Ryszard III

New Yorick

The competition is aimed at young artists debuting in the Polish theatre and is intended to encourage them to read and re-enact the works of William Shakespeare, to seek answers for contemporary problems in his works, and to test new theatrical forms with their help.

The New Yorick statuette will be awarded as a part of the 27th international Shakespeare Festival. Three presentations will be competing for it, produced by the laureates together with the theatres invited to cooperate by the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre – the Polish Theatre in Poznań, the Helena Modrzejewska Theatre in Legnica and the Powszechny Theatre from Warsaw.

The competition received 27 entries from direction students from all schools in Poland, directors at the beginning of their careers, and artistic collectives. The selection was made by the heads of the above-mentioned theatres – Maciej Nowak, Jacek Głomb, Paweł Sztarbowski – who chose three adaptations. Each of the productions will be funded by the organisers of the international Shakespeare Festival with 25,000 PLN as the monetary part of the prize. They will be presented as ‘work in progress’ during the festival and judged by an international jury consisting of: Eleanor Skimin, Jacek Kopciński, and Aneta Mancewicz.

Artists about the performance

In” “Richard III”, two great dramas converge: an existential drama of consciousness, connectecd with an attempt to find your own identity in a world in which there is no place for you, and a political drama of history, concerning itself with the twilight of a state (or, more broadly, a community) as an idea. These two planes are strictly connected with each other: that which is public is always a consequence of that which is private – that is, until this “exterior” starts to live its own life, grasped by the merciless waves of discourse which no longer seeks rooting in that which is real, and becomes an autonomous political force.
Richard, always different, separate, misshapen, unable to find himself in the realityin which he has come to live, always humiliated, has spent his life in solitude but decides to become a villain because all he knows how to do is kill. “This weak piping time of peace” has deprived him of the last role which connected him with reality: the role of a warrior. He is no longer needed by anyone for anything. The world has not allowed him to fulfil the humanity he bears within himself so he decides to renounce it in the hope that, through blood, he will be able to carve a new world in which he will never again have to feel alone. The current period of national mourning will serve his end – he will take over the funeral procession and, on the basis of its myth, he will start to build his own order of resurrection. The boundaries between that in which we believe and that which is real become ever more blurred – as blurred as the roles which we all play in order to keep our withering community alive. Madness begins to creep into the world and the only thing that is left beneath the rotting masks of contemporaneity is the body – but is it really my home?

Creators

Adaptation, direction and sound – Jan Marek Kamiński
Design, costumes, video – Ewelina Węgiel

Cast

Joanna Gonschorek, Anna Sienicka, Paweł Palcat, Arkadiusz Jaskot, Nikodem Księżak, Dominik Rubaj