Shakespeare has been a controversial artist for over 400 years. Sometimes he is the greatest ever, other times he is dismissed as an anti-Semitic misogynist who especially got a kick out of conceiving violent scenes. That's what Billy's Violence covered extensively. In the eighteenth century, people detested the violence and dark twists in his tragedies. Consequently, these were shamelessly rewritten. Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after! This inspired Needcompany to ask Victor Afung Lauwers to read the comedies and see what they can still mean in our time - a time of great controversies, vulgar polemics, cancel culture, structural racism, climate change, war. What is there left to laugh at? Is humour the coward's weapon or a form of activism?

"Following Billy's Violence, which dealt with tragedies, I was asked to write a comedy based on Shakespeare's comedies. I wanted to write about 'reconciliation'. It is a central theme in the comedies. But reconciliation proved impossible without love! So, I pulled Romeo, that 'star-cross'd lover', out of his tragic story and brought him to the place of our comedy: Fairyland. Fairyland, however, turns out to be torn apart and ravaged by fragmentation. Having arrived, Romeo loses his language. Henceforth, he speaks hybrid English, or 'Globish'. He goes in search of his beloved JULIET. But JULIET has been expelled from the Symbolic Order, from the edifice of narrative itself! Still, Romeo wants to fulfil his narrative destiny by turning himself aside: he wants to turn himself aside to overcome that which separates him from JULIET in death (primarily political divisions and global warming). But... Romeo cannot kill himself because he is in a comedy! Naked and isolated, Romeo must keep looking for love until someone ends him... That someone is Bolingbroke, later Henry IV from the King's Dramas. Romeo becomes Richard II and they share each other's fate: Romeo, lovingly disowned, and Richard, lovelessly deposed.

Billy's Joy: a liquid comedy, a 'HYSTORY', a battle of attrition. Something is rotten in Fairyland!"

- Victor Afung Lauwers