Berenice

This is how BIT Teatergarasjen refers to tg STAN:

"It is simply impossible to avoid this Belgian theatre company if one is to talk about European performing arts during the past decade. Some think that tg STAN has found the key to the heart of theatre. The artists call themselves autonomic actors. They work without a director and choose their repertoire from the classical canon and newly written drama. Onstage they are always true to themselves, always as involving and involved. Theatre can simply not be done any better."

The play Berenice (1670), now in a production by tg STAN, is based on actual events that took place in the first century Roman Empire. It is derived from the Roman historian Suetonius.

The three main characters are the Judean Queen Berenice, the Roman Emperor Titus and Antiochus, king of the Black Sea state of Commagene. As a vassal of Rome, Antiochus fought under Titus and his father Vespasian in the war to put down the Jewish revolt. That is where the two men met Berenice and where they both fell in love with her.

During the play, the three are in Rome, where Titus has just become Emperor on his father's death. He is about to marry Berenice, only to be brought up short by the Roman dislike of kings and queens and the specific law against marrying a non-Roman. Titus knows that if he is to continue as Emperor, he must reject his personal happiness with Berenice.

Racine's contemporaries did not take to the play. Voltaire pronounced that the work was merely "an eclogue in dialogues" and was "unworthy of the tragic stage". He declared: "A lover and his mistress cannot possibly provide a fit subject for tragedy. This is unquestionable the weakest of Racine's works still being performed."

It is difficult to avoid the impression that eminent people like Voltaire were yielding to the preference for physical action and violence, omnipresent in plays of that era. In his preface, Racine replied in advance to such criticisms: "It is not essential that there should be blood and corpses in a tragedy. It is enough if the action is elevated, the characters heroic, the passions aroused, and if all the play breathes that majestic sadness which is the whole pleasure of tragedy."

Berenice by tg STAN was created in Lisbon, where it opened on March 1st 2005 (by Culturgest, at Casa d'Os Dias da Água). Later Berenice toured until the beginning of June in Belgium, The Netherlands, Great-Britain, Portugal and Norway.

Sources:

BIT Teatergarasjen, spring program 2005 and the program of the performance. 09.11.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no -archive

Tg Stan, spring 2005.

"This Berenice is a great theatre experience showing that capable, daring and inventive actors can blow new, convincing life into a traditional and easily old-fashioned theatre expression."
-IdaLou Larsen, scenekunst.no, April 2005.

09.11.2010: http://www2.scenekunst.no/artikkel_1164.nml