Synetic Theater

Hamlet (and Others) as the Strong, Silent Type
By PATRICK HEALY
January 21, 2011

WASHINGTON — For their first attempt at wordless Shakespeare — that’s right, wordless Shakespeare — the husband-and-wife leaders of the Synetic Theater company chose to apply their physical-theater aesthetic to “Hamlet,” counting on audiences’ familiarity with the plot.

In place of three-plus hours of verse, Synetic presented 90 minutes of highly stylized dance, movement, acrobatics, pantomime, music and story. “To be or not to be” was never uttered, but Hamlet stormed across the stage, gesturing to convey desperation. He and Ophelia never touched; their tortured attraction was reflected, instead, by the two actors’ bringing “their fingertips to within a hair’s breadth of each other,” as The Washington Post noted in its rave review in 2002.

Just a year-old troupe at the time, Synetic ended up drawing wide critical praise and winning local theater awards as best resident play for “Hamlet” and best director and best choreographer for the husband-and-wife team, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, who also played Hamlet and Ophelia. Since then Synetic has won many more local awards — mostly for wordless Shakespeare stagings like “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” — as well as a devoted following in this city and nationally among admirers of physical theater.

Émigrés from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whose style draws on the popular tradition of pantomime there, the Tsikurishvilis (pronounced T-SEE-koorish-VEAL-ee) have also been embraced by establishment theaters here.

“No one does what they do — not in Washington or, really, anywhere that I know of,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, who has advised the couple on building a theatrical troupe and provided performance space for some Synetic productions.

Read the New York Times article on Washington's Synetic Theater here.