The fisherman and his soul

after Oscar Wilde, directed by Carmen Lidia Vidu

Photo by Ana Maria Moldovan

The performance’s text The fisherman and his soul is based on a fairytale written by Oscar Wilde, published in 1891 in the fairytales’ collection The Pomegranates’ House, a follow-up of the volume The Happy Prince and other stories. Is a story dedicated to Alice Heine, a Monacco princess and was written as a reaction to the Little Mermaid written by Hans Christian Anderson , in which a mermaid wants a soul and she desired to be mortal.

There was once upon a time a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid. But they cannot live their love story because they belong to different worlds: he has a soul and she does not. So the fisherman has to chose between his soul and his love. If he could make it to the water world to marry his little mermaid, we shall let you discover in the performance.

The text is not only a forbidden love story, but also a meditation about the body-spirit tension, about the importance of the heart for the building self, about what brings us the happiness and the salvation.

Carmen Lidia Vidu makes a thetrical – multimedia performance that hypnotises through the sound field and through the actors’ voices musicality like in a concert. The story is doubled up visually through the video projections with a great symbolic burden which are a descend in the middle of the story and deep down the own self.