class="">Villa Dolorosa

Irina celebrates her birthday three times, and each of these events highlights the drama taking over the lives of the three sisters, enhanced by conflicts stemming from financial problems, lack of meaning, disillusionment, debts, anguish and despair. Birthdays should become days of rebirth, but these characters seem utterly unable to overcome their limitations. Or is there, in fact, some hidden hope?

“Loneliness, distancing, lethargy. Before these manifest in the form of the pandemic, they take the shape of inner blockages. Everything is possible, but it is also extremely boring. Hence, the hesitation, the blockage, the lack of any desire in the three beautiful sisters with Chekhovian names. An indirect tribute to famed director Harag (whose staging of Chekhov remains one of the most beautiful moments in the history of this theatre) and to Chekhov himself, therefore also to theatre as an art of closeness and knowledge. A tribute to art theatre and to theatre as art. Ultimately a tribute to ourselves as social, albeit socially distanced beings.”– Theodor-Cristian Popescu

„The characters in Villa Dolorosa are definitely and forever scarred by the impossibility but also by the denial of escape. Hence, the minimal, formal, rapidly concluded attempts to oppose that ‘Verboten’ (Forbidden) that turns out to be not by a long shot the result of Janine’s boundless malice. The propensity towards forbidden things, censoring momentum and non-action is simply a part of who these characters are. They are lacking absolutely any will to live, to enjoy or even to suffer all the way.– Mircea Morariu, contributors.ro, January 2021