by Sebastian-Vlad POPA and Laur CAVACHI,
after Youth without old age and life without death by Petre Ispirescu

Opening night: July 10, 2024
Duration: 2h 5′

Silviu Purcărete, one of the greatest theatre creators in Europe, with a prodigious career during which he has received numerous prestigious award, he accepted the invitation to stage a world premiere at the Odeon Theatre, based on a text dedicated exclusively to him.

Following an intensive one-week workshop that provided the 29 participating actors with the opportunity to refine and refresh their theatrical practice, learning to explore through their own means, the journey into the magical world of fairy tales, the necessity arose to continue this endeavor and materialize it into a large-scale theatrical production.

Complex but highly intricate, mysterious and subversive, tender and political, profound but joyful, the play is inspired by one of the most beautiful texts written in the Romanian language: Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tale Youth Without Age and Life Without Death. However, this is not a dramatization of the narrative but an independent text whose core is drawn from the heart-wrenching story told by Ispirescu. (A folk tale? An invention?…)

Silviu Purcărete

The Bitter Lexicon is a theatrical script that remains faithful to the fundamental theme of Youth Without Age and Life Without Death by Petre Ispirescu: establishment by word and the relentlessness of the spoken word. But if the effect of  “contemporaneity” happens to seem jarring, then the new text’s intent is at risk, for authors Sebastian-Vlad Popa and Laur Cavachi do not claim to have adapted the fairy tale to contemporary jargon or current sensibilities. Therefore, anything expressed in today’s language is intended to be a natural expansion of the concise and dynamic sequences of the classic text – where archetype reaches out to incorporate the present, rather than the other way around. Thus, we hope that the essential intensity of the relationship between word (speech), interdiction and death has been preserved.

What is ultimately decisive for the fate of this rewriting, however, is the fact that it was requested, then received and finally entrusted to the sensitive vision of a creator with the rigor and genius of Silviu Purcărete.

Sebastian-Vlad Popa and Laur Cavachi

Photos by Mihaela Marin