Romeo and Juliet. Fragment

Shakespeare as produced by the Ukrainian “theatre mystic” Andriy Zholdak, the last surviving “Surrealist” of the stage (as Georges Banu has called him). Zholdak’s past works based on classic texts – by Shakespeare, Goldoni, Gogol, Chekhov or Turgenev – presented an oneiric visual world in which upheavals of the recent past and present are dealt with in painfully poetic fashion. The familiar figures move, often rigidly choreographed, in unfamiliar depths. When rewriting old plays, the director does not follow a psychological, sociological or historical pattern – his is a total theatre, it is distillation and dissolution, poetry and performance, concentration and dissipation at the same time. Zholdak’s versions of the classics, with their post-humanist vision of man beyond anything traditional or familiar, have provoked controversial discussions from Barcelona to Tallinn.

According to Zholdak, the “main object of research” in Romeo and Juliet. Fragment is the theme of home, of Ukraine today. He devised the production with his ensemble at the Shevchenko Theatre in Kharkiv. The performance at spielzeiteuropa is the first time it has been seen outside Ukraine and marks the start of a series of Zholdak productions at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.