CIS News
“Offending the Audience” or theatre in the present time
Ever since its launch in 2014, the 9G Program at NTB dedicated to young theatre artists has aimed to be a space of freedom and artistic search, of all kinds of experimentation and refined art. The new premiere Offending the Audience achieves these goals and brilliantly slaloms between these trends. Peter Handke's text, translated by Victor Scoradeț, turns everything we thought we knew about the art of theatre upside down, bringing an atypical plea for reactive theatre to the audience.
Director Edda Coza flees from traditional conventions and finds in Handke's play the perfect refuge to question, even insulting us, theatre, life, time and our presence in a theater hall. Irina Ștefan, Carol Ionescu, Vlad Brumaru and Dan Coza are the actors who accompany her in this direct, personal and courageous approach.
“I really hope you will talk and we will talk at the end, as I am convinced that theatre still has the magical power to bring people together, setting itself apart from all the other social environments - physical and virtual - that divide us and deprive us of the opportunity to listen and understand the perspective of the person or person next to us.” Edda Coza
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019, Peter Handke invented, at the age of 24, a special kind of universal drama - Sprechstück (talking play) - with the publication in 1966 of Publikumsbeschimpfung, in direct translation - Offending the Audience. In an interview in 1970, Handke stated that "… paradoxically, the result was to do something for the stage against the stage, using theatre to protest against the theatre of the moment. I mean theatre as a historical phenomenon, as it is to this day."
Staged the same year at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, representing Claus Peymann's directorial debut, the play instantly attracted a huge wave of criticism for its shocking and irreverent style, which only served to propel Handke into the ranks of the outstanding writers of the last century.
The first performances of Offending the Audience will take place on February 19, March 3 and 5, 2023, at 8:00 pm, at the Sala Mică Hall of the National Theatre.
A 9G performance at NTB
Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu
