Volume 10

Among the wide range of diverse offerings that I attended at this year’s Avignon festival, I was struck by a recurring theme, the theme of exile and its devastating effects on characters torn from home and family, far from worlds …

The Russian-language press thoroughly covered Oedipus Rex by Rimas Tuminas after it opened in the ancient Greek city of Epidaurus (29 July 2016), and after its Russian premiere at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow on the day of the company’s …

The Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2017, directed and curated by Christophe Slagmuylder, is an outstanding transdisciplinary arts festival, showcasing many new creations, often produced by the festival itself. Those creations, most of the time daring and often fascinating, question the traditional limits of …

The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts is one of the leading producers of experimental theatre work in Budapest. In May of 2017 it offered an unusual piece of documentary theatre, Long Live Regina!. The performers (bar one) were Romani women …

There has been something in Madrid’s theatre that has seen a return to the spirit of the Greeks: plays inspired by or adapted from classical tragedies that ask fundamental questions about what democracy means and how it functions. At a …

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” One of the most quoted of Chekhov’s statements seems to contradict the habit of the organizers to include in cultural programs those familiar discussions between artists and spectators …

The B*easts (2017) is a play about the consequences that ripple through and reshape the life of the eight-year-old Lila and her mother, Karen, when Lila gets breast implants. In erasing one letter, and replacing it with an asterisk, the …

Swiss-speaking Germany is sometimes overlooked in considerations of the contemporary Germany stage, but the frequent appearance of Swiss productions in the annual Berlin Theatertreffen is evidence of the continuing importance of the theatres of Basel, Bern, and especially Zurich. Two …

Heddadagene is a brand-new theatre festival in Oslo where twenty-nine theatres joined together to present a new theatre experience from all over Norway, during June of 2017. Thanks to the festival director Åslaug Løseth Magnusson and three leading Norwegian Theatres …

There is a new tendency in Hungarian theatre for reinterpreting the notion of psychological realism and, at the same time, offering a new perspective on the good old topic of bourgeois drama: “family”. There is no age, as Erika Fischer-Lichte …

Ophelia is in her room, sewing. Enter Hamlet. He takes her “by the wrist” and holds her “hard.” Really hard. Clearly it hurts. He shakes her. Then he extends his arm, leaning back to look, and “falls to such perusal …

Sibiu, where the third biggest international theatre festival in Europe takes place, is a city with approximately 150,000 citizens and constant cultural life, blossoming in the heart of Transylvania, Romania. The history of the city goes back to the Middle …

Almagro is Spain’s largest and oldest classical theatre festival, bringing fifty-two productions to this small, picturesque town in Castilla la Mancha for its 40th edition. Five productions from Spain’s Compañia Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC)—one  of the festival’s most consistent …

It’s a crisp, remarkably rainless evening for the beginning of September at The Globe Theatre in London, as the audience wiggles and shifts in anticipation of Matthew Dunster’s reimagining of Much Ado About Nothing. An announcement is made; there are …

Berlin is feeling more and more like Avignon or Edinburgh. The Theatertreffen, the major theater festival for the German-speaking world, is structured around inviting the ten “most noteworthy” productions of the former year to Berlin, juried by ten critics. But …

The following reports back on the 2015 edition of the Reims Scènes d’Europe (literally: Reims Stages Europe) theatre festival, which has grown to become a leading counterpoint to the more established summer gathering at Avignon. The 2015 festival was particularly …