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T h e...N A T I O N A L...D R A M A...A N D...T H E A T R E...S E L E C T I O N |
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Sterijino Pozorje Festival |
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Novi Sad |
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May 26th - June 4th 2007 |
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SUNDAY - MAY 27th 2007 |
Grand Stage, Serbian National Theatre |
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18:00 & 22:00 |
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Jean-Luc Lagarce
ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD
The Little Theatre "Dusko Radovic", Belgrade
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Director VLATKO ILIC
Translation JOVAN CIRILOV
Translation Reader LJILJANA MRKIC-POPOVIC
Set design SINISA ILIC
Costume design JELENA
MIHAJLOVIC
Premiere:
June 20th 2006
Duration: 50 min |
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Catherine |
DUSICA SINOBAD |
Antoine |
BOJAN LAZAROV |
Mother |
JELICA VUCINIC |
Louis |
MIHAILO LADJEVAC |
Suzanne |
SNEZANA MILOJEVIC |
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| The LITTLE THEATRE "DUSKO RADOVIC", BELGRADE |
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| Little Theatre "Dusko Radovic" is one of the most notable and most respectable theatres in Serbia, presenting on its repertoire the shows for children audience as well as for young people in general. Basic artistic orientation of the theatre is focused on projects that deal with educational, social and most of all urban topics. By introducing such issues as children's rights, tolerance (multi-ethnic, multi confessional, multi cultural), the right of being different, accepting and respecting differences into the vocabulary of Belgrade youth, we try to establish the cultural networking of children coming from different national backgrounds and living in Serbia.
In this way we try to direct it further towards developing diversity and tolerance as the assurance of future stability of modern Serbia as a multi-etnic and multi-confessional state. The theatre is constantly open towards new, experimental approaches of young theatre authors, giving them important and valuable space and resources to question their ideas. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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| THE OBLIVION WE SHALL LONG FOR |
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In his play “Only the End of the World” Jean-Luc Lagarce presented a most distressing and most tragic apocalyptic picture of modern man.
Through a subtle dramatic analysis of a middle-class family, “successor of French kings”, and through an analysis of their human and family relations, this great successor of Becket and Camus succeeded in deconstructing classical civil drama by introducing into it elements of modern drama - alienation, absurdity, absence of contact and communication - intensifying to the utmost the feeling of anguish, misery and death ...
We have in front of our eyes the closest members of a family who are, after many years, during a short encounter, desperately trying to recognize each other and become close again. But they do not know each other any more, they do not love each other, they are complete strangers ...
In this artificial encounter Lagarce has exposed the entire history and all myths of the modern world. He carefully selects and varies emotional and intellectual angles of vision. Scenes, pictures, moments, silence and words replace one another. Long monologues are followed by shorts dialogues. Lagarce suggests and deepens the feeling of complete loneliness and alienation in the given situation.
In this loveless world there is no need for a nuclear, natural or any other disaster brought about from without. Man is decaying from within in fear and in shivers. Without a scream.
This Lagarce’s imploring prayer, poetical oratory or whisper on his death-bed, miraculously shaped into a great and confessional drama, distressingly echoes throughout the universe.
In the end of the drama, he reminds us that life does not pass, but just elapses into oblivion that we shall long for.
Milica NOVKOVIC |
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REPORT
OF ARTISTIC DIRECTOR......
AND SELECTOR...... |
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In his play Only the End of the World, Jean-Luc Lagarce develops, just like every great writer, an authentic dramatic form which bears an essential connection with the topic and the meaning of the play. This middle-class drama about a young intellectual who returns to his hometown and who, because of uncovered family conflicts, does not manage to tell his immediate family that he is about to die, is dramatically shaped by long speech passages which block out any kind of communication, instead of enabling it. Young director Vlatko Ilic develops an extremely radical and daring concept arising from the form of the drama itself, underscoring and intensifying - in the spirit of the post-drama theatre - the gap between speech and communication by transforming the characters into some kind of speech machines.
Ivan MEDENICA |
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JEAN-LUC LAGARCE
Playwright and director Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957 - 1995) was one of France's most popular and prolific men of the theater before his death in 1995 at age 38. Author of more than twenty plays, director of works by Feydeau, Gozzi, Ionesco, Marivaux and Moliere, he was also artistic director of Le Théâtre de la Roulotte in Besançon. Lagarce was born in Franche Comté, on February 14, 1957. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Besançon and theater at the Conservatory of Besançon, where he wrote his first plays. From 1985 to 1995, plays and directing jobs followed at a frenetic pace. During the 90's many of his plays were helmed by major French directors such as Norday, Jouanneau, Py, Rancillac and Canterella. His plays were translated in German, English, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, and Arab. He won the Leonard de Vinci and Centre National de Lettres prizes.
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VLATKO ILIC
Vlatko Ilic was born in 1981 in Belgrade. By directing a play Juste la fin du monde he will obtain a graduate degree in Theatre and Radio Directing at the Faculty of Drama Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade. Since 2001 he has been collaborating with TKH (Walking Theory) Center and Journal for the Performing Arts Theory and Practice.
The choice of works directed:
Mila by Jelena Popadic, Bosko Buha Theatre, Belgrade, 2005; The Closet by Katarina Zdjelar, FIST01, FDU, Belgrade, 2005; Misssssssss K by Katarina Zdjelar, a radio piece, FIST01, FDU, played on the exhibition TKH&Think Performance, Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade, 2005; Crave by Sarah Kane, National Theatre, FDU, Belgrade, 2004; No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, April’s meetings, SKC, Belgrade, 2002.
Co-author and one of the performers on the projects: "IX Government Constitution of the Kingdom of Koreta", cycle of five performances (work in progress), co-author Vojislav Klacar; "The Dracula Project", group of authors, Theatre des Augenblicks, Kaiserliches Hofmobiliendepot, Vienna, Austria, Les Subsistance, Lyon, France, 2002/03; "Performing Gender", theoretical performance, group of authors, April’s meetings, TkH Centre, SKC, Belgrade, 2002.
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Only the End of the World after the text written by Jean-Luc Lgarce, is a play of ’social contracts’, their ’unsuccessfulness’ which is performed in front of/for the audience. The staging is based on speech mechanisms, behavioral matrices, that are offered as a more powerful motive power than the very motivation of characters. In the classical theatrical sense, the play is elusive, it remains unuttered, in indications or traces, in jerks, while what persists is the social order.
The staging of this play is founded on the principles of post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann), primarily of ’omitted interpretation’, that is ’abated semiotics’. The centre of the ’event’ is shifted from the stage into the field of dynamic communicational exchange between the stage and the audience, vision is activated, the spectator is the one who brings the performance to a close, the play demands constant ’framing’ with one’s eyes.
The procedure of the team of authors of the play The Very End of the World conveys a serious intention to re-articulate the local theatrical space, primarily to question the dominant ’presentation’ model, the ideology of an orderly micro-entity, along with closed social identities. A structure open to reading, disfunctional and inappropriate is offered instead.
Vlatko ILIC |
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Beyond tradition
Only the End of the World by Jean-Luc Lagarce is an extraordinarily interesting poetical-dramatic text, unique in its form, i.e. for the very well thought out relationship between the dialogues and monologues uttered by the characters, convincingly shaping the topics of this drama: provincial desperation, a lack of understanding between the people who are close family members, facing the past, etc. Therefore, the text is very challenging for stage interpretation - a fact amazingly skilfully exploited by director Vlatko Ilic, who has conceived a minute, minimalist play, made special by the uniqueness of the dramatic expression of the cast.
Dressed in black (costumes by Jelena Mihajlovic), almost immobile, in an empty room defined by its bleakly common wallpaper (set design by Sinisa Ilic), the performers shape their characters - the members of one family: Louis (Mihailo Ladjevac), who returns to his hometown after a long time, his brother Antoine (Bojan Lazarov), sister Suzanne (Snezana Milojevic), Antoine’s wife Catherine (Dusica Sinobad) and mother (Jelica Vucinic). Louis is more self-confident, superior and cynical than the other characters, who are all obviously miserable and sadly stuck in this provincial nowhere. Their speech - mechanic, absentminded, flat, frequently indistinctive and too fast – convincingly embodies the notion of a total lack of mutual understanding, i.e. the senselessness of their communication. The director underscores their distinctive psychic unbalance by their conspicuous tics: rapping with fingers, scratching, nervously playing with their rings... Among them all, for example, the character of Mother is a typical representative of this. The actress creates her character with a clear distance, manneristically depicting her forced, basically fake well-intentioned nature, thus exposing the true face of that kind of oily nice behaviour.
Only the End of the World, directed by Vlatko Ilic, definitely goes beyond the traditional dramatic theatre - a feature undoubtedly valuable in the context of Serbian mainstream production, determined by the domination of different versions of “well-tailored” plays and an occasional courageous experiment.
Ana TASIC (Politika, 26th June 2006)
Speech and other poses
(...) Vlatko Ilic develops a very radical directing concept, and on the contrary to what most of his peers do, he avoids imposing his concept upon the text, drawing it rather from the analysis of its dramatic form. He adds a theatrical emphasis to Lagrace’s gap between speech and communication, between speaking and understanding, by turning the characters into some kind of speech machines. Each character has its artificial speech structure - with speeding up, slowing down, fake sentimentality, mechanical breaks – thus avoiding, in the true sprit of Lehmann’s post-drama theatre, mimetism, narrativeness and psychology, introducing automated speech instead. By making speech independent and unusual, the director transforms all the characters into one or more social poses, cleansed from any individual, psychological content (for instance: artificial emphasis on the words they say and Sunday as expressions of middle-class faked modesty, i.e. middle-class glorification of a Sunday family gathering).
As an essential construction element of these poses, there are automated, obsessive postures and motions of body, alienated from speech, which show (bring to the surface) some of the social or psychological distinctions of the characters in a stylized, direct, even ironical manner: the feminine gestures of Louis’s body, probably infected with AIDS; the bourgeois fondling of the son’s hair and playing with rings; the young and rebellious daughter’s offensive stance... It would be very interesting to see, in a future theoretical discussion, if and to what extent these social poses match Brecht’s rather enigmatic notion of gestus. As these bodily postures are, in their stylized form, extremely static, they do not require much space, so the director and his set designer Sinisa Ilic have designed a small stage, only defined by sets with typically middle-class wallpaper and a matching carpet; the small dimension of the stage probably also comes as a result of a desire to make a close, almost voyeuristic insight into the broken idyll of a middle-class family. The accurate, discretely demarking costumes, stylized in black by Jelena Mihajlović, have a similar effect of purified minimalism. (...)
Ivan MEDENICA (Vreme No. 808, 29th June 2006)
The last play of the season brought us the largest, and I dare say, most pleasant surprise - the graduation play by Vlatko Ilic made after the text of the prematurely gone French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce. It is a play which offers a sharp analysis of a middle-class family and complicated interrelations in it, where the closest relatives fail to grasp the last chance to establish a human, emotional contact getting lost in a futile game of affirming their social roles which are surrogates for their non-existent identities. While we listen to the tirades which seemingly establish the social, societal and emotional position of a certain character, we actually witness the exposure of their miserable, senseless existences and we gradually come to understand why communication between the ones who are supposed to be the closest is actually impossible. Ilić has radicalised this line of the text to its final consequences by his directing technique, placing his actors and actresses, dressed in black, against a simplistic yet symbolical background, limiting not only their space but movements as well, at the same time accentuating the natural interrelation between the characters (making their alienation unbearable), as well as the claustrophobic air of their home. Everything happening in this simplistic space has a complexity of meanings; each pause, stammer and acceleration in speech, each movement made by the performers, stylized yet accurate and clear (as in a close-up) provides a new piece of information on the characters, their desires and ambitions, tells us what they feel for one another. Small signals have the significance of a decision - a change in the speech rhythm unveils the emotional void or impotence. Among the truly excellent cast, it is Jelica Vucinic’s remarkable rendition of Mother that stands out.
Sharp and furious, with the inspired cast and simple yet, for our environment, daring and uncompromisingly carried out concept, this play is the one which made the strongest impression on this text’s author in the last season. You must see it!
Boban JEVTIC (YellowCab, 8th September 2006) |
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.The management preserves the right to change the schedule
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2007.
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