Jacques Offenbach’s Die Schὃne Helena at the Komische Oper was totally sold out well in advance of the October 2014 premiere and remains a popular feature at that theatre. The Australian director Barrie Kosky’s previous operettas were very popular, and …
During a week’s visit to Madrid in the fall of 2014, I saw six productions. All but one of these was in the little auditorium of a larger playhouse, in a new alternative theatre, or in a cultural center. Except …
Pornography, perhaps the best known novel by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, has been freed from the pages of the book and has been “re-written” for one of the most famous Italian stages, thanks to an extraordinary operation of dramaturgy …
Majster a Margaréta (The Master and Margarita, Teatro Tatro, Nitra 2014) directed by Ondrej Spišák is, in many aspects, an epoch-making feat in the context of the Slovak independent theatre culture. The Slovak director—author of both the script …
Actress, director, and playwright Leea Klemola and her brother Klaus Klemola are known for their original plays colored with a peculiar sense of humor, bizarre characters, and unexpected relations between them. Their professional co-operation started with a play called Kokkola…
The opening of any new production by Ariane Mnouchkine at her Théâtre de Soleil in Paris is an event of considerable significance in the European theatre, but her staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which opened in May of 2014, came with …
This article was scheduled to appear in Slavic and East European Performance (SEEP) in 2012. Due to the merger of SEEP with Western European Performance (WES) the publication was postponed. The significance of Michał Zadara’s performance of Awantura Warszawska for …
In August 2014, during the Malta Festival in Poznań, Poland, one of the major European festivals of world theatre, the performance of Golgota Picnic, by Rodrigo Garcia (a festival curator) was cancelled due to the protests of right-wing Catholic …
The British theatre has always derived enormous, even savage pleasure from depicting the antics of its social misfits, eccentrics, and manipulators. Two recent productions, one Jacobean and the other contemporary, illustrate this beautifully. From the seventeenth century, the Royal Shakespeare …
With his acclaimed Young Vic production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge still playing to sold-out houses in London’s West End, Ivo van Hove turned his attention to a much older classic tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone, which began …
We possess nothing in the world…except the power to say ‘I’. That is what we have to give to God—in other words, to destroy.
-Simone Weil
Split between London and Dublin, Dead Centre is a collaboration between director Ben Kidd, …
Recently, on the stages of two capital cities–Warsaw and Kyiv–there appeared singular examinations of the rural component of the Ukrainian and Polish national identities. Premiering in the beginning of February of 2013 at Kyiv’s Ivan Franko National Academic Ukrainian Drama …
From May 15 to 19, 2014, the symposium, “Theatre as a Laboratory for Community Interaction” convened in Holstebro, Denmark at Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret (founded in 1964 in Oslo, Norway) by the theatre’s concomitant research and publishing wing, Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. …
Songs of Lear, performed February 26-28 as part of Yale Repertory Theatre’s international performance series, No Boundaries, is a striking sonic tapestry of Shakespeare’s tragedy, woven live before an audience by Wrocław, Poland’s Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Pieśń …
When the actor and director Josep Maria Pou informed me that he was staging Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides, first produced in 1995, at Barcelona’s Teatre Goya, I was a little surprised. My last encounter with the piece, István Szabó’s …
