There's no shortage of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, but Oskaras Korsunovas's Lithuanian version offers a whole new level of meaning, writes Peter Crawley
'What's in a name?" Juliet has always wondered, from high atop her balcony, in the most famous scene of Shakespeare's tale of two star-crossed lovers.
The answer, it transpires, is actually an ocean of meaning. That which we call a rose, by any other word, would smell as sweet, but alter just one letter of the Lithuanian word for flour - milt - and you stumble helplessly towards death. That's right, to the icy grip of mirt.
In Oskaras Korsunovas's extraordinary interpretation of the play - playfully absurd in aesthetic yet poetic and serious in intent - the Lithuanian director transplants the age-old feud between the households of Montague and Capulet to two warring pizzerias. Putting up their swords, the families battle with exchanged volleys of fresh pizza dough. The moments of their various demises are portrayed through erupting clouds of flour. And pivotal scenes incorporate an enormous, revolving mixing bowl emblazoned with the word "milt".
"That's why I didn't erase the word," explains the 34-year-old director, although it is the only identifiable Lithuanian signifier on a stage dripping with confections, pastas and assorted Italian stereotypes. "On one hand it's flour for making bread," Korsunovas continues, his words relayed through an interpreter. "Bread means life and living. On the other side is death, and death is like a glass of poison. So it can mean both in one."
We are sitting outside the Teatro Valle, a handsome theatre in Rome, tucked away from the thronging tourists and actual competing pizzerias of the Piazza Navona nearby. The previous night, Korsunovas's production had played to a generally appreciative crowd, much to the relief of his compatriot actors. The cast had been unusually nervous before the performance. "So, what?" one of them asked Korsunovas, exasperated. "We're going to play Italians - to the Italians?!"
Korsunovas admits that such stereotypes go down easier among audiences from Lithuania to Germany to America (where this production has toured since first opening in 2003), but in the age-old conflict of Verona almost any audience can see themselves on the stage.
"It is very universal," the director agrees, "because it speaks about basic things - and not only because it's a love story. One of the reasons [ it is universal] is the dilemma that exists in every society in times of romance.
"Romance can be treated either ironically on the other hand, or it can be idealised. But it is not tolerated in society in many cases. Because, in fact, love is a phenomenon that destroys the social order." There is an intensity in Korsunovas's character which belies the playfulness of his stagecraft. Though our three-way conversation passes with the slow rhythm of a delayed correspondence, he refuses to be interrupted until he is content that he has seen his point through. When asked to explain the antisocial politics of love, for instance, he will pause for the duration of an ice age to properly consider his response. Our translator Camilla gives me a well-practised shrug. It is clear that he does this a lot.
"Because love is never dogmatic," he finally replies. "That's why love is poeticised but very hard to accept in reality."
That Korsunovas is so alert to the suffocating power of dogma and the subversive potential of art and the imagination is easy to understand.
Growing up in a satellite state of the Soviet Union and educated within its Communist regime, Korsunovas's professional career coincided with his country's independence. In 1990, at the age of just 20, Korsunovas's directorial debut was with There to Be Here, an adaptation of the work of Russian avant-gardist and children's author Daniil Kharms. To this day Korsunovas's work retains a sense of playfulness and absurdism (he once set Oedipus Rex in a playground), a result, perhaps, of a childhood smothered behind the Iron Curtain and a career that began, quite aptly, when communism finally fell.
"It's true that my career in theatre is very related to independence - to Lithuanian independence - and it's related with a change to the city [ of Vilnius]. All my ways of thinking and creating are related to that. I belong to the generation which has grown up and studied in a Leninist society - and an occupied country - where the ideology was very repressive and we never expected the walls to break.
"We came to accept this reality," he continues, "with the idea that it would never change and we learned to have a cynical point of view about everything. But then we found out that everything is changeable. Everything is malleable." This might serve as the motto of his eponymous theatre company, set up in 1999, which treats classic plays as though they are new works and new works as though they are classics. "Theatre as a place where traditions are kept is not interesting to me," he explains, "because it doesn't have anything in common with free spirit . . . But, on the other hand, theatre which does not take into consideration the heritage of the theatre is not interesting either." For these reasons Korsunovas's programming policy is dizzyingly diverse, incorporating everything from Sophocles to Sarah Kane, from Shakespeare to Mark Ravenhill.
"Theatre to me is an instrument [ with which] to learn about life - to understand society, our time, and our place in that time," says Korsunovas.
"What's very important in the theatre is its interaction with the times." He pauses again while a succession of scooters whip past our cafe and rattle down the narrow street. "In staging classical plays and contemporary plays, we give sense to ourselves. By making theatre we give sense to the times.
What's important is not to stage Shakespeare or Sarah Kane; what's important is to actualise what they are saying." Whether or not they are quite "actualised", the words of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (for all Korsunovas's perceived iconoclasm, he does use the full title) find an intriguing translation in the stage picture created by a physically adept cast. Just as Shakespeare's lines frequently warp and weave, revealing a cascade of playful puns or slippery meanings, so the brutal edges and metallic clutter of Korsunovas's stage allow bodies to emerge from every nook and cranny. As the use of baking ingredients and kitchen utensils becomes ever more inventive, one might ignore the Lithuanian dialogue and English surtitles when the production performs for just two nights in the Dublin Theatre Festival and concentrate instead on the poetry of the stage.
Korsunovas insists that he is careful to root such physical interpretations to the original substance of the play, however, alluding to quotes in the text involving "white ash" and "people made from the same dough" that I fail to recognise. (In our interview, certain things inevitably become lost in translation. "If you give a rose another name, does it smell less?" relays the interpreter at one point.) "What is important now for all of us," Korsunovas continues, "in Lithuania too, is if a tradition becomes religious or dogmatic, if it doesn't have any shifting points or isn't flexible, then it's due to end. It cannot survive because it has no way of [ adapting]. What destroys Verona is not anger but hatred. Shakespeare says that they don't even remember the reasons for this hatred. It becomes a tradition. Hatred becomes their way of recognising themselves and of affirming themselves. And it was very important to feel the point where the [ same] thing that creates you starts to destroy you. Theatre has to speak about that."
Beyond the poetry and the romance of the play, beyond even the intermingling of tragedy and comedy, Korsunovas resonates most with the politics of the drama, with its struggle for independence and the necessity of transforming old ideas.
"That's why the balcony scene is not only a love scene," he says. "It'salso the point where two kids start to see things clearly. They start understanding they are living in a poisoned society. And that's essential; they start to understand that they live in a society that is dying, and it's time either to change names or to change the tradition. But Verona does not let them do it. And it kills those kids.
That's why Shakespeare's play is universal. And that's why we chose the kitchen as the setting for the action. The kitchen is an eternal thing. It never changes. It stores tradition."
The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet runs at the Gaiety Theatre from Oct 14-15 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, www.dublintheatrefestival.com