Ömer and Romulus met in Romania in 2020, years before DOOMSDAY LOVERS was even a bad idea, and spent their time together doing what young theatre people transplanted into the Balkans tend to do: making things, playing things, drinking things, staying out far too late and developing the kind of friendships that don’t necessarily require knowing whether the other person will be living six months from now or not.

Eventually, Ömer announced that he was applying to Jacques Lecoq in Paris, a perfectly sensible artistic decision complicated only by the fact that he had absolutely no money to pay for it. He went through the admission process anyway, fully aware that every successful round was bringing him closer to a financial problem of his own making, until the school finally accepted him and the hypothetical problem became a very real tuition fee. Ömer responded by starting a GoFundMe; Romulus threw some money into it, wished him luck, and somewhere along the way they disappeared into their respective lives.

Five years later, both somehow ended up in Paris, carrying considerably more theatre and several countries’ worth of life with them. Ömer had made it through Lecoq, Romulus had made it through his own collection of questionable artistic decisions, and it didn’t take particularly long before they were back around a table concocting things together. The first was The Story of the Panda Bears, where Ömer spent nine nights opposite Juliette Castro navigating love, immigration, cultural misunderstanding, ghosts and the general difficulty of getting very close to another person without knowing exactly what to do once you get there.

That probably should have been enough romance for one collaboration, but apparentlynobody involved had learned anything. Five years after Romulus helped Ömer get to Paris without the slightest idea of what either of them would be doing there, they are now usingShakespeare to argue about whether two people should bring a child into a world of wars, burning forests, runaway technology and an endless supply of terrible news while dressing upas each other’s parents, priests, nurses and enemies along the way.

It took five years, three countries, one financially irresponsible theatre school, a crowdfunding campaign, several nights of Balkan drinking, nine nights of falling in love and the looming possibility of planetary collapse for somebody to finally realise what kind of people they had become.

DOOMSDAY LOVERS.

Somehow, the apocalypse had acquired a theatre company.