Die Tragödie von Romeo & Julia

In Shakespeare’s play, violence is the origin, pivot and endpoint of tragic love. The fact that no one remembers the reason for the war seems irrelevant. In the parental homes, it is unquestionably cemented how it has always been – and against whom it has always been. The production takes the famous first verse “Two families of the same rank” as the starting point for its narrative: two hostile worlds stand parallel on stage, which are astonishingly similar in their precisely timed synchronized sequences. Are the rifts so deep because they are closer than they would like to admit? There certainly doesn’t seem to be any safe space for Juliet and Romeo to try out a new togetherness.

In his radical and celebrated theater works, director Emre Akal exposes social structures in terms of their power mechanisms. In his own stage language, which places the actors’ bodies at the center of the narrative, he finds a powerful meta-narrative: text and image stand side by side on equal footing and together tell the most famous love story of all time.

To this end, the artist duo Mehmet & Kazim combine pop digitality with the three-dimensionality of the theater so consistently that they become one. The artistic team with Lara Roßwag, named “Costume Designer of the Year 2025” by the trade magazine “Theater Heute” for her work with Emre Akal, is working in Graz for the second time following the production of Jelinek’s “Sonne / Luft” and is also creating a completely unique, visually incomparable world for this production.

Director Emre Akal: “For me, text and language are not the only narrative; in my work, the story is told through the bodies, through the images on stage. When images begin to speak a story – that’s where theater begins for me.”

Duration: 1 hour 40 minutes, no break