BÉZNĂ Theatre

BÉZNĂ Theatre is an award-winning British-Romanian interventionist political theatre collective formed in rural Lincolnshire in 2013 by Sînziana Cojocărescu & Nico Vaccari, who make theatre to investigate societal inequalities & confront institutional & normalised violences. Pivotal to our work are close collaborations with activists & academics during field research, inclusion of communities in our process & emancipatory actions to enact lasting change. Our previous work includes:

CUNTHATE [URĂ], 2015, the first play in Romania to confront the relationship between patriarchy, rape and pornography; one of Romania’s first openly feminist productions. Prior to CUNTHATE a number of leading Romanian feminist organisations did not have policies on rape.

boyz and girlz, 2017, the first play in Romanian theatre history to expose rape culture and the patriarchal phenomenon of revenge porn in Romania, sparked journalists to investigate the phenomenon in high schools and faced resistance from the fundamentalist anti-choice Christian movement.

112, 2017, the first play in Romania to deal with femicide & to criticise the sexism within the police and emergency response teams. Two years later, in 2019, the case of a kidnapped teenager & the published transcripts of the girl’s conversations with the police mirrored the action and dialogue in the play.

VINOVAT,-Ă (GUILTY), 2018, the first play in Romania to explore the Climate Crisis, has been invited to play for the Romanian Ministry of Ecology to spark a conversation about policy and the Climate Crisis.

ILLEGALISED, 2019, the first piece of art in the UK to promote the term ‘illegalised’ or ‘to illegalise’, when referring to those affected by the UK’s immigration and asylum policies: a human being cannot be illegal, but laws and policies can illegalise them.

BÉZNĂ Theatre appears in the following books:
– Festival Catalogue: 10 years of Temps d’Image, produced by Colectiv A.
– Performing Freedom: Alternative Theatre in Eastern Europe after the Fall of Communism by Professor Diana Manole with Dr. Vessela Warner, IOWA UNIVERSITY PRESS.