Measure for measure

Synopsis

Purcărete's playful nature wears, as if together with the Duke, other clothes than the ones we are used to: those of sadness without a cure, born in the place where it is clear that "there are thousands of deaths hidden in life". Constructed with professionalism and expressiveness, with a simple cut and easily decipherable signs, the show has an engaging dynamic, clarifying the ideas-force.

Magdalena Boiangiu, "The moving walls of evil", Literary and artistic truth, March 5, 2008

"Measure for measure" is a text that speaks, at the same time, about a thousand things (among other things, if someone was really looking for a drama about honor and the observance of oaths, he would have found it here without a doubt). At Purcărete, this impossibly tree-like play about a duke who puts his subjects to the test, so that, in the end, he himself fails the test, becomes one of the most refined essays about the desire for power and despotism, around the type of morality who should govern a society. Not because it would be a grandiose show, "Measure for Measure" is a theatrical event of the Romanian spring. Could it be because Silviu Purcărete is a real director?

Iulia Popovici, "Our Beloved Dictator", Ziua, March 8, 2008

The feeling is of real theater. Those who officiate "play" themselves, but they also "play" us. In the vision of Silviu Purcărete, Measure for Measure is a tragic and buffoonish requiem of twilight times. Vienna in Shakespeare's play becomes a shipwrecked world on the stage of history.
Director and scenographer, Purcărete builds a shocking production, as simple and austere as it is elaborate and elevated. It has rigour, suppleness, a perfect cohesion of all the elements in which we recognize an author, a style. The fascinating "brutal poetics" of this stage reading is born from the experience of the masterpiece performances "Ubu king with scenes from "Macbeth", "Titus Andronicus", "Orestia", "Danaides", "Don Juan".

Ludmila Patlanjoglu, Purcărete's "Measure", Jurnalul Naţional, March 7, 2008

The world of Shakespeare's comedy, "Measure for Measure" in the vision of Silviu Purcărete, at the National Theater in Craiova, is filthy, filthy and without any patch of light. But consistent with the usual Purcăretian substance: the scabby old woman with concupiscent bales, zero purity, one hundred percent grotesque. How consistent remains the director of the construction and mathematical decoupage on the text, here it is flat, without Shakespearean scrolls, without effusions, without puns. Even without accents. A story that unfolds and that's it, lacking the classic therapeutic ending in which the good is safeguarded. […] Silviu Purcărete remains faithful to the simplicity of the scenographic solution. Simple, but always with great effect.

Cristina Rusiecki, "In the brothel, at our home. What a brothel!” Culture, no. 10, March 2008

The director Silviu Purcărete offered, through the outstanding performance of the "Marin Sorescu" National Theater in Craiova, an interpretation of impeccable logic of the play, in a way superior to the text. He brings out, with more clarity than the text shows, the treachery of the duke's maneuvers, who always play double.
Valentin Mihali is admirable in the role of Angelo. He expresses with convincing talent the subtle mixture of ambition, fanaticism, radicalism and weakness, which forms the substance of his character.

Adrian Mihalache, "Treacherous politics", Teatrul azi, no. 3-4, 2008