The Couple

Following a fight, a wife stabs her husband in the leg. This becomes the pretext for a confrontation in court, which gradually transforms into a painfully honest portrayal of the modern couple.

With emotion, cruelty, and disarming authenticity, the text written by Edna Mazia is brought to life by Bogdan Sărătean in a play that is followed with fascination and bated breath. The four characters caught in the delicate mechanism of personal, yet unshared truths, begin their journey on the winding path of discovering each other. What, however, lies at the end of this journey? Certainly, the hope of salvation through love.

"At first glance, THE COUPLE by Edna Mazia is a text about domestic violence and its unsuspected forms. However, I have found other themes in this text that resonate with my aesthetic and human pursuits. The theme of the perpetrator-victim relationship, in which often these two roles/statutes are interchangeable. The theme of the masks we wear according to our social status with such fervor that when we are left alone and the mask inevitably falls, we often find an unhealed void. But what attracted me the most were the theatrical aspects of the text, in the most creative sense: the fact that the courtroom becomes a theatrical space, in which the accused and the victim play key moments from their conflicted past. What an acting challenge! The text also allows for a delicate play with existential levels, both spatial and temporal. Hence the minimalist, conceptual set design by Alexandra Budianu. For me, this production is, after all, a natural continuation of the pursuits I began last year, when I staged Oleanna by David Mamet on the same theme of the fragility of the victim-aggressor relationship." – Bogdan Sărătean, director

Bogdan Sărătean, born in Sibiu, studied the art of acting at UNATC Bucharest (class of Florin Zamfirescu – Adrian Pintea). In 2011, he completed a master's degree in THEATER DIRECTING at the same university, under the guidance of director Victor Ioan Frunză. In recent years, he has directed several plays at the "Radu Stanca" National Theatre of Sibiu: "Blind Man's Buff," "Love Among People," "Jerusalem," "The God of Carnage," "Oleanna."