William Shakespeare: The Tragedy 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 renewed production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre: 6 February 2015.
Director: Oskaras Koršunovas

Shakespeare’s work “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 resonance. What interests me most in this tragedy is that love is born and flourishes amid hatred, in the atmosphere of war in Verona. I wanted to emphasise this paradox: hatred kills, yet it is 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 hatred itself is, in fact, born from nothing. The example of the Montagues and Capulets is telling precisely because no one knows the reason for their feud anymore. The reason for their war was forgotten long ago. Young Tybalt embraces hatred and defends it as tradition. We often cherish traditions that create opposition out of supposed differences and sustain hatred. Unfortunately, this principle is increasingly applied: uniting society by looking for enemies. In staging the production, I wanted to examine how hatred shapes differences and becomes the cause of everything. It seems to me that hatred is the basis of differences: it creates the illusion of differences between the Montagues and Capulets, deceives them, and sets them against each other even more. All societies are divided in this way. Love erases differences. It alone shows that, fundamentally, there is 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, embodied by the 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