“Twelfth Night, or What You Will”, directed by Piotr Cieplak, will be presented by the National Theatre in Warsaw on 3 August at the 26th Shakespeare Festival in Gdańsk. The production was in the final of the Golden Yorick Competition for the best staging of William Shakespeare’s dramatic works.

“Twelfth Night, or What You Will”, staged by Piotr Cieplak, brings out the musicality of one of Shakespeare’s most important comedies. In the fever of sounds flowing from the stage, we witness intrigues, games of appearances and, above all, love in its most diverse colours and varieties,” emphasize the experts of the National Theatre.

“This is the first Polish Shakespeare done ‘in English’, with lightness and charm, saturated with music, i.e. love, based on the vis comica of the actors of the national stage, I believe that one should trust Shakespearean conventions and not play against them in search of the black core of comedy. Cieplak made the show out of love for theatre and love for the people who make theatre and those who watch it”, stressed Lukasz Drewniak in his competition justification.

The Shakespeare Festival is an international theatre event which presents the best Shakespearean plays from around the world. This year, from 27 July to 6 August, it will include performances from Italy, Denmark, the United States, the Czech Republic, Norway and Poland.

The theme of the 26th Festival is: “Between Heaven and Stage. After the Storm’, referring to the three radically different foreign productions of The Tempest hosted at the Festival and to the storms currently sweeping the world – political, pandemic, climatic and those related to the human condition. It is also a reference to the title of Professor Jerzy Limon’s book published in 2002 entitled “Between Heaven and Stage”.

Adrian Andrzejewski