A poisonous tragedy

Women, Beware Women is a disturbing play. As in King Lear, the plots reinforce each other; every forced marriage initials the possibility of a happy alternative in return. On the surface, the language has the features of a simple conversation that gets stuck in a web of endless ironies. The characters talk about their physical and emotional desires as if they were of fundamental importance. In the first instance they are trivial and they are wrong about it, only to be right in the end in a way that even they fail to understand. In this way, dramatic irony drives the formalism of social comedy into a tragic world. Women are randomly lured into a deceptive sexual paradise; paradise collapses in a disturbing and sharply ironic vision of the damnation of the carnal.

John Jowett – Women, Beware Women: A Traged 

Chronicles of the show:

Silviu Purcărete's directorial rhetoric involves working on layers of meaning, a direction of reinterpreting the dramatic text, of installing it in visual metaphors that pamper the retina and stimulate hermeneutics. The scene plays images that challenge you to decipher. As a viewer, you like what you see, you laugh, but there is a subtext in each sequence whose understanding you embroider in reception. The chess game between Livia and Mama becomes a commentary-anticipation of Bianca's seduction by the Duke. The denouement challenges cultivated intuition.

Oltița Cântec

Culture Supplement

Purcărete's show is difficult to summarize, because it is full of significant details, lines, intonations, gestures, interactions, "lizards", if I may say so, which make it very Poznań, very contemporary, very parodic, very friendly and accessible to the viewer (although it is not at all easy or problem-free).

Claudiu Groza

Teatrul Azi