Bernd Lafrenz - Romeo & Juliet

Who doesn't know the most beautiful and most heartbreaking of all love stories? And anyone who knows Bernd Lafrenz also knows that tissues and dog-eared paperbacks can safely stay at home. In his affectionate parody, Lafrenz brings "Romeo and Juliet" - one of his free-wheeling comic Shakespeare productions - that particular, breezy lightness with which he has already won over audiences in other shows (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear).

As in those other adaptations, the multi-award-winning theatre artist Lafrenz performs the entire story of Romeo and Juliet as a technically dazzling one-man show, 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 a descendant of Romeo's servant of the same name. For eleven generations - since 1423 - the Balthasars have fulfilled Romeo's legacy: spreading the story of the two lovers across the land. But things take a very different turn from what Balthasar had planned, as the Shakespearean 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", living through the whole story of "Mr. Romeo" and "Miss Juliet" - live and on the spot. And when the audience, torn between wonder and laughter, witnesses two magnificent, stylishly performed theatrical deaths at the drama's end - complete with writhing and convulsions - even those are, thanks to Balthasar, touching and funny at the same time. A fitting finale to the evening, in any case.