Gertrude. The Scream

Synopsis

Gertrude.The Scream is a classic tragedy that has become a meditation on sexuality and power, an exploration of the most hidden human desires. The radical rewriting of Hamlet, focused on the female figure of Gertrude, lets traditional values ​​collapse under the weight of their own excesses. Gertrude is no longer just Hamlet's mother or the king's widow or Claudius' wife, she is marked by the cry of her own suffering and pleasure, a political and erotic obsession, a voice between agony and ecstasy. We see a Gertrude who no longer has anything to hide. But Hamlet, the son tortured by an extreme morality, is torn by her cry between love and hatred for his own mother. All the characters gravitate around this cry – a symbol of chained impulses. It becomes the center of a theatrical universe in which tensions arise from the struggle between what can be known and what escapes understanding.

Howard Barker is an internationally renowned playwright, whose early plays were performed at the Royal Court and by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 1992, his works have been presented by his own company, The Wrestling School. Barker's theatre is characterised by its poetic, non-naturalistic form and constructs worlds of contradiction, suffering and sexual passion. Barker is also a poet and theatre theorist, and his proposed "Catastrophe Theatre" defines a new form of tragedy for our times.

Denisa Hălăngău is a theater director, graduated from the Faculty of Theater and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, in 2023. Since her first performances, she has shown interest in exploring essentialized forms of artistic expression, purified of any excess and, at the same time, capable of offering the viewer a space for their own imagination. She seeks to shift the emphasis from the text to the emotional score extracted from it, from psychology and interior monologue to body language, acoustic and visual elements. The actor is the central point of the directorial construction, and the interpretive scores are taken to an increased level of intensity by transforming the drama encapsulated in the text into an experience generated with the help of rhythm, bodies and spaces.

During his studies, he approached various texts and styles, consistently experimenting with the essentialization of stage discourse, in performances such as: Stitching by Anthony Neilson (2021), Medea, after Euripides (2022), Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen (2022), Richard III by William Shakespeare (2023), 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane (2023), Demons by Lars Norén (2024). He participated with his performances at the Sunlight International Theater Festival, Timișoara (2022); the International Festival of Theater Academies – Dionysus, organized by the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Croatia (2023); the Sibiu International Theater Festival (2023); the International Festival of Young Directors – THEATER NETWORKING TALENTS, Craiova (2023); International Shakespeare Festival, Craiova (2024).