Bernd Lafrenz - ZMF Freiburg

Who doesn't know the most beautiful and most heartbreaking love story ever told? And anyone who knows Bernd Lafrenz also knows that tissues and dog-eared Shakespeare paperbacks can safely stay at home. In his affectionate parody, Lafrenz gives "Romeo and Juliet" that special, breezy lightness that has already won over audiences in his other free-comic Shakespeare productions (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear). Musical accompaniment is provided by the Riegeler Musikverein.

Lafrenz - a multiple award-winning theatre artist - performs the entire story of Romeo and Juliet as a one-man show of remarkable acting virtuosity, switching from character to character with playful ease, often within seconds. But Lafrenz wouldn't be Lafrenz if he simply retold the famous story straight!

The audience first meets the endearingly lisping Balthasar, proud owner of the courier company "Internationale Kurierdienste Balthasar (seit 1423)" and descendant of Romeo's servant of the same name. For eleven generations - since 1423 - the Balthasars have been fulfilling Romeo's legacy: spreading the lovers' story far and wide. But things take a very different turn from what Balthasar had planned, as Shakespeare's work and its characters suddenly spring to life by magic. Together with Balthasar, the audience finds itself unexpectedly right in the middle of "that business from back then", experiencing the whole story of "Mr. Romeo" and "Miss Juliet" - live and in person. And when the audience, torn between fascination and laughter, witnesses two magnificent theatrical deaths performed with all the requisite writhing and convulsions, even that - Balthasar will make sure of it -