Alexandru Ionașcu
Summary
Here is a brief summary of Alexandru Ionașcu’s piece on what he saw at the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova:
- Context and significance: Between 21 and 31 May 2026, Craiova is hosting the International Shakespeare Festival (over 400 events), transforming a former communist industrial city into a hub for cultural tourism and a multicultural space.
- The play Venedikli Tacir: A Turkish adaptation of the play The Merchant of Venice performed using traditional shadow and puppet theatre (originating in Bursa in the 16th century). The puppeteer performs all the voices (including the female ones) for the iconic characters Hacivat and Karagöz as a solo act, in a performance rich in mysticism and symbolism.
- The play Two Young Men from Verona: Staged at the Museum of Exile by students from the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina). A modern interpretation, with interwar and film noir influences, combined with Balkan music, pop and pantomime.
- Conclusion: The festival rounds off a festive period for the city (also marking the success of the local football team), serving as an open invitation to culture for audiences of all kinds.
Review
At the end of May 2026, Craiova became Romania’s theatre capital – more precisely, from 21 to 31 May, the southern Romanian city hosted the International Shakespeare Festival. This theatre festival has been running since 1994 and, this year, features over 400 events of the most diverse kinds, including conferences, performances held in various cultural venues across the city, screenings of Shakespearean adaptations, activities for children and teenagers, performances in the city’s schools, costume exhibitions and even magic shows and mime performances. Not much happens in Craiova culturally speaking, but the biennial Shakespeare Festival puts our city on the map for theatre lovers and beyond. It goes without saying that the city is becoming a tourist hub – and not just any kind of tourism, but a hub for cultural tourism. This detail is particularly significant for a run-of-the-mill ex-communist city – that is to say, one characterised by a vanished heavy industry, limited cultural activity and closed cinemas. In other words, Craiova is not all that different from other large Romanian cities (with over a hundred thousand inhabitants) in the post-1989 era. Even the communist-era blocks of flats in Craiova are incredibly run-of-the-mill, with very little variety. Yet now, these days, Craiova has become a multicultural city thanks to the Shakespeare Festival.
The most obvious example of the festival’s multiculturalism that Craiova is currently enjoying is the large number of actors, directors and theatre enthusiasts from diverse cultures, including theatre companies from Spain, Germany, as well as South Africa and Kenya. On the fifth day of the festival, I attended a puppet show, a rendition of the play The Merchant of Venice performed by small marionettes of non-Western origin. To be precise, the show was called Venedikli Tacir and featured several marionettes moved from behind a white sheet, their dialogue delivered by the puppeteer’s voice. The puppets’ voices depicted well-defined characters, each with distinct inflections, including a female voice. The lines were not subtitled, but there was no need for translation either; the voices took on a tangible quality that made them feel like real beings, and the dialogue in Turkish had a certain flavour of its own. Two puppets stood out in particular. At the end, one of the puppeteers spoke about the history of this uniquely Turkish form of puppet theatre, which emerged in Bursa towards the end of the 16th century – exactly when William Shakespeare was also active, as someone in the audience pointed out. The puppet characters known as Hacivat and Karagöz are two distinct figures in Anatolian culture; the former represents the educated scholar who seeks to better himself through education and is usually depicted as a green puppet. Karagöz is the ordinary man of Anatolia, without much education, and is represented by a red marionette. On hearing this brief description, I thought of what Dan Alexe had written about Nastradin Hodja, a figure from Turko-Persian culture widespread throughout the Muslim world, including the Balkans – a wandering dervish from the mystical Sufi brotherhoods. I learnt that this puppet theatre has a mystical origin when the translator informed us that the light projected onto the white sheet represents the soul, the spirit, and that at the end, when the little puppets wave to the audience and return to the box, it is a metaphor for how the human soul leaves the world and the body is laid to rest in a coffin. It is a real feat for a puppeteer to imitate different voices, and for a single performance, the puppeteer needs a month to perfect the voice of each individual puppet character, including the female ones. Being a puppeteer in a show featuring the characters from the classical Turkish puppet theatre, Hacivat and Karagöz, is a true test of acting prowess, an example of theatre’s connection to ancient mystical traditions.
From traditional Turkish puppet theatre, I’ll move on to a small production I saw on the eighth day of the Shakespeare Festival. In the courtyard behind the Museum of Exile, students from the acting department of the UNIBL Academy of Arts staged Two Young Men from Verona, one of the Bard’s lesser-known plays. The obscurity of the play did not deter the students from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who produced a very modern adaptation, featuring music, short mime sequences and costumes that subtly evoked the culture of the interwar period. Thus, the actress playing Silvia delivered her lines with tenderness and an apparent seductiveness, though this could just as easily have been irony directed at Valentine’s amorous gestures. The actress’s costume struck me as reminiscent of a noir film character from the 1940s, of the femme fatale type. The actress playing Julia had a charming candour; she was amusing whilst exuding an air of sadness at the same time. The two actors playing Valentine and Proteus beautifully conveyed that male self-delusion which blinds men to the bigger picture. Speaking of the music, at one point, Balkan rhythms could be heard coming from the speakers – as if from an Emir Kusturica film – alongside bits of pop music. Seduction, a friendship shattered by the thrill of love and social pressures, insecure men, pantomime and an atmosphere drawn from the Balkan imagination – this is what Shakespeare looks like as imagined by the students of the Academy of Arts at the University of Banja Luka.
The International Shakespeare Festival is currently underway in Craiova – a most delightful coincidence, given that the city’s football team has achieved the double, winning both the Romanian Cup and the league title. And I invite everyone passing through Craiova to visit the Shakespeare Festival – there are events to suit everyone.
Photo: A Turkish adaptation of the play The Merchant of Venice, performed using traditional puppet theatre and shadow theatre (which originated in Bursa in the 16th century) (source: Alexandru Ionașcu)
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