When the only alternative to rescuing love is the ingestion of poison, whose action is to cease after three days and give the lovers resurrection in a brave new world free of boundaries, does this sound like a good plan? Or perhaps a different question is more pertinent: maybe something went wrong? The eternal lovers return once more to the stage of life, to hurl a challenge to the world and, in between pop-culture cliches, try to find a place for themselves and to cheat destiny. But will the great theatre of the world allow for this? Or will it transform them again into the iconic poster of the Lovers from Verona? One thing remains unchanged – Romeo and Juliet’s request to you to cross your fingers once again for them, with perhaps just one small difference: this time, cross them even more tightly.
Michał Siegoczyński about the production: “Romeo and Juliet have become a hashtag, a kind of thought or idea, whose most important bond is their sacrifice. A sacrifice which must be made. But does it really? And if so, why and for whom? William Shakespeare’s play is for me not only a starting-point but also a labyrinth into which the main protagonists go, as if someone has shown them the script of their lives, revealed the future, the point for which they are heading, while simultaneously encouraging them to reflect on and look critically at their own fates, maybe even try to reevaluate them. But is the only remedy for, and answer to, the fragility and volatility of love nothing else than the mythical Club 27’s laying down of life in sacrifice right at its start? Can the guarantee of immortality for Romeo and Juliet be only the bloody crusade celebrated for hundreds of years, where the heart’s aphrodisiac is the forbidden fruit of love, and the price for its consumption death? Or maybe the result of these games has become for us too obvious, like a morning coffee or an after-dinner nap? Could not the lovers, in exchange for this narcissistic photograph of such an ordered eternity, experience a life burdened by uncertainty, mundanity and prose, but still one of fulfilment? Or maybe even this very thought has become for its adherents an iconoclastic scandal? Despite this, I would like to equip Romeo and Juliet with the heroism of aspiring towards their own subjectivity, which might cause the hand of William Shakespeare to hesitate when holding the pen over one of the acts and give the story a new and unexpected course.”
Production
Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk / Poland
Creative
Written and directed by Michał Siegoczyński
Designer – Justyna Elminowska
Costumes – Sylwester Krupiński
Music – Kamil Pater
Stage movement – Maćko Prusak
Video – Natalia Mentkowska
Assistant director – Robert Ciszewski
Stage manager/Prompter – Agnieszka Szczepaniak