William Shakespeare: The Tragicall History of Romeo and Juliet

◊ 2003 Golden Stage Cross. Best Director – Oskaras Koršunovas ◊ 2003 Golden Stage Cross. Best Set Designer – Jūratė Paulėkaitė

Premiere: 13 June 2003. Premiere of the revived production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre: 6 February 2015.

Director: Oskaras Koršunovas

Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” is most often imagined as an ode to romantic love. In fact, it is a social drama in which ordinary love, amid dramatic circumstances, takes on the highest tragic intensity. What interests me most in this tragedy is that love is born and flourishes in hatred, in the atmosphere of war in Verona. I wanted to emphasise this paradox: hatred kills, yet it is precisely hatred that kindles the spark of love. This can also be discussed on a divine level: love is born from hatred in order to overcome it. Perhaps, in reality, hatred itself is born from nothing. The example of the Montagues and Capulets is telling precisely because no one any longer knows the reason for their feud. Everyone has long since forgotten the cause of their war. Young Tybalt embraces hatred and defends it as a tradition. We often nurture traditions like these, which create opposition out of supposed differences and sustain hatred. Unfortunately, this principle is increasingly used: uniting society by seeking out enemies. In staging the play, I wanted to examine how hatred shapes differences and becomes the cause of everything. It seems to me that hatred is the basis of difference: between the Montagues and Capulets it establishes an illusion of difference, deceives them, and drives them further apart. All societies are divided in this way. Love erases differences. It alone shows that there is essentially no conflict between the clans. Love creates freedom, and there are no opposites in freedom. Unfortunately, Romeo and Juliet find freedom only in death. The freedom they sacrifice destroys not only modernity, which is shaped by children, but also the tradition so cherished by their parents.

Production producer – OKT / Vilnius City Theatre
Co-producers – Avignon Festival, Remscheid City Theatre, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, THEOREM Programme