Andrei Şerban’s very successful staging of Cries and Whispers returns to the spring schedule of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. Based on Ingmar Bergman’s film with the same title, the stage production of the work was presented in January 2010 on the Cluj stage. By revitalizing the production, the Hungarian Theatre wishes to mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the legendary filmmaker.

The Cluj production of Cries and Whispers won the Best Performance and Best Director awards of the Romanian Association of Theatre Artists (UNITER) in 2010, while Zsolt Bogdán won the title for Best Actor. The female characters of the play are portrayed by Anikó Pethő, Emőke Kató, Imola Kézdi, Csilla Varga and Csilla Albert.

Director Andrei Şerban writes the following words about the performance: “Bergman used to rehearse with the actresses before shooting the film. We try to find out how this project started. We try to imagine how this stage-based fiction becomes reality, to decipher the secret of one of the greatest film directors and that of the portrayals of four great actresses. The core of the story is based on four women: Agnes, a dying woman, her sisters, Karin and Maria, who came to be by her side, and Anna, the servant. The cries and whispers from the title represent the cries and whispers of the four women.”

Here is a fragment of Iulia Popovici’s review published in Observatorul Cultural concerning the production that was presented also in South Korea, the Czech Republic and Serbia: “Şerban’s Cries and Whispers is a meta-referential undertaking of the film. The performance presents on a stage actors and a directorial group who are rehearsing and producing a movie; the [performance’s] creation process is on a par with the actual creation; the actors play actors who are playing movie characters. The dramaturgy of the spectacle points to multiple lines of narrative and themes, searching for a coherent structure that allows this “making of” to turn art into life.”

Tickets for the performance can be purchased at the theater’s ticket office, as well as online at www.biletmaster.ro.