International Production Directed by Purcarete at RNTF 20

The 20th edition of the National Theater Festival will feature the stage director Silviu Purcarete’s latest show: Exit the King, by Eugene Ionesco, an international coproduction. The show premieres on September 15 at the Ex Ponto Festival in Slovenia, and will later be presented in the RNTF, before going on tour in France, Italy, Montenegro, Macedonia and Croatia. In January 2011, the new building of Esch Theater in Luxembourg will be inaugurated with this production.

A great personality of European theater, Silviu Purcarete opted for an international team to stage Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco in 2010, after his 2007 success with Macbett, by the same author, at the Royal Shakespeare Company. This international coproduction is for Purcarete the opportunity of a new encounter with Ionesco, as well as with the music writer and close collaborator Vasile Sirli, and artists from France, Slovenia and Luxembourg.

“Silviu Purcarete is tackling this play, which until recently looked totally alien to him, in my opinion, and I am trying to understand his reasons. Why is he doing it now? A mere accident? An arbitrary decision? What I do understand, after seeing and revisiting his Faust, his masterpiece, is that a new cycle is being initiated, which could be named ‘the stage director and death’. To Purcarete, Exit the King follows in Goethe’s footsteps. The Epicurean, until now seduced by Rabelais, is taking distance from him in order to ask himself a few questions about the best way to leave, about what this departure involves, and about what it retains from the point of view of ‘theatricality’. The man who staged Faust as a testamentary work in which the fate of the protagonist is mingled with that of theater, with unique brilliance, now embarks on Exit the King, a play in which Ionesco, against a background of exacerbated fear, sets in motion all theatrical means without the slightest economy. This is what undoubtedly attracts Purcarete who, by staging Exit the King, wishes to face death while trusting in theater. This is what, in my opinion, connects the great, already fulfilled Faustian project with the Ionescan project to come,” writes the essayist George Banu about the stage director’s choice.

Exit the King is produced by the Parisian company Les Arts et Mouvants – Cie à l’endroit des mondes allant vers, and coproduced by Ex-Ponto Festival Kulturno Drustvo B-51 (Slovenia), Théâtre d’Esch (Luxembourg), National Drama Theater Ljubljana (Slovenia), International Festival Theater MOT (Macedonia), Scène Nationale de Bayonne Sud-Aquitain (France). The following organizations supported it financially: Culturesfrance, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana City Hall, the Charles Nodier French Institute, the Romanian Cultural Institute (Cantemir program), the Embassy of France to Romania, the French Institute in Bucharest, UNITER and BRD-Groupe Société Générale, the principal partner of the Bucharest shows.

The organizers took advantage of Silviu Purcarete’s presence in Bucharest to invite him to a meeting with the audience. In November, the stage director will attend the Debates, Conferences, Meetings module at the UNATC (NUTCA) HQ, where he will have a dialogue with the theoretician Octavian Saiu, starting from the show Phaedra, after Racine and Euripides, a notable success of the Craiova National Theater in 1994.