tg STAN
Tiago Rodrigues  The way she dies

Drawing upon a twenty year-long creative collaboration, the tg STAN collective joins forces with the author and writer Tiago Rodrigues in their shared taste for major works and a certain artistic freedom. With The way she dies, they revisit the mythical story of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s passionate and fateful heroine. In doing so, they pose the question of the power of a book to transform a person’s life.

Whilst it is true that the impetus for The way she dies came from a reading of Anna Karenina, the show transcends mere theatrical adaptation: what unfurls on the stage is not late XIXth Russia but the pared-down inner lives of two couples who have fallen out of love. One lives in Anvers, the other in Lisbon and, at the heart of their daily lives, feelings have waned and duplicity has set in. Tiago Rodrigues summons up the mythical heroine Anna Karenina, and interweaves her tragic life history with that of his characters. The passages read out aloud and quotations from the novel haunt the onstage bodies and spirits as they battle against each other. Literature invites itself into their daily lives, and the intimacy of their flailing love. The question is: how can a book change a life, in secret? With its backstage open for all to see, acting style verging on the real, sky-blue background and sparse set, combines tg STAN’s stagecraft with the poetry of Tiago Rodrigues. Flemish, Portuguese and French cohabit the stage space and unite passion and literature in a single score. The words of Anna Karenina in the distance become, thus, this contemporary voice, the memory of our readings and our loves.
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Running time : 1h40
Performed in French, Portuguese and Dutch with French subtitles