“Shakespeare” is a performance about the most famous dramatist, William Shakespeare, and his writings. But it’s not a biography written as God intended. It’s a collage of Shakespeare. And a kind of philosophical formula. “Shakespeare” is a sum total of impressions and associations, it does not avoid politics, it touches upon the collective experiences, mixes aesthetics an historical times, experiments with form, and enters a dialogue with the ideologism of our life, creating a subversive cocktail.

William Shakespeare lived and wrote during the Elizabethan Era, a period named after the ruling monarch of the time, Queen Elizabeth Tudor. During her reign, dramatist discarded the concept of three unities, theatre became institutionalized, and being an actor became a profession. At the same time the Elizabethan theatre entangled art with politics, violence, sex, and introduced gender inequality by casting young boys before voice change in female roles. The biography of William Shakespeare has overgrown with many theories, some of which have scientific attributes to them, and some sound like fables. I was particularly interested in the Lancaster’s theory, which, in short, states that William Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic who belonged to a secret Catholic organization, and has travelled to Rome many times under a fake name. Richard Wilson, one of the researchers of Shakespeare’s life and literary works, claims that “Shakespeare wrote his plays with a conscious intention to hide his identity”, and that when analyzing his works one should concentrate on what he hasn’t written.

The play “Shakespeare” juggles with theories about the author of “Romeo and Juliet”, plays with the code of meaning of his plays, looks for the effect of shakespearism in the private space of actors, theatre, politics, authorities, and even the whole nation. It talks about the fact that the contemporary cultural space, just like during the Elizabethan era, is more and more appropriated by politics, religion, fear of otherness, fear of sexuality, gender, and their redefinitions. Shakespeare thought of theatre as a mirror that reflects reality. How do you like what you see in it?