BILLY`S VOILENCE & BILLY`S JOY

ЗАПАЗЕТЕ МЯСТО И ВЗЕМЕТЕ СВОЯ EARLY BIRD БИЛЕТ

For Billy's Violence, Victor Afung Lauwers researched the ten tragedies of Shakespeare and rewrote them into violently loving, intimate dialogues in which the woman is the central focus, stripped of any historical reference or anecdotal content.

When the curtain falls over Shakespeare's tragedies, order is restored. Over a mountain of corpses, the calm of the equilibrium descends once more. In what precedes this - the actual play - a departure from all moral rules is staged, a deep rent in the social fabric, an excess of aggression and violence. Is this excess only required to more convincingly demonstrate the need for the law? Or does the violence contain its own insight? Its own truth? And what might that be?'

Shakespeare is the most read and performed writer the world has ever known. And yet many of the bard’s plays are virtually unperformable due to their violence, gruesomeness, racism and misogyny. What does violence in art mean in today’s world? Why do we enjoy watching it so much? Is violence viewed differently today than it was in the 16th-17th century?

Billy`s Joy

Shakespeare has been a controversial artist for over 400 years. Sometimes he is the greatest ever, other times he is dismissed as an anti-Semitic misogynist who especially got a kick out of conceiving violent scenes. That's what Billy's Violence covered extensively. In the eighteenth century, people detested the violence and dark twists in his tragedies. Consequently, these were shamelessly rewritten. Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after! This inspired Needcompany to ask Victor Afung Lauwers to read the comedies and see what they can still mean in our time - a time of great controversies, vulgar polemics, cancel culture, structural racism, climate change, war. What is there left to laugh at? Is humour the coward's weapon or a form of activism?

Following Billy's Violence, which dealt with tragedies, I was asked to write a comedy based on Shakespeare's comedies. I wanted to write about 'reconciliation'. It is a central theme in the comedies. But reconciliation proved impossible without love! So, I pulled Romeo, that 'star-cross'd lover', out of his tragic story and brought him to the place of our comedy: Fairyland. Fairyland, however, turns out to be torn apart and ravaged by fragmentation. Having arrived, Romeo loses his language. Henceforth, he speaks hybrid English, or 'Globish'. He goes in search of his beloved JULIET. But JULIET has been expelled from the Symbolic Order, from the edifice of narrative itself! Still, Romeo wants to fulfil his narrative destiny by turning himself aside: he wants to turn himself aside to overcome that which separates him from JULIET in death (primarily political divisions and global warming). But... Romeo cannot kill himself because he is in a comedy! Naked and isolated, Romeo must keep looking for love until someone ends him... That someone is Bolingbroke, later Henry IV from the King's Dramas. Romeo becomes Richard II and