Billy's Joy

After Billy’s Violence, Victor Afung Lauwers was asked to continue exploring Shakespeare’s theatrical universe by surveying his comedies, and so he set out to free the character of Romeo from his tragic fate. If audiences at certain points in history, such as in the eighteenth century, who were overly sensitive to violence and tragedy changed some of the endings of Shakespeare’s plays to make the characters happy... why couldn’t Lauwers do the same today? With Oberon and Sycorax imagined as Romeo’s parents and Juliet expelled from the story, the play transports spectators from the supposed spirituality of the Fairyland where the story is set to the most prevalent controversies today, including cancel culture, structural racism, war and climate change. Fiction is foregrounded in this tale populated by fairies, kings and queens, bears, and Snow White and the seven dwarves. Just as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Are the main characters tragic figures performing a comedy or comical beings immersed in a tragedy? All of this in a text that is very much in tune with the times, parodying or reflecting Shakespearean characters who here speak directly to younger audiences, Gen-Zers or Millennials, who are trying to carve out their own space in a Boomer world. This show features the Barcelona-based performers Nao Albet, Gonzalo Cunill and Juan Navarro.

A Needcompany production.

Co-produced by: ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Perpodium (Antwerp), Le Quartz (Brest), The Shakespeare Festival (Gdansk), Teatro Central (Seville), Teatro Español and Naves del Español en Matadero (Madrid), CC Brugge (Bruges).

With the support of the Flemish government and the Belgian federal government’s tax shelter via Cronos Invest.

This show will be performed along with Billy’s Violence on Sunday 30 June.