"Eventually, theater will regain its position as a great… rassembleur". A Dialogue with Robert Lepage

Abstract

Raluca Rădulescu: Robert Lepage, you are back again in 2024 at the International Theatre Festival in Craiova, and the first question coming into my mind cannot be but linked to this: How do you consider this festival, what attracts you here?

 Robert Lepage: For me it’s very important, I love the people who hang out there, there’s a lot of Shakespearean scholars but it’s also a great audience, I love the audience in Craiova, or Romanian in general, but what I find really exciting about it is that it’s a great place to talk about Shakespeare because we’re not in England, you know, there’s always this thing in the English-speaking world where people in New York or people in London or in Stratford think that they have the monopoly of all the interesting ideas and the analysis of the Shakespeare work, when in fact it’s really a universal work and I think that in Craiova it does that: in French we say, un pied-de-nez, we send a finger, and we say: “Okay, well, there’s also other people in the world who are interested in him, who relate to his work and who are rewriting him, who are transforming him, who are using him as a writer of our time”. So, I think Craiova has that special focus, I’d say. It’s very different than having Shakespearean scholars from Great Britain or from the United States who come with their sentences and you know… So it’s great, it’s great fun and it’s very crafty, I love how it’s organized, I love the youth also of it, there’s a lot of young people. I’ve seen some interesting costume exhibitions there, and people who do younger productions. It’s the youth of it, and that’s where the hope is if you want to continue to do Shakespeare in a modern way, a contemporary way.