Politics, Shakespeare, East-Central Europe: Theatrical Border Crossings

Zsolt Almási; Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney; Mădălina Nicolaescu; Klára Škrobánková; Ema Vyroubalova; Oana-Alis Zaharia

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.28.03

Authors

Zsolt Almási Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hunagary https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9405-8040
Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney University of Lodz, Poland
Mădălina Nicolaescu University of Bucharest, Romania
Klára Škrobánková Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Ema Vyroubalova University of Dublin, Ireland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0606-8658
Oana-Alis Zaharia University of Bucharest, Romania https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7909-3580

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.28.03

Keywords:

race, racism, political theater, William Shakespeare, Jan Kott, adaptation, cultural mobility, cultural transmission, microhistories, translation

Abstract

This essay discusses how productions of Shakespeare’s plays that transcend various geographical, national, and linguistic boundaries have influenced the theatrical-political discourse in East-Central Europe in the twenty-first century. It focuses primarily on the work of four internationally-established directors: Andrei Şerban (Romania), Jan Klata (Poland), David Jařab (Czech Republic), and Matei Vișniec (Romania), whose works have facilitated interregional cultural exchange, promoting artistic innovation and experimentation in the region and beyond. Among the boundary-crossing productions analysed in detail are Vișniec’s Richard III will not Take Place, Jařab’s Macbeth – Too Much Blood, Klata’s Measure for Measure, and Serban’s Richard III. The essay also notes that while there has been a relative scarcity of Shakespearean productions in this region engaging closely with gender and race inequalities, productions such as Klata’s African Tales or Vladimír Morávek’s Othello manage to work with these politically charged topics in subtler but still productive ways. The essay concludes that the region’s shared historical experience of totalitarian regimes followed by the struggles of nascent democracies, provides a fertile ground for a diverse and internationally ambitious Shakespearean theatre.

The publication of the article was supported by the International Visegrad Fund, project no. 22210007, titled “Crossing Borders with Shakespeare since 1945: Central and Eastern European Roots and Routes.” The project is co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants. The mission of the Fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Author Biographies

Zsolt Almási, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hunagary

is an associate professor in the Institute of English and American Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. His book, The Problematics of Custom as Exemplified in Key Texts of the Late English Renaissance came off the press in 2004. He is the co-editor of journals (International Journal of Digital Humanities), Digitális bölcsészet (Digital Humanities) and was co-editor of books with Mike Pincombe, Writing the Other. Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England, (2008) and New Perspectives on Tudor Cultures (2012). More recently (2021) he co-edited with Kinga Földváry a special issue “Shakespeare in Central Europe after 1989: Common Heritage and Regional Identity” of Theatralia. He serves as the head of the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, the president of the Hungarian Shakespeare Society. His current research projects and publications focus on Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the contemporary Hungarian theatre, digital Shakespeare, and digital and visual culture.
Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, University of Lodz, Poland

is a full professor at the University of Lodz, Poland. Her research interests focus mainly, but not exclusively, on Shakespeare, theatre, and literary and cultural theories, especially gender, New Historicism, and presentism. She received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. She published numerous international and local monographs, articles, and essays on the long-term global authority of Shakespeare, as well as on his dramatic works and early modern and contemporary culture. She authored, contracted, and coordinated several international projects (e.g., TEMPUS, SIME) funded by the European Union Commission and the Australian Government and Polish projects devoted to Shakespeare and Polish culture. She is a member of the WSB (World Shakespeare Bibliography) consortium of international correspondents, and she co-edited the journal Multicultural Shakespeare for twenty years (2004-2024). Eleven doctoral dissertations in Shakespeare studies on cultural appropriations, borrowings, and adaptations were completed under her supervision.
Mădălina Nicolaescu, University of Bucharest, Romania

is professor at the English Department – University of Bucharest. Her books on early modern theatre include Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare (2004), Ec-centric Mappings of the Renaissance (1999); she has edited collections of essays such as (In)hospitable Translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings (2010), Shakespeare Translations and the European Dimension (2012), Shakespeare 400 in Romania (2016), Perspectives on Shakespeare in Europe’s Borderlands (2020). Further recent contributions on Shakespeare have also been published in International Shakespeare Yearbook (2020), Cahiers Élisabéthains (2019, 2020), SEDERI (2017) and in volumes like Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, (2014), Great Shakespeareans (2012), and Visions of Shakespeare (2011).
Klára Škrobánková, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Ph.D. works at the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague and at the Department of Theatre Studies, Masaryk University Brno. She is especially interested in music theatre and the German-language theatre in the Czech lands in the 18th and 19th century—the issues of theatre historiography and its documentation are important parts of her research interests. She partakes on the creation of the Czech Theatre Encyclopedia, where she focuses on the German theatre in the Moravia and Silesia in the 19th century.
Ema Vyroubalova, University of Dublin, Ireland

is assistant professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Her research and teaching interests include English Renaissance drama; Shakespeare’s plays in global contexts; theory and practice of literary translation; and travel literature. She has published on multilingual elements in the literature of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and on stage and film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Europe and the Middle East. Her most recent publication is an edition of the collected writings of the Reverend Jermyn Pratt (1723-1791), an English clergyman from Norfolk, co-edited with James Robert Wood. She has also been contributing to the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings initiative, organizing stage readings of over twenty plays by contemporary Ukrainian dramatists at Trinity College Dublin in June 2022 and June 2023.
Oana-Alis Zaharia, University of Bucharest, Romania

is lecturer of English at the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She is the author of the monograph Cultural Reworkings and Translations in/of Shakespeare’s Plays (Bucharest, 2015). Her recent work has been published in prestigious international journals: Cahiers Élisabéthains, SEDERI Yearbook, Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, etc. She has co-edited and contributed to several volumes on Shakespeare and translation/adaptation: Perspectives on Shakespeare in Europe’s Borderlands (co-editor, Bucharest 2020), Shakespeare 400 in Romania. Papers Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of William Shakespeare’s Death (co-editor, Bucharest, 2017); Shakespeare, Translation and the European Dimension (co-editor, 2012) and Inhospitable Translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings (Bucharest, 2010).

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