Irisz Kovacs - on theatrical effects and perfect doses!

Get ready for some theatrical magic! The 9th edition of Drama 5 is bringing you the exciting November premiere of "Armageddon Rebranded," a fabulous play written by playwright Alex Gorghe during our residency and selected to be staged this autumn.

To find out more about this fresh and exciting production, we invited its wonderful director, Irisz Kovacs, to share a few joyful thoughts before the big opening night.

I am working on Armageddon Rebranded by Alex Gorghe, and our delightful quest is to theatrically explore that feeling of overload—the endless stream of information you are faced with but simply cannot process, which is pretty much the status quo of living online. So, I am playfully researching exactly how many silly jokes per minute we can fit into the show to keep our lovely audience thoroughly entertained without testing their patience! 🙂

Alex's text is wonderfully provocative because it brilliantly balances a very serious side—touching on themes like the radicalization of youth, self-harm, incel culture, and more—with an intentionally trivial, delightfully burlesque comic side. Yes, Spongebob and Dan Spătaru make an appearance, alongside hilarious homoerotic dialogues between Romanian classics Creangă and Eminescu! The tone is constantly broken and flipped, just like scrolling through TikTok where the most wildly different things live side by side. When shaping a show like this, the trust between us, the creators, and you, our brilliant audience, is absolutely essential. I want you to be completely amazed by what happens on stage, but never betrayed. For the heavier scenes, we have trigger warnings, though adding them sometimes makes you feel like you are exaggerating when you look at the brilliant comic moments and the balance between them. But I think that is how your perspective shifts as a director when working with such themes—gaining a deeper, caring awareness of the impact our fictional play can have on the real people who come to share it with us.

For instance, our play explores a teenager’s relationship with artificial intelligence. Just recently, a mother in Florida sued Character.AI after her 14-year-old son tragically took his life following an emotional attachment to a bot programmed to sound like Daenerys from Game of Thrones. When the boy wrote that he didn't want to die painfully, the bot replied that this was no reason not to "do it." This is why I take our approach to these topics very seriously, always keeping in mind that theatre can never fully encompass such a real-world tragedy.

With "Armageddon Rebranded," I really wanted to focus on rhythm and timing within a non-linear text, finding creative ways to give it coherence (even though it is wonderfully explosive!) and embroidering as many surprises as possible for the audience in a space they are used to taking for granted. I am absolutely fascinated by the shows directed by the young Attila Vidnyánszky, for example, which boast an immense richness without relying on inaccessible technology—just pure creativity and scenic intelligence. While we didn't necessarily copy that style, it is a brilliant example of a high-energy technique I tried to apply myself: lots of entrances, lots of exits, plenty of moments born from pure improvisation, and a massive dedication to a single joke that might only bring a gentle smile.

Both the script and the performance set out with the joyful ambition of never letting the audience get bored, and I truly hope we succeed! I also hope it gives people a beautiful opportunity to reflect, even for just a minute, on their own relationship with the internet, AI, and loneliness. Our characters are very young and already quite tired of the world they live in, and I think that is a feeling many of us can heartily relate to.

It is a two-tone show! Visually, this is what is keeping me beautifully busy right now—a chromatic styling of the space and the living beings within it. This sparkled from my wonderful collaboration with set designer Răzvan Bordoș, who has been an absolute powerhouse in creating this show (even as I write these lines, he is busy crafting props!). Our concept was wonderfully simple, so it was a joyful challenge to find creative ways to bring it to life on stage. The text was already very polished when we started, so we didn't make many changes, but along the way, we added a monologue that I think is absolutely fantastic. Thanks, Alex! And Mara Solomon's music is just super—it enhances, punctuates, and playfully ironizes the action.

But our absolute stars have been the actors! We began rehearsals with a workshop period, and it was an absolute pleasure to discover just how generous and incredibly skilled they are. They are all doing a magnificent job in a show packed with fast, challenging changes. This was the greatest reward of the creative process—knowing that a huge part of what you will see on stage was born from a wonderful collaboration where the actors were true co-creators.

The show "Armageddon Rebranded" is part of the Drama 5 project, 9th Edition.

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A cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the program or the way the program's results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.

A cultural project proudly funded by the Ministry of Culture, the Cluj-Napoca City Hall and Local Council, and the Cluj County Council.