tg STAN brings a script from Portuguese theatre director to Kaaitheater

Theatre company tg STAN met the Portuguese theatre director Tiago Rodrigues twenty years ago. Rodrigues was a student at the time, and he had signed up for one of their workshops. He is now the director of Portugal's Teatro Nacional D.Maria II in Lisbon.

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their first encounter, Rodrigues has written a script for STAN for the first time. In The Way She Dies, he explores more deeply the subjects that he had treated in Antony and Cleopatra – which was performed at the Kaaitheater this season.

In this conceptual version of Shakespeare's tragedy, Rodrigues showed very clearly that theatre productions are always translations of the original. And the older the original is, the greater the adaptations in the translations for a contemporary audience.

This new text also assumes that translation is a betrayal – a negotiation between original intentions and new interpretations. Theatre producers not only translate texts into different languages, new settings, and new periods, but also turn words into actions. The good news is that these translations only expand the possible meaning of the source text.

One might say, for example, that Leo Tolstoy's famous novel Anna Karenina is ultimately the sum of all the ways in which the book has ever been read and the effects that the book has had in the lives of its readers. Rodrigues wonders whether this also has an impact on the way in which the title character in Anna Karenina died. Perhaps there is a way out for her after all.

The piece is performed by Isabel Abreu, Pedro Gil, Jolente De Keersmaeker, Tiago Rodrigues, and Frank Vercruyssen.

> The Way She Dies. 20/04 > 22/04, 20.30, Kaaitheater, Brussels