Performance - "Archie and Kate"

Within the 6th International Theatre Festival "Theatrical Baltika"

Performance - "Archie and Kate"

Valka City Theatre (Latvia)

Director - Aivars Ikšelis

"Archie and Kate"

Dmitrijs Učaneišvili (1969) is a Georgian playwright, translator, and writer. His literary debut took place in 2007, when the stories "Chronicle" and "Godot" were published in the sixth issue of the magazine "Our Writing". After several short stories, plays were also written.

The play "Archie and Kate" won first place in the 2014 international playwriting competition among 180 submitted works, while in 2016 it received a silver award at the international drama competition in Badenweiler, Germany.

Our performance is an experiment. It is a story about two people’s attempt over twenty-five years to cope with themselves, with love, with the world around them, and with their relationship.

In the performance "Archie and Kate" we explore the concept of love and try to find an answer to the eternal question - does love really exist? While creating the production, one of the reference points became William Shakespeare’s plays "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" and their plot lines.

The author has said that he wrote "Archie and Kate" in the course of one night, without taking his eyes off the white sheets of paper, because he needed to free himself from one persistent thought that had constantly occupied his mind.

The plot of the play is the author’s fiction, but the most important thing is not the chain of events itself, but the characters’ choices and decisions.

That is why this story can become very personal for every viewer - in trying to understand it, one may also recognize moments, feelings, and relationships from one’s own life.

Our production reflects on whether a feeling created by one event can remain "for a lifetime" and what happens to the people who experience it. It is a parallel between the play and real feelings, an exploration of mutual emotions, expectations, and demands. The theatre’s search here comes ever closer to real life.

The production process used the methodology developed by the Ukrainian-born director, playwright, screenwriter, and philosopher Vladimir Klimenko (KLIM).

Cast: Vilis Daņilovs and Evgenia Kozlova.

Performed in Latvian and Russian.