Joël Pommerat (b. 1963) is a self-taught French artist who has become one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed contemporary theatre artists. His work as a playwright and director has earned him numerous prestigious theatre awards, such as the Grand Prix de la Theatre of the French Academy, the Molière Prize, and others. He writes adaptations of fairy tales, film scripts, short films, and operas. His work explores the complexity of human nature, constantly updating form and narrative.
In his play “The Reunification of the Two Koreas”, he explores the feeling of love, combining the curiosity of a scientist with the passion of an artist. This playful game is taken up by director Artūras Areima, who has returned to the National Kaunas Drama Theatre after a long break. The performance features seventeen fragmented stories in which love/lovelessness unfolds in various colours and manifestations. Sometimes it is comic, sometimes melodramatic, banal, ironic, absurd, surreal, or as complicated as the relationship between two hostile states. On the field of love, battles are fought, destinies are shattered, the most delicate nuances of feelings are stirred, and everybody is striving for the impossible – the perfect fulfilment of love. But perfection is hardly possible, because lovelessness, indifference, loss, and disappointment are just different stages of the same emotion. This collage of moments and random dialogues wittily satirises the clichés of relationships taken from literature, cinema and television. “I feel like I’m in a series”, says one character. “I feel like I haven’t had to suffer”, says another. “There is a terrible misunderstanding between us”, says a third. All of them find themselves at an impasse as they seek the impossible – the unification of two different worlds.
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