Press highlights
„A magnificent production! ”
Bernard Faivre D’Arcier
director of the Festival of Avignon 1993-2003
„Purcărete’s show has been one of greatest hits of the Festival, an original and powerful production.”
Frank Dunlop
director of the Edinburgh International Festival 1984-1991
„Ubu Rex and Titus Andronicus are doubtlessly masterpieces. Both productions are truly brilliant, powerful and free. ”
Marie-Hélène Falcon
director of the Théatres des Ameriques Festival, 1985-2014
„So ravishing that you’re almost prepared to sell your soul to the devil to keep the succession of lush images coming, Silviu Purcărete’s version of Goethe’s Faust is such a seductive visual fantasia that you might not notice it has sold its own soul to spectacle. But what a mighty spectacle it is, with a series of eye-popping illusions and conjuring tricks that make you feel as if you’ve fallen into a waking dream – or a nightmare. You leave the theatre hungover from having binged so greedily on the rich visuals, but almost entirely unmoved by the simple purity of unaccompanied voices and the sweet songs of the doomed Gretchen, whose love redeems Faust. In Purcărete’s vision, hell is so much more exciting than heaven.”
Lyn Gardner
The Guardian
„Purcărete’s talent for creating images shines through from the very first seconds of the first part, Agamemnon, with the appearance of the messenger, suspended in the sky, then of the chorus of obese old men wearing suits and ties. The sumptuous grey lighting, the violence of the murder, a bloody Clytemnestra facing Agamemnon’s corpse thrust into a zinc bathtub, the poetry of a scene lit entirely by candlelight… For two hours and forty minutes, Purcărete displays an impressive mastery of stagecraft”
René Solis
Libération
„Silviu Purcărete is a director-poet. Double identity, communion of two roles, which interfere and give him his own status. On the stages of this world, his theatre is the expression of the presence of an artist, but also that of an interpreter: this is where his unique role comes from. It’s a double role manifesting itself with various accents in the performances, one by one, one never to eliminate de other, different side; Purcărete is seduced by cohabitation, by the cohabitation between reading the texts and their poetic treatment on a theatre stage. Purcărete exerts a relative freedom, recognizable, but not predetermined, because he maintains a consensual relationship with the text, an affective rather than strictly interpretative one. This is why, in his case, the stage bears the trademark of the artist’s signature, but, at the same time, it does not absolutely exclude the impact of the written work. This relationship modifies with each of the performances he creates, but it does not disappear: the poet’s freedom and the director’s reading. Reunited!”
George Banu
Observator Cultural
„When asked, in various contexts, what he considers to be his most fulfilling show, Silviu Purcărete always answers: Phaedra! It is the Romanian show with the longest and most impressive international career, so far unequaled. Phaedra premiered in Vienna, on June 8, 1993, at the Wiener Festwochen, and on July 2, at the Craiova National Theater, the producer. The ensuing series of international tours spanned over almost a decade, alternating with presentations in Craiova and at festivals around the country, accumulating a long list of superlatives.”
Oltița Cîntec
Teatrul Azi
„Travesti is another theme that constantly runs through Purcărete’s works. It is an exploration in the depths of the masculine and the feminine, of the relationship between them, first of all a challenge for all actors cast to perform in travesti, taking the path of an analysis of the other sex, of noticing other types of movements, of gestures, other rhythms, other ways of looking, of wearing a suit, of using an accent. From Ubu Rex with scenes from Macbeth , where Madam Ubu was played by Valer Dellakeza, to the Danaides, where Coca Bloos portrays Danaos as a timeless decrepit, wrapped in oversized shawls, bare-chested with exposed breasts and a beard, to The Tempest where Sorin Leoveanu was cast as Miranda, to Faust where Ofelia Popii played Mephisto, to the female Choir of the elders in Phaedra, to the Limoges production of Don Juan in which all parts, except the protagonist, are played by actresses. In the way the director works with the actors, we sense the laboratory, the continuous discovery of a potential and the multiple forms in which it can be exposed.”
Marina Constantinescu
România literară
„… The director’s impeccable (and very well trained) taste for the visual arts is there, in all the details of the staging, starting with the very first scene: behind a curtain made of bedsheets (a possible reminder of the much-praised Decameron, directed more than a decade ago by Purcărete in Râmnicu Vâlcea), a room full of the various wastes of human science. Old Faust and his students, a grey and almost faceless humanoid mass, seem to have frozen in an eternal Dead Class inside this room. Other images of intense plastic beauty (to which the costumes designed by Lia Manţoc and Stürmer’s lights fully contribute) follow right after the extremely powerful opening: the seduction of Gretchen– of the several Gretchens, in fact, because the Goethean female adolescent multiplies (I said this before) as seven little girls– or the appearance of the allegorical Four Grey Women – Scarcity, Duty, Care and Need, all played by young male actors.”
Alice Georgescu
Dilema
„In Troilus and Cresida, the closing performance of this exceptional edition of the Shakespeare Festival in Craiova, a production of the Katona Joszef Theater in Budapest, Silviu Purcărete embodies an apocalyptic vision of the modern world, criscrossed by the magnetic currents of self-destruction. The Trojan war unfolds in the former dining room / ballroom of a mansion, between two heaving drinking sessions. Helmuth Stürmer creates a space that is real and fabulous at the same time.
Recreating a state of conscious chaos, the staging becomes contagiously topical; like with Artaud, there is a call for the moral ferment, the extreme tension that the events impregnate the spirits with. Searching for nurture at the roots of archaic energies, crossing the history of civilizations in a lucid and playful back and forth, Purcărete composes a reality more real than reality. His way of reading analyzes the perennial goals and motivations of the human species, its degeneration, not without ironic flashes. Driven by primal instincts and reduced to satisfying physiological needs, the world depicted in Troilus and Cresida looks a bit like a promotional video in a campaign for male pride, as a trademark. Whether Greek, Elizabethan, Eastern or Western, its commandments to not include the redeeming prohibition. Thus, to lie, to kill, to covet your neighbor’s woman are the imperatives of a testosterone-based inflamated dignity. Just as in a game, aggressive stupidity, brute force and perversion of the mind destroy the last forms of spirit. A kind of final war that Purcărete directs with tragi-comic subtlety, inventing savory situations, stripping the narcissistic expression of the mask of heroism.
In Vasile Șirli’s conception, the dissonant harmonies embody signals of a realm beyond reality. Materialising into sounds, the invisible hyperbolizes the state of strangeness to quickly fold back into a music pleasant to the ears. The quality of the acting is close to perfection.
Purcărete’s proposal emerges from a pattern of inventive artistic thinking, sensitive to contemporary history, operating with solid cultural tools. The aesthetic dimension, the power of representation and the density of emotion place Troilus and Cresida in the among the most memorable performances. Artaud would have called it a communicative delirium because, even above its geometry, its purity and coherence, it features the effectiveness of a healing ritual.”
Adriana Moca
The Continuous Apocalypse. Level 200X – Troilus and Cresida, Cultura/Liternet
„Thanks to Silviu Purcărete’s staging in Craiova, I meditated about the author’s right to put a lot of himself into the performance he creates. Returning, in 2004, to the theatre that consecrated him in the ‘90s, he chooses As You Wish or The Night after the End of the Fair, a touching page of his personal diary, packed with elements from the intimate universe of its author: not only actors with whom he previously worked in his great stagings, but also a set featuring the remains of the bookshelves of the old theatre library. Craiova is an old love to Silviu Purcărete, and he converted this nostalgia into a theatrical medium.”
Cristina Modreanu
Ziarul Financiar
„Undoubtedly, a performance of Faust can only be a work of maturity, an attempt only names with great credibility can dare to make. Silviu Purcărete is one of them, along with famous director- colleagues such as Peter Stein or Giorgio Strehler, who have also recently devoted themselves to the theme. With a formidable team made up of Helmut Stürmer (scenography), Lia Manţoc (costume designs), Vasile Şirli (music), Ilie Gheorghe (main protagonist) and the excellent ensemble of the National Theatre of Sibiu, Purcărete accomplished a grandiose staging, involving over a hundred performers and reviving the spaces of a former industrial plant in Sibiu.”
Doina Papp
A Romanian Language Faust in Goethe’s Homeland, Liternet
„As always, Silviu Purcărete’s, humour is jubilant and painful. The fecund act of eating – in an uninterrupted celebration of the passage. Moliendo Café, yet another space of passage, and the title of a nonverbal impro show, produced by the German and Hungarian Theatres of Timișoara in 2014, reconstructing, in a series of improv episodes, the mythical, dual, abstract themes of the present day, made visible in a suite of variations: human beings in an erotic search for each other and for their ecstatic death. If Eros is the ecstatic experience of death, then coffee, black coffee, intensifies the tension of the search and the café has become the passage space from Eros to Thanatos and back. Moliendo Café is probably one of the time structures of the purest tragic spirit in the Romanian arts of the drama over the past few decades. It has the purity not even attained in Faust, adapted after Goethe, produced by the National Theatre in Sibiu (2007). One can say without hesitation that Faust is Silviu Purcărete’s most grandiose show in recent decades and the most assiduously sought after by the most unthought of audiences across the country. The Sibiu production of Faust and the George Enescu International Festival are the only artistic phenomena in Romania to succeed in converting tourism into a fact of highest culture. Faust is very a beautiful and very technological staging, built on the enormous space of an industrial hall, with passionate dislocations of actions and audience.”
Sebastian Vlad Popa
Lucid Bodies, an essay published in “Silviu Purcărete. Infinite Metamorphosis”,
by Mihaela Marin
„Under Silviu Purcărete’s gaze, everything is subtle, nothing is bold, both allusion and irony insinuate themselves with finesse. The comedic spirit is obviously present, perfectly integrated into this meditation on our condition: at present, we cannot imagine the human being deprived of humour. That fine irony and that smart, unostentatious, almost intimate jest, soaked in a bath of cultural allusions, double almost every scene: at the end, making use of the same musical instruments that had played such divine music, the chamber orchestra simulates a devilish piece of jazz.”
Cristina Rusiecki
The Rising Leaf from the Tree of Oblivion, Waiting for Godot – Teatrul Azi