A Midsummer Night's Dream Kicked off the Shakespeare Festival in Chișinău

For the first time, the Shakespeare Festival of the Theatre Without Name in Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, startet in autumn 2025. Under the slogan ‘Shakespeare United’, theatre companies from Italy, Romania, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Republic of Moldova came together.

 

A Midsummer Night's Dream to kick things off

The troupe of actors, some of them very young, from the Teatrul Fără Nume (Chișinău), under the experienced, fast-paced, extremely precise and spot-on direction of Mihai Mihai Țărna, managed to completely captivate the audience on a minimalist stage with skilful use of lighting and powerful sound. The 145 minutes flew by. It was a pleasure to watch the actors' skill and enthusiasm. The audience seemed ‘enchanted’ by this opening of the festival.

 

A feast: play in one cooking @ parrabbola/UK

London-based Romanian actress and playwright Olivia Negrean brought together six of Shakespeare's most important female characters, directed by Philip Parr. ‘Emilia brings the wine, Ophelia helps with the salad, Lady Macbeth takes care of the soup, Imogen stands at the grill, while Lady Anne and Isabella have both brought dessert. Each woman has her own story to tell and her own perspective on the stories of her fellow women.’

A wonderful performance that lasted 90 minutes and was followed by time for conversation and dinner.

 

Richard III

During the guest performance by the Teatrul de Nord, Satu Mare, Romania, directed by István Albu, we witnessed the rise and fall of an unprecedented tyrant whose distorted figure overshadowed an entire century of English history.

With Shakespeare's creative genius, this production exploded with themes of power and tyranny, the eternal dialectic of cruelty and human vulnerability – more relevant than ever!

Richard III became a celebrated hero, a person many would like to be: a rock star!

The live music integrated into the dramatic action offered the audience a unique and authentic theatre-concert experience. The bandleader thus became the vocal alter ego of the bloodthirsty King Richard III.

‘And with The Doors, the psychedelic effect of the play was guaranteed.’

 

Hamlet Mortuus Est

The latest project by the independent ARTE FACTUM COMPANY from Timisoara, Romania, led by Mona Donici (text) and Levente Kocsárdi (concept/direction), ventured into a new Shakespeare production.

After the interpretations of ‘One Man/One Woman’ had been met with rapturous applause worldwide, the proven team presented something completely new at this festival with ‘Hamlet Mortuus Est’.

After entering the auditorium, the audience was led into an underground depth (minimalist stage design by Mihai Donici). Here we already encountered the protagonist in the form of Levente Kocsárdi on a quest.

He wandered through the darkness, groping around without recognising anything in particular. His eccentric behaviour, marked by fragments of his experiences, continued in the following performance, when, as a gravedigger, he searched through the remains of historical figures and realised that a worm can eat its way through the remains of every human being, whether good, evil, honest or dictatorial. What remains is dirt, a loamy earth with which the later (un)dead try to fill the holes in their bodies. Without success.

Kocsárdi slipped into the roles of those who had shaped him. Dictators of the past and present, Alexander the Great and Hitler lay in their graves, while dictators such as Kim Jong Un, Erdogan, Orban, Lukashenko, Putin ... were projected onto the walls as cautionary examples.

The video mapping by Sebastian Hamburger/Sorin Mocan seemed to enclose the actors and audience in the curvature of the space and unite them in the plot: a contemporary Hamlet who spoke of the insolence of the officials. The multi-layered interweaving of Donici's text and Kocsárdi's performance/concept was equally fascinating and drew the audience into the plot in an inspiring way. Sergiu Cătană wove a tapestry of sounds with live sound and music, filling the piece with space and time.

 

imPerfect Dance Ensemble: Hamlet from Italy

The protagonist, a mentally unstable young woman, identified with her namesake, Shakespeare's Ophelia. Reading Hamlet, she tried to understand what had happened to her. The words took shape, the characters came to life, and through the story told by Shakespeare, Ophelia relived the dramatic events of her own life.

Hamlet, a drama about life and death and the ambiguous relationships between people, took the audience on a journey through the darkest alleys of the human soul.

The audience at the Shakespeare Festival in Chisinau was wildly impressed by the Italian dance group imPerfect Dancers. Ina Broeckx and Walter Matteini had choreographed HAMLET with a fresh, new troupe of talented dancers. The male dancers in particular were able to express their talents, all in all a package full of emotion.

 

The Teatro Clásico de Sevilla returned to the programme with Macbeth, directed by Alfonso Zurro.

Alfonso Zurro explains that the play, "which is so medieval and yet so contemporary, evokes the most disturbing fears in the audience. The basis of the story is well known. Some witches prophesy that Macbeth will become king and then vanish into thin air. From this moment on, the protagonist is driven by his imagination and delusions, which, fuelled by his wife Lady Macbeth, plunge the couple into the heart of darkness. They drag us with them into the abyss of a bloody journey."

Throughout the play, Macbeth suffered from hallucinations that only he could see. Fantasies, phantasmagorias, dreams that surrounded him with worries and fears of all kinds and drove him to compulsively destroy everything: life, the established order, the kingdom and even time itself.

 

In Desdemona's Handkerchief, based on an idea by Paula Vogel, Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca told the truth – with emotion, strength and courage.

A play directed by Anca Sigatău. A bold, but above all drastically loud reinterpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy ‘Othello’, performed by Shakespeare Imaginarium, Bucharest.

 

Two theatre academies at the festival

Ivano-Frankivsk is one of the smallest regional capitals in Ukraine, with a population of around 230,000. It is located in the Carpathian foothills, which are part of the historic region of Galicia.

Under the slogan ‘United by Shakespeare’, the Meldau Festival invited second- and third-year students from the Ivan Franko Drama Theatre.

The young, committed, fresh actors were very convincing in their ‘Rendezvous with William’.

This exuberant energy, this strong will to counter the Russian invasion of their homeland, destruction and war crimes with something positive, something human.

The thought that these young people might have to return to a war zone and perhaps defend their country on the front lines moved the audience emotionally, and the well-deserved applause seemed endless.

 

The ‘Shakespeare and the mask’ workshop was an event organised by third-year students in Mihai Țărnă's ATC class, under the direction of Mihai Fusu.

The aim of this special laboratory was to explore the style of the Commedia dell'arte and discover the diversity of characters from Shakespeare's universe. Through practical exercises, improvisation and scenic explorations, the students learned to work with masks, develop their expressiveness and bring comic and dramatic characters to life: an invitation to visitors to immerse themselves in the students' world of research and discover with them the transformation through which masks reveal emotions and Shakespeare's words blend with the energy of the performance.

It was a celebration of universal culture, an invitation to discover how Shakespeare has remained relevant and moving regardless of language or tradition. SHAKESPEARE NOW – because his theatre always speaks in the present.

 

And to top it all off, another Hamlet, this time directed by Declan Donnellan, National Theatre ‘Marin Sorescu’, Craiova, RO

"Sometimes we do senseless things, truly terrible things, for no apparent reason or benefit. And we run around desperately asking, “Why?! Why?!” Humans are the only animals that can be irrationally cruel, capable of committing spectacular acts of violence both against themselves and against other people.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that humans are the only beings who can question their own existence. Sometimes people do wonderful or terrible things just to prove that we exist.

Hamlet's dilemma embodies this struggle. But not directly, rather enigmatically, like a ghost in the dark corridors of Elsinore." (Declan Donnellan, artistic director, on Hamlet)

Or ‘unsurpassably sensitive and yet at the same time determined,’ as former Russian star critic Roman Dolzhanskiy, who now wanders around Europe like a driven ghost, described the play.

 

Questions were asked, answers remained open, as it should be at a Shakespeare festival. Congratulations to the organisers.

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