The event includes more than a dozen productions of Shakespeare plays by theatre companies from Poland, Britain, Italy, Croatia, Romania, Peru and Ukraine.
Festival director Agata Grenda, who also heads the Shakespeare Theatre in Gdańsk, has said that the highlights this year include a production of Romeo and Juliet staged by the National Academic Music and Drama Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.
“In this post-apocaliptic version of Shakespeare’s saddest drama, directed by Rostyslav Derzhypilsky, Romeo and Juliet meet in a nightclub, instead of a ball at the Capulet house," Grenda said in an interview with Polish state news agency PAP.
"Their iconic kiss does not take place on the balcony but in an industrial watchtower, while the duel between Tybalt and Mercutio starts in a huge cage," she added.
Grenda told the PAP news agency that after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, performances in Ivano-Frankivsk were transferred from the theatre’s main stage to its dungeons.
Festival audiences will also have the chance to see several takes on Hamlet, including an English-Romanian co-production by Declan Donnellan’s acclaimed Cheek by Jowl Company and the National Theatre in Craiova, Romania; a Peruvian production from Teatro La Plaza; and an English-Italian version entitled Hamlet Double Bill by the English Theatre Company and La Ribalta Teatro.
Polish productions include A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Nowy Theatre in the western city of Poznań (dir. Jan Klata) and Macbeth from the Baltic Drama Theatre in the northern city of Koszalin (dir. Paweł Palcat).
Asked whether it is worthwhile to produce Shakespeare these days, Grenda said: “Absolutely. With the passing of time, his plays have lost nothing of their topicality because people are driven by the same mechanisms of love, desire, money, sex and power. That’s why the Bard is a never-ending source of inspiration for theatre artists to talk about the problems that are important for their generation."
Grenda added that Shakespeare appears to be a bigger challenge for the British people because of the archaic character of his language. “We in Poland are fortunate to have Shakespeare in excellent translations,” she said.
The programme of the festival includes meetings with directors and actors, open rehearsals, critics' debates, workshops, concerts, dance and street performances, and stand-ups.
The event runs until August 4.
The International Shakespeare Festival was founded by Jerzy Limon, an outstanding Polish scholar, writer and translator who died of COVID-19 in March 2021.
Limon specialized in Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre. In the early 1990s, he discovered traces of a Shakespearean playhouse in Gdańsk that resembled the Fortune Theatre in London, and subsequently initiated the construction of a replica of the historic theatre in the Polish coastal city. The project was successfully completed in 2008.
(mk/gs)
Source: PAP
