Breaking news – Première at the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia in June 2016

Ensemble Leporello (Brussels) and L’atelier Spectaculaire (London) launch Portable Classics, a series of European plays honed in Brussels and touring the world. Popular texts from Chekhov, Marivaux, Molière, Pergolesi or Shakespeare revisited by Dirk Opstaele. The simplicity of the empty stage, actors who act before they speak, and an ounce of music or circus. Accessible plays, performed in different languages, sur-titled when need be, and accompanied by rich theatre apps designed by Philippe Rixhon.

Portable Classics will be set in spaces – villages, towns and local communities. It will engage local professionals and amateurs in the discovery of the world of theatre and the work of a playwright.

We start in Naples with a rerun of The Final Party, a production of Ensemble Leporello and Angers-Nantes Opéra based on Chekhov’s texts. The audience is invited to a musical and visual journey through the universe of the great Russian playwright on an a capella score composed by Kurt Bikkembergs. The polyphonic thread guides the spectators on a winding path going – as in a dream – through fifty key scenes of Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. It is an introduction to Chekhov’s blues, its melancholy, its ardent passions and painful desires. Relationships, signs and gestures are interwoven like the phrases of a polyphonic partition.

We create plays by passion and commitment. Our work projects just and lively images of human nature; it represents its passions, humours and changes of fortune for the audience's delight and instruction.

- adapted from John Dryden

Indem wir das Theater ernsthafter behandeln, wollen wir das Vergnügen des Zuschauers nicht aufheben, sondern veredeln. Es soll ein Spiel bleiben, aber ein poetisches. Alle Kunst ist der Freude gewidmet, und es gibt keine höhere und keine ernsthaftere Aufgabe, als die Menschen zu beglücken. Die rechte Kunst ist nur diese, welche den höchsten Genuß verschafft. Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemütes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.

- adapted from Friedrich Schiller

El sentimiento del teatro es un acto de amor. Nuestro teatro se hace siempre por un sentimiento de fraternidad. Quien sea el poeta o la organización, el tono o el lenguaje, las grandes obras de teatro tienen en común un signo de generosidad, de coraje, de sensibilidad, de poesía y de bondad que son el secreto del teatro y de la vida.

- adapted from Louis Jouvet