throughout the action, thus, becoming a witness of everything. The other characters who meanwhile pass away, sit then on the other “chairs,” forming altogether a special territory in-between the living in the real world – the viewers – and the living in the play. i.e. there is a two-layer audience of what transpires in this Hamlet. Importantly too, the living in the real world are at an arm’s length from both the alive and the dead of the characters.

Yet, it is this very closeness that proves to be a double-edged weapon, as most of the acting is, alas, very superficial, which could hardly be hidden at such a short distance. So, most of the time, the characters seem like computer-generated, i.e. without true emotions, trepidations, development. That applies especially to Hamlet himself who gets mad rather abruptly, almost within a second, and the expression of his madness is via a quite worn-out cliché – he puts on red high-heel shoes and bright red lipstick, and stays like that nearly throughout the action. The madness of Ophelia is not very persuasive either: she bangs with a spade on the metal wall on the side of the back wings. Polonius, in turn, inexplicably is played by an actress in a tremendously padded man’s suit and with a moustache.

All of this doesn’t mean that Donnellan’s Hamlet doesn’t have its concrete excellent moments too. Such is the genuinely moving first encounter of Hamlet with the ghost: he touches his hands, shoulders, head, in an attempt to find out if his father is real, and then, being happiness itself, he embraces him. Gertrude slapping Hamlet is also in a very

truthful scene which, alas, gets spoiled quickly by the manner in which he gets mad. Then, his smelling of the poison on the tip of the sword and in the wine is an interesting detail. There are other powerful moments, yet, on the whole, as the case with the bulk of conceptual theatre, this show gets exhausted quite early on, since it is not persuasive on the level of human presence, relationships, and emotions. So, in the end, I didn’t feel touched or transformed by it.

Much more integral was Twelfth Night, created by the Romanian director of world fame Andrei Serban with the actors of the State Theatre of Constansa, Romania. It was a sample of a fully organic mix of an unobtrusive, yet very clever and elegant, directing style and a very functional set-design (a small and narrow stage, turned into a shiny box by the fringe curtain that surrounded it). Talking about the Romanian highlights of the Festival, I will take the liberty to include among them a book that was launched there and that is dedicated to the National Theatre of Craiova, to Boroghina and Purcarete. These three names form its title, while the subtitle tells the rest: Pilgrims of the Great Theatre of the World. Created by Ljudmila Patlanjoglu, the doyen of the Romanian theatre critics and scholars, this book was the best present to the Festival for its jubilee. An equally awesome and elegant volume, it contains all the important data about the main developments of this remarkable institution as well as splendid large photos of the main productions, events, and the champions of the Festival. The Romanian connection was also to be traced as far as to one of the highly acclaimed Asian entries in the main indoor program: a non-verbal King Lear of Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio from Hong Kong, with a mixed local and Romanian cast, which, alas, I didn’t get to see.

From among the shows I did see, I was most struck by The Tempest Project of Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne, the Spanish Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic of the Jesus Herrera Flamenco Ballet, and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, staged as a ballet by Robert Lepage and Guillaume Cote. They were actually more than merely distinctive. They were rather the most spectacular and unforgettable theatre fireworks in tribute to the Festival’s jubilee. Moreover, they rather complemented each other as an overall effect bringing out three aspects of Shakespeare’s oeuvre: its profound spirituality, its visceral side, and its strong potential for visual expressiveness.

The Tempest Project of Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne or When Theatre Transcends Theatre

The thrill of expecting an encounter with the extraordinary charged the air around the National Theatre of Craiova already before the show. The building was as if under siege: there were more than twice as many people in front of it as there were seats inside its main hall. And, as the routine practice is in this part of the world, all students and ardent theatre aficionados, who hadn’t managed to get hold of a ticket, were let in and allowed to sit on the steps of the rather large and steep staircase-aisles on the two sides of the seats. In the end, the hall was literally full to the brim. Still, at the moment the lights started to go down, an extraordinary silence fell over the packed theatre, as if all these people, like one, held their breath in awe of the greatest theatre maestro of our time, humbled by the privilege to see his last work. When the lights were fully dimmed, the silence became even more special, as the stage responded in the same language of quiet – like an echo that can not be heard but can be felt with both body and soul. Prospero, standing on a Persian carpet on the proscenium, started slowly to twist and turn in his hands a big wooden stick, slightly curved at one of its ends, like a shepherd’s crook. In full quiet.

It was as if time slowed down and stopped. Our time, the time we know, that is. And the space too started to change. As if, with every move of this crook, the very air around it, around Prospero, and around us, was changing: like its invisible molecules were getting rearranged and, at the end of the next several fully quiet minutes, the hustle, the vanity, the pettiness of our life not simply disappeared, but rather got cleaned up, as mere spots get cleaned up, and everything around us and even in us became crystal and clear, and full of tranquil joy. And this purity felt so natural as though we were back to normal, back to where we belong. The next hour and twenty minutes of this unique theatre piece transpired in this other, yet so naturally ours time and space. No matter that speech makes its appearance too, soon after the beginning. The atmosphere on and off stage retain that extraordinary blissful charge of peace and harmony – the feeling of becoming freed from the ordinary and of recognizing the extraordinary as our natural home. Importantly, the arrival of speech was not followed by any special effects, already so inseparable from theatre today. Until the end of The Tempest Project, on stage there are only several more carpets and several more sticks – only smaller than that in Prospero’s hands and some of them being in small piles on the floor.

Magic carpets and magic wands? This thought may cross one’s mind, but only briefly. To me, they were much more than that. And this became crystal clear in a scene that was a stroke of genius. Ferdinand takes several of the small sticks and lays them out on the floor, forming a line – a path – between himself and Miranda. Then he carefully puts one stick on her head and one on his own, and they start treading the path towards each other very carefully, lest the sticks fall down. So, maybe the carpets and the wooden crook in Prospero’s hand are, indeed, the well known symbols of the fairy tales. We are humans, after all, and are in need of familiar vehicles for our imagination to take off. Yet, here the “flight” is not to somewhere distant else but it is rather the “flight” of a revelation – of getting to see through about the essence of here and now, and realize how different this here and now is, in effect, from our usual perception of it. And that it takes only one thing for our eyes to get open for this other reality: to get to follow the paths set up for us and enshrined within us. Which is to say: to see the here and now with “the eyes of the heart.” From that scene with the path outlined with the sticks on, I couldn’t stop thinking about several lines from Psalm 25 of the Book of Psalms: “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.” (Psalm 25: 4) And then: “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.” (Psalm 25:10)

Of course, minimalism in terms of stage means of expression is not at all a surprise in Brook’s theatre. I will never forget The Valley of Astonishment, again created by him and Marie-Helene Estienne. It had the effect of a drawing by a genius painter, made on a napkin – just few strokes and the essence of a face, person, relations… is there. Yet, in The Tempest Project this utmost simplicity that zeroes in on the quintessential is on a much deeper level: about our communion with the other world – the invisible one which resides both outside and inside us, and which, for centuries already, has been sneered at and entirely dismissed as non-existent.

No wonder Brook went back exactly to The Tempest (for a third time) when the end of his life was approaching. “There is a word that chimes through the play: free”, he wrote about the play. “…As always in Shakespeare, the meaning is never pinned. It's always suggested like in an echo chamber. Each echo amplifies and nourishes its sound. Caliban wants his freedom. Ariel wants his freedom, but it's not the same freedom. For Prospero, freedom is undefinable. It is what he is looking for throughout the play. The young Prospero, plunged into his books, searching for the occult, was a prisoner of his dreams. On the island, we may think he became free because he had acquired all the magical powers a man can acquire. But a magician plays with powers that do not belong to humanity. It is not for a man to darken the midday sun, nor to bring the dead out of their graves.”

With The Tempest Project Brook dispenses nearly fully from the material, from nearly everything that constitutes what we accept now as ordinary, both in life and in theatre. As a result, we can fully concentrate on the nature of freedom as the first and foremost prerequisite for our communion with the invisible – the world of the Spirit. The show italicized in my mind yet another line of the sacred texts which, paraphrased, reads like this: all the taking care of the material life has chased us from paradise.

The Tempest Project also reminded me of something another great director of our time, the late Eimuntas Nekrosius of Lithuania, said, “We have empty years, empty days and empty months alike in our lives. We only have a handful of real life. Almost everything is wasted time. However, we all imitate that we are in a hurry, that we do not have time, and that we are and will be very busy for a few years ahead. This is not true. This is how we deceive ourselves and others.” The Tempest Project of Brook and Estienne is, to me, exactly about that “handful of real life” – life that is free from the material, from the imitation of substance via its so contemporary substitutes – the haste, the cult for adrenalin, and the ubiquity of many-ness. In brief, life that is sync with the Spirit, and is, thus, harmony and peace itself.

A distant serene song resounds from one point on in The Tempest Project – coming and going, as if in waves; a song, which at times seems as simply part of the air. The people on stage – and I deliberately don’t say actors, lest I ruin the wonder – are somewhat like that song: at times they talk, at times they are simply there, yet, apart from the rare funny scenes, they too feel like a part of the air. You can probably say that Brook and Estienne have managed to bring us as closest as possible to one of the core themes of the play: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.” I dare say again that The Tempest Project is much more than that: it rather makes us feel like in heaven, or, even more to the point, in what heaven could feel like here on Earth – during the “handful of real life.” Actually, Nekrosius himself tried to create Paradise on stage, in his adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy at his Meno Fortas Theatre in Vilnius, Lithuania. And he did manage to a large extent. Yet there were some illustrative moments there which grounded the overall effect of the show. While seeing The Tempest Project is truly like experiencing a life-changing revelation. Joe Martin begins his essay on Peter Brook “The Invisible Made Visible” in the 2015 SUFI “Peter Brook's life work for theatre constitutes a journey on a path upon which the spiritual traveler's quest is inseparable from that of the artist.” Indeed, experiencing The Tempest Project is equally an eye- opening experience in terms of theatre too, i.e. of what theatre could be like.

In the 2023 program of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Peter Brook wrote, in reference to the Tempest Project: “Today, Western actors have all the qualities necessary to explore in Shakespeare's plays; all that concerns anger, political violence, sexuality, introspection.  But for them it is almost impossible to touch the invisible world. To play a character who is not real, for a Western actor, requires real acrobatics. For the actor who has been raised in a world of ceremonies and rituals, the way that leads to the invisible is often direct and natural. The Tempest is an enigma. It is a fable in which nothing can be taken literally, because if we stay on the surface of the play, its inner quality escapes us. For the actors as well as for the audience, it is a play that reveals itself by playing it. It's like music.”

In The Tempest Project the actors not only do manage to touch the invisible. They manage to become humble mediums between it and us, willfully dispensing from everything acting is usually associated with. The whole Tempest Project feels like being set free from everything ordinary theatre is associated with. It is a genuinely extraordinary piece – a piece of theatre that transcends theatre. It is as if, with this last show of his, Brook nods us from heaven and, by letting us experience a feel of it, reminds us that both life and theatre could be indeed holy.

Hamlet “Translated” into the Language of Flamenco

Another extraordinary prism for viewing, or rather feeling, Hamlet in Craiova was offered by the Spanish Jesus Herera Flamenco Ballet. Entitled Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic, this show is, to a large extent, at the other end of the pure spirituality of The Tempest Project: it dwells in the territory of the visceral, having simply skipped the one of the merely physical. All the same, it is an equally unforgettable and truly unique experience, as the work of Brook and Estienne. Indeed, as the Festival catalogue assured us, “For the first time ever, one of Shakespeare’s most iconic tragic plays is being turned into a Flamenco production.” The very logical motivation for this so unlikely undertaking was immediately pointed out there: “Hamlet is a tale of family, revenge, power and murder – and it is these aspects that make the story perfect for a Flamenco adaptation with their intensity and passion.”

Importantly, in Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic, the passion of the Flamenco language is not limited to the well-known ingredients – the dancing, the singing, the live music (here provided by a guitar,drums, flute and sax) and the rhythm of hands-clapping and feet-tapping. On stage, there are also a piano with a piano-player and a six-person choir. The choristers are in cloaks with hooks and with painted white faces, as if with masks. All the participants in the show are all the time on stage but, in effect, we rarely do see them altogether. Because of the light – another major partner in this stunning dance of passion: it brings in and out of the action not only the concrete characters and musicians, but also the choir. So it is a surprise when we first get to see it and it continues to be so further on in the action. The choir not only adds the might of an oratorio type of a recital to the whole sound texture of the show but it does dance too – with the main dancer and artistic director of the company Jesus Herrera. Herrera’s performance is literally a tour-de-force. An unlikely Hamlet – very tall and solid – he manages to transform his body into a whirl of passion. So it is not anymore human flesh but the very energy of all the extreme emotions that take hold of the character – and human beings at that matter.

Interestingly, but at once rather appropriately to the language of the show, the familiar plot is not followed in its entirety. Rather than that only separate lines unfold and not so much in an intertwined manner but one after another until each one exhausts itself. Thus, Hamlet’s mother (as Gertrude is billed) – the mesmerizing Lola Jaramillo – when taking center stage, plays the part from the beginning to the end, with the poisonous wine, before, for instance, Ophelia’s plot line starts unfolding. It is a part played at one gulp – one impossible gulp, that is– and one holds one’s breath, amazed by the energy of the passion Jaramillo exudes and also, from one point on, by how she doesn’t drop down fully exhausted. Although of a lesser overall might, the performance of Ophelia – Begona Arce – is also very persuasive. Only her drowning in a small pool is rather illustrative and, to me, unnecessary. Her dance there right before that, making the flying splashes of water become part of the show’s rhythm and dense texture, would have been a much more impressive end of her plot line. The figure of The Death – Hugo Sanchez – most of the time literally in the shadows or in a hook, charges the three-dimensional darkness on stage with sinister vibrations and, thus, with another layer of figurative blackness, and makes one palpably feel the threat for light to be overwhelmed.

“The culmination of any dancer, of any performer, is when they know that choreography is no longer necessary,” the catalogue quotes Juan Vergillos. This fully applies to the whole stunning piece too. It takes a few minutes at the beginning, so that the viewer stops being preoccupied with the ingenuity and precision of the movement itself, with the overall dance of the bodies, light, shadows, melodies, and rhythm. Then, I dare say, all this becomes one entity – a bigger pulsation of the air in the theatre – and we, the spectators, get drawn into it and transformed into a part of it. This pulsation has nothing to do with the one experienced at contemporary concerts or anything of the kind. It doesn’t “erase” your ability to think. On the contrary, while your body and feet move in rhythm, in an inexplicable way, with your cells vibrating, you get not only to experience the exaltation of passions but you also realize what they mean in terms of temptations, downfall, disaster… This Hamlet causes an unlikely catharsis reverberating in the spectators long afterwards.

There was yet another surprise show in Craiova that Shakespeare’s main masterpiece had inspired, an unexpected and surprising contribution by Robert Lepage: a ballet version of Hamlet. Lepage has created for himself a reputation of a stage sorcerer who mixes with ease theatre genres and forms, traditional means of expression and new technologies, but – more importantly! – manages to always subject all this amalgam to a truthful and emotional storytelling having at its core the human being. I have been following his oeuvre, since his first international break-through with Seven Streams of the River Ota back in the mid 1990’s, and as a critic I’ve never stopped being amazed by Lepage’s impeccable professionalism and ingenuity. Again more importantly, though, I’ve never felt failed by him in my capacity as a human being. Not only hasn’t he succumbed to the ills of our time theatre wise, like letting multimedia overwhelm and dehumanize his shows, but he’s never let the ubiquity of egocentrism take over his stage stories.

An excellent example of the latter is his solo piece 887 which I have had the delight to see many a time. Although formally devoted to his growing up, it is, in effect, the least about his own persona. He acquaints the audience with a diverse range of people who inhabit his childhood and teenage years, as well as his nowadays. We get to know his relatives, his neighbors – the world around himself, what the society in Quebec experienced over the years he grew up, while he retains the position of a witness-narrator who, despite being all the time there, is rarely in the limelight. This stands out so much at the background of all the one-actor shows which are usually predominantly about their creators.

In Craiova, however, I have to admit, I was initially rather disappointed, as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, staged by Lepage and Guillaume Cote, was more or less just a ballet and, to a large extent, illustrative at that. Namely, it was by and large following the plot and the canon for the characters, without ingenious “tricks” that would cast a new light on some familiar details and relations, and, thus, inspire startling insights. It looked like an abridged and illustrated Hamlet with no words but few sparse surtitles, as if in a silent movie, just announcing the main scenes that would follow by indicating who of the main characters is about to enter. Only in the very beginning and few times later on, the surtitles were more complex and formed ingenious pans, when the places of words or letters got to be written and changed in front of us. In the same vein, the ballet dancing seemed to be only slightly enhanced by a pinch of modern dance elements. All in all: nothing to do with the Lepage who has changed the face of world theatre with his panache, inventiveness and so fine and profound understanding of the human nature.

However, more and more time has been passing since I saw this Hamlet, I’ve come to realize I can’t stop thinking of it. Moreover, it has very often been coming to my mind during other shows, where deliberate ugliness and/or repugnancy is being manifested on stage – a rather strong trend on the festival circuit and on main European stages too for the last several seasons. So not only have I changed my initial opinion of Lepage’s and Cote’s Hamlet, but it has become like a life-belt for me, charging me with its beauty as a shield against the arrogant march of physiology against spirituality on stage.

There are three scenes in this Hamlet which are at once paragons of beauty, of profundity of the meaning and of ingenuity embedded in simplicity. The first one is of the very process of Ophelia’s getting mad – something which we rarely do get to see anyway in the interpretations of the play. Lepage and Cote place her in front of three mirrors, where she starts getting confused by seeing herself threefold. The rest of the characters too are around her and around the mirrors, and the feeling of her losing touch with reality becomes truly palpable: the integrity of her mind and her body starts falling apart in all these pieces of her in the mirrors, she tries hard to keep herself whole, but soon stops being in control altogether. And the next scene, right afterwards: her drowning. A blue curtain falls down and whirls and curls around her, moved by the other characters. She dances towards it, “diving” in and then managing to get out, and taking a breath, and then back into it, and again “to the surface”, and then again, until the vertical blue waters engulf her. The third scene is the duel at the end of the play: the swords of Hamlet and Laertes end with long, red and white ribbons respectively, like those of the gymnasts. So the fight becomes like a beautiful 3D painting, drawn and changing in front of us. These ribbons reminded me of the long sleeves of the characters in traditional Chinese operas that fly away and draw curved strokes in the air, creating an ephemeral feeling, as if the action takes place between the earth and the sky.

So, has Craiova, with the 30th anniversary of its main theatre event over, been definitely transformed from a city with a festival into a festival city, and a city of Shakespeare at that? Here is a true story instead of an answer:

With Spectators Like That… (a true story)

At the Lepage show, the staircases were again packed with students and theatre-lovers, who were not among the lucky ones with tickets but were magnanimously allowed inside the theatre. When the show was about to begin, the seat next to me was miraculously still empty. One of the men standing on the staircase parallel to my row made a sign to me, asking if I was still expecting someone there. I nodded negatively and, as the lights started to dim, made a sign back to him to quickly get in and sit there. After the show I realized that I had spotted his face either in the audiences or among those eagerly waiting to get in despite the tickets were sold-out. I told him so and he answered that, yes, indeed, he was trying to make sure he wouldn’t miss a show. Naturally, I asked him if he was connected with the theatre by his profession. “Not at all,” he answered and told me he’s a math’s teacher but he’s infatuated with Shakespeare. He went on to share with me that, some years ago, when he unexpectedly got some inheritance money, he went to London and spent most of it for some very old editions of the Bard’s plays, which later on he lent to the Festival for a special books exhibition. I expressed my amazement and admiration, to which he responded that this was simply normal – why would I go from my country and as far as from Sofia, at that, to Craiova if it were not worth it?!

With spectators like that and with the genuine respect and interest among the world-wide theatre brethren, it is then no surprise that the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova, that took off as a triennale and went on to be a biennale for a while, will start its fourth decade in a new, denser rhythm: it will become an annual event from 2025.

Moreover, another anniversary is approaching exactly then: the National Theatre of Craiova will celebrate 175 years of its opening - on the 29th of June 1850.

So we don’t have to wait for a long time for our next helping of this truly special Shakespearean theatre feast – only till next June.