Tudor Romulus Licu is a Romanian stage director, playwright and dramaturg whose work has developed between contemporary writing, devised theatre, cinema, live music and, increasingly, emerging technologies. Trained in directing at the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, he began making theatre as a teenager before entering Romania’s institutional theatre system, assisting at the National Theatre of Bucharest and eventually making his professional directing debut at the Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu with Terminal Generation, his first work on the apocalypse, created with six playwrights and selected for the Sibiu International Theatre Festival after winning the theatre’s Manifest for Dialogue open call. The production later received the Iulian Vișa Prize, which was a perfectly respectable beginning to what would become a progressively less respectable series of decisions.

His work keeps returning to people attempting to love, communicate and remain human while larger systems make this unnecessarily fucking difficult: migration, political fracture, language, technology, collective memory, fear and the increasingly absurd business of living through history while history is still happening. After working across theatres in Bucharest, Sibiu, Galați and Constanța, Romulus moved to Paris in 2025 to study Mise en scène et dramaturgie at Université Paris Nanterre, and this is approximately where the relatively orderly version of the story begins to fall apart. He directed Matei Vișniec’s The Story of the Panda Bears Told by a Saxophonist Who Has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt and put Juliette Castro and Ömer Faruk Ertuğrul together onstage, partly because Ömer was an old friend from his Romanian years and partly because Juliette, whom he had just met at Nanterre, appeared to possess exactly the dangerous mixture of circus body, philosopher brain and theatrical recklessness the situation required. They fell in love for nine nights, became ghosts, survived, and everybody involved somehow concluded that the responsible thing to do was give them Romeo and Juliet.

Meanwhile, Romulus’s own understanding of “professional development” was becoming increasingly questionable. He went to London to bury himself in Shakespeare at LAMDA, then to the mountains of Japan to spend two weeks stomping, sweating and screaming his way through Suzuki training in Toga, which is where he met Kian Dillon, an Australian producer and theatre-maker with enough large-institution experience to recognise a terrible idea and enough dirty DIY instinct to help make it happen anyway. They discovered somewhere between the mountains and the aching thighs that they shared an appetite for theatre that was physical, obsessive, unruly and slightly doomed, so naturally Kian eventually joined the operation as producer and THE VOICE OF DOOM. At roughly the same time, somewhere between Paris, Nanterre, Avignon, Helsinki, Cannes and Craiova, Romulus became closer Félix Pagès, an AI engineer who should by every reasonable metric have been the stabilising influence in this group, except Félix had already begun breaking bad and was considerably more interested in using his engineering degree to make radios talk, dead televisions hallucinate and algorithms crawl onto stages.

At this point the pattern should probably have been investigated. Instead, Romulus began bringing these people together.

The circus philosopher. The Turkish clown who crowdfunded his way to Lecoq. The Australian producer found halfway up a Japanese mountain. The AI engineer developing an increasingly intimate relationship with obsolete electronics. One by one, people who had previously maintained independent and at least partially defensible careers began appearing around the same table, while Romulus continued crossing borders, stealing techniques, corrupting classics and asking questions nobody had requested answers to. Shakespeare went into the machine, Suzuki went into Shakespeare, Vișniec went into Romeo and Juliet, AI went into cathode-ray televisions. And it all went onto the fucking stage. Félix started talking about technophany. Romulus understood him, which was the first major warning sign. Kian agreed to produce it, which was the second. Juliette and Ömer agreed to fall in love again, which should have triggered an international response.

Instead, they called it DOOMSDAY LOVERS.

Now Romulus is directing R&J vs THE WORLD, in which Shakespeare’s most catastrophically horny teenagers are dragged into the twenty-first century and forced to consider war, climate collapse, migration, runaway technology and whether producing another human being under these circumstances constitutes hope, resistance, selfishness or just the ancient human tradition of looking directly at the approaching meteor and deciding this might be a good moment to fuck. Juliette becomes Juliet and half of Romeo’s universe. Ömer becomes Romeo and half of hers. Kian hovers above them as a disembodied saboteur sticking her fingers into the machinery. Félix is somewhere behind the machinery actually rewiring reality. And Romulus, having somehow assembled all of these people in the same theatrical blast radius, remains in the middle insisting that there is, in fact, a dramaturgical structure to all this.

There probably is.

Unfortunately, he’s the director. He’s the director of the DOOMSDAY LOVERS.