Ibsen Face to Face with The New Stage Aesthetics. Radu Afrim and Andriy Zholdak Recreating The Lady From The Sea

The classical repertoire and, especially, its stage rewritings define a thematic obsession for the great theatre creators of the moment. Just as each great director has their own aesthetic, so each of them has their own way of appropriating representative plays. Henrik Ibsen is one of the indispensable playwrights in the artistic portfolio of the most important names whose creations were performed on the Romanian stages. This article aims at a parallel analysis of two recent versions of the Ibsenian play The Lady from the Sea, directed by Radu Afrim (2014) and Andriy Zholdak (2022), respectively, in order to deepen the specific differences of two theatrical aesthetics decisive for understand the evolution of contemporary theatre. We also aim to question the possibilities that the readaptations, the rewritings of the great classical texts involve in the attempt of the creators to “contemporize” a play representative of the sensitivity of a past century.