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YOUNG THEATRE CRITICS' SEMINAR IN NOVI SAD / May 27th - June 3rd 2007 |
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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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...52nd STERIJINO POZORJE FESTIVAL - REVIEWS / Young Theatre Critics' Seminar Participants |
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AMERICA IS FAR AWAY
Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse, John Kander CHICAGO | Terazije Theatre, Belgrade | Director KOKAN MLADENOVIC
The effective, visually and technically neat musical-stage spectacle is presented to us by the Belgrade Terazije Theatre with its musical Chicago, this time opening the Sterijino pozorje festival. An interesting phenomenon in an interesting context. Almost perfectly befitting Goran Markovic’s “state of questioning” expressed in his opening speech entitled “Why are Our Theatres Full?”. It was something about truth...
And, who is the greatest libertine of the city of Chicago, the Whore of Babylon? Are adultery and murder - shortly the deadly sins, our favourite things and why? Yes, they are, and we know why - because we are defined by our mortality and our sins more than anything else. We either have a good laugh at them or wholeheartedly sing together - drunk. Roxie, oh Roxie, “Bang, Bang”... You didn’t shot the sheriff, but an ordinary fellow, in this case a man, and they are generally labelled as dickheads in Chicago, which doesn’t go unnoticed in the director’s remark that, in that case, the prison wards are gay icons of the 1990s. But, also femen feminis lupus est.
So, a story from the turn of 20th century is well known: Roxie Hart is a girl in search of her own star on the Californian Boulevard of Fame, if we were to make an updated parallel to the 1920s Chicago - as it seems - a metaphor for Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, Gibson’s Apocalyptica, or what. Consistent to her name Roxie Hart is ready to do anything to make her dream true. On her road to nowhere in nothing, she finds herself in prison, newspapers, and the court of “justice”... Standing in her way, on the very same road, there is Velma Kelly, a woman, no less, probably partly because (arrogant) men get killed in Chicago on regular basis.
However, Kokan Mladenovic’s story, with all that jazz, is more of a rock them and waste them.While the first part exploits the full potential of the ensemble, the orchestra, the music (all the best for communicative, cooperative work of the orchestra led by Milan Nedeljkovic), songs (Sing and Be Merry!) and definitely the choreography by Mojca Horvat (in the conventional style of Broadway, dynamically and dramaturgically more active, with certain remarkably creative solutions, easier in order to accommodate the performers) - pure play - the second half (the trial and outcome of an always new shooting star) is amply used by the director to underscore his main points. Compared to the Western physiognomy of things - (far away is ...) “America” - we are forced to give stars a showbiz crucifix to carry, probably as a symbol of the very well-known cliché: yes, it’s hard for us, brother, bro, sister, capish... The media, lawyers: devil’s apprentices. Why? Business, dough. And Justice? Just like politics - it’s a whore. Perhaps it is a legitimate thing, considering the comet-like, fading nature of the universe of stars. What stays resonating is a lament for decency, but they cry out for niceness to no avail. That’s why Mladenovic, by stylising in a humorous way the already humorously translated text (Marija Stojanovic), consistently follows the author’s smart idea that populist “tabloidisation” of the text, in a provocative form such as the musical, parodies something that needs nothing to make it a parody on the verge of believable.
The Master of Ceremonies, as interpreted by Miroljub Turajlic, is a spice of every scene and remarkably makes a distance from reality, offering a spectacle on the silver platter. Retro iconography of the set designed by Marija Kalabic and provocative “Charleston” costumes by Lana Cvijanovic rise the temperature of the show leaving a strong, in colours even minimally reflected impression of a mise-en-scène, covering (Roxie Hart’s) Sloboda Micalovic’s boldly little green dress and her somewhat more experienced “opponent” Ivana Knezevic (Velma Kelly).
Billy Flynn brought by Dragan Vujic is nonchalant, correct in his performance, but questionably (un)able to project the depth of the message “the world is a circus” and his own motives (cash, business). On the other hand Amos Hart played by Nikola Bulatovic is the coolest character of all - naïve and sincerely close, so necessary for “us” to find someone to relate to. It’s no wander that he is exploited more than decency allows.
All the best for the “journalists, jury members and citizens” too, as well as for the dance troupe, for a concentrated, uniform and rounded-up performance in all aspects; for a similar function the same goes for the choir and orchestra of the Terazije Theatre.
 Igor BURIC, Serbia (Translated by Lidija Kapicic) |
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ALL SHADES OF BLACK
Jean-Luc Lagarce ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD | The Little Theatre "Dusko Radovic", Belgrade | Director VLATKO ILIC
The play Only the End of the World, after the text by the French author Jean-Luc Lagarce, in the daring and original graduation production of Vlatko Ilic, offers a surgically precise cross section of a bourgeois (middle-class mentality) family with all its shortcomings. For those who failed to understand something - the “prodigal son” Louis returns after a long time to his family home to announce to those gathered htere that he is dying. And what he finds in the “warm family nest” is a network of codified, cemented relationships in which the family live without any live communication, although they constantly talk about each other. The decision not to make the tragic announcement after all in such circumstances - is the only logical thing to do. This would make absolutely no difference, no essential change except for an obvious twitch of a participant in the drama...
There is also benign envy of the elder brother Antoine (Bojan Lazarov) which escalates as the play nears the end; there is the character of the overwhelmingly slow mother (simply perfect Jelica Vucinic) who seeks constant attention; the sister-in-law Katherine (Dusica Sinobad) whose sense of not belonging and being rejected by the group is marked by a simple fact that she will never be able to be on the first name basis with her mother-in-law. Such is the family circle of Louis (Mihailo Ladjevac), who was absent for many years, and his sister Suzanne (Snezana Milojevic), who is seemingly the only one whose unconditional support he enjoys, but whose attitude is occasionally on the verge of pathological and latently incestuous. It all happens in the horror of the minimalist stage set - hermetical, limited stage whose claustrophobia is only emphasised by the psychedelic, irritating, wannabe aristocratic pattern of the wallpaper (effective set design by Sinisa Ilic).
All the relationships in the play are marked clearly in a minimalist manner - constant coldness where a touch is so rare that it always has some specific meaning - when the mother caresses her elder son’s shoulder she actually demonstrates the power she holds over him, the territory she has marked as hers since the day he was born, an attitude evocative of the way parents treat a small child rather than an adult person. And within the realms of such family coldness, a problem pulsates movingly - the problem manifested in the sister’s twisted and awkward clinging on her younger brother, both of whom seem to be listening attentively to one another’s inner being trying to solve a problem of their long ago lost ability to communicate.
The treatment of speech has a special place in the play Only the End of the World - the stream of thoughts of all the characters is nothing but a bunch of intertwined sentences which reflect the fact that they have no consideration for one another. The waterfalls of monologue turn into forced dialogues, and the five members of the cast, thanks to their perfect discipline and concentration, turn the focus of the audience’s attention to the details such as the minutely developed tics which are not reduced to bare repetitiveness.
The style of the acting, characterised by a (German) distance, not only establishes the relationships in the play, but also the attitude of the cast towards the audience. Coldness and the lack of communication, together with the unbearable, ever present look down on things, which dominate the family relationships, become a characteristic of the way the play communicates with the audience. This becomes crystal clear when the cast takes a bow, not personally but “from their characters”. Still in the same poses, still with freezing looks.
The message is clear: this play is an attack on Belgrade mainstream repertoire, and the audiences with inclinations towards it are treated in the same way as the petit bourgeois characters from the drama. The audience’s opinion is necessary yet essentially worthless. A fortunate circumstance is that such an attitude is not a result of the director’s arrogance but rather the composition and style of Lagrace’s drama.
Bojana JANKOVIC, Serbia (Translated by Lidija Kapicic) |
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FRAGILE
Tena Stivicic FRAGILE! | Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana (Slovenia) | Director MATJAZ POGRAJC
Tena Stivcic’s drama Fragile moves all the common places of the Eastern European nightmares to London where we witness cohabitation of a Serb without a visa, an unaccomplished vaudeville star from Croatia, a Bulgarian café owner, a trafficking victim from Russia...
All of them are struggling for their own place under the sun in a society that treats strictly bureaucratically those people who are forced to come here by difficult circumstances in their home countries, labelled the Third World by Western Europeans.
Matjaz Pograjc’s direction pays a due respect to the text (in its integral version written in English) - unfortunately the fact which occasionally works against the play, driving certain scenes, regardless of the refined acting into neutral gear (the cast simultaneously play for the big screen, TV and stage, and had to perfect their pronunciation of Serbian, Croatian, Norwegian and other languages). The staging in which the streets of London and the rooms where the heroes work and live are completely substituted by fictitious structures and at the end by a short video footage, made in the real world (we couldn’t see whole of which due to some technical problems), support the thesis that contemporary Slovenia is, in comparison to other Balkan countries, the one which has come closest to a developed Western society, associative of orderly life and security. As it turns out during the play, these notions are only a pure fiction even in the West, so often dreamt about. And considering the not at least rosy position of ex-Yu emigrants and all like them in Slovenia today (the famous case of “the erased”), it becomes irrelevant if the heroes of the play are placed in a position of marginalised, socially ignored, and excluded others in one or the other part of the world.
The dominating feature of this play is definitely the technical one, i.e. the use of video. The director places his cast against a chroma-key background, the film equivalent of a white screen, thus making a debate on the location of the play irrelevant, as geographical facts are just a part of the backdrop. The problems stay the same everywhere - be it Ljubljana, London, or probably anywhere else. The footages of the actors and actresses in some neutral place are combined with the live footages of miniature scale models - and these two “films”, integrated into one, are projected on the big screen and several TV screens and, of course, the picture received is completely different.
While in the large format the small stories of insignificant emigrants almost come close to the Dogma films in character, on the small screens, they turn into a recognisable genre of cheap soap operas. And so, we follow a nostalgic TV series on the screen, a number of episodes that come one after the other while one-dimensional characters produce emphatic emotions. The intentional pathetic feature staged in this way is further strengthened by the lyrics of popular pop songs from the old Yugoslavia. This is a motif that we can often observe in a number of plays (for example the Belgrade production of Tracks after the text by Milena Markovic), and the pop music of the 1980s gets established as one of the basic symbols of the country which doesn’t exist any longer and one of the important segments of its identity. Yet, there is an impression that the play Fragile takes it too far: the songs come one after the other, until at the end they become their own ultimate parody (the lights over the audience are turned on, the actor in the role of Marko comes to the stage to sing a bizarre Slovenian adaptation of the song You Are in My Veins by Zdravko Colic).
Minimalism which seems to be the director’s choice on the cinema screen, on TV strikes us as a result of über- modest conditions of these stories, and the melodrama of the text, which occasionally falls short of convincing and spills over into pathetic, gets its justification: like it or not, Eastern European emigrants are material for stories which are just unconvincing enough that no Western European can take them seriously.
Olga DIMITRIJEVIC, Serbia (Translated by Lidija Kapicic) |
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EMMA
Géza Csáth EMMA | Hungarian language drama of the National Theatre - Népszínház, Subotica | Director PÉTER FEKETE
Children can be cruel. We all know that. Teasing the fat boy. Pulling a girl’s hair. But Emma, performed by the Hungarian language drama of the National Theatre, takes it to a whole other level.
Emma, directed by Peter Fekete, is based on the novella Little Emma by Géza Csáth. The performance tells two stories: the story of the drugaddicted writer and his wife en the story of a group of children. Both stories are strongly connected. The group of children are part of the imagination and childhood memory of the writer. In the beginning of the performance he brings them to life and is present during some of the scenes. Sometimes he just observes, other times he manipulates them.
The children are just ordinary children. They go to school, they play in the attic, they tease eachother. One finds a small white feather, another has a brand new knive that is taken from him by a class mate and a third takes a beating for not having learned the poem the class has to recite. The playfull innocence of the children is deceiving however. In the last part of the performance, the children are playing more dark games in the attic. They have a little chemistry (drug)lab and hang animals.
Fekete had constructed the play in a non-realistic manner. The structure of the frame story with the presence of the writer as storyteller reminds of the epic theatre of Brecht. Some of the scenes are staged in only music and movement. As the scene were one of the children plays dead and the others are appointed by the ‘leader’ to ‘wash’ the body. A poetic image which shows the innocent imagination children can have as well as the first hint of their dark and troubling fascination.
The audience is seated on both sides, facing the stage in the middle, which gives an intimate atmosphere and a feeling of ‘nearness’. The playfullnes and musicality of the children and the energetic acting of the performers give the performance a dynamic energy. The characters are not portrayed in a realistic or psychological manner, but tend to go towards archetypical fugures: the distant Father, the authorical Teacher, the innocent Child. Those are the elements that give the performance its strength.
Emma tells a story of the destruction of childish innocence. A destruction possibly caused by the adult role models, the Father/Governor and the Teacher. They show the children that violence and aggresion are part of everyday life. The theme is interesting, but the development from the playfull lifelyness of the children in the beginning to the more worrysome ´games´ in the end is not gloomy enough to be really dangerous. Maybe the staging is too nicely done to really grab you by the throat. Which makes that the statement in the performance is not completely clear. Are we ruining our children? Is authority and oppression to blame? Or are some children just by nature cruel to a worrysome extent?
Even though Fekete could have gone further to really make the dark side of these children more intensely tangible, the performance does bring questions about where childsplay ends and violence begins.
Erica SMITS, The Netherlands |
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ŒDIPE À BALKANWOOD
Milena
Markovic SIMEON THE FOUNDLING | The Serbian National Theatre and Sterijino pozorje,
Novi Sad | Director TOMI JANEZIC
Une croix chrétienne en guise de praticable, une guirlande lumineuse de forme phallique en fond de scène, voilà cette confrontation qu’on voit de prime abord.
Lesté par des ballons de baudruche, le berceau de Siméon l’enfant trouvé est recueilli des eaux tel Moïse par les Egyptiens. Pour lui, point de mère adoptive, mais une poignée de prêtres qui s’occupe de le faire grandir et en guise de nourrice, une attractive sauvageonne prête à faire tomber les soutanes. A l’heure de son adolescence, Siméon prend des allures de jeune éphèbe caravagesque. Se promenant nu, il semble émouvoir un moine condamné à l’interdiction du plaisir charnel. Le tout est orchestré par une musique sucrée et des chansons style comédie musicale. Cette première partie de Siméon l’enfant trouvé de Milena Markovic, mis en scène par Tomi Janezic, prend des accents provocateurs et âpres à l’encontre de la religion, cette ironie est renforcée par le contraste créé par la forme "bollywood" du spectacle. Toutes ces oppositions laissent présager une alléchante satire de la religion.
Mais hélas, cette supposition tombe à plat. Cette voie ne semble pas celle choisie par le metteur en scène. Et en fait, ne semble être ni son sujet ni son objectif. Sa démarche s’illustre plutôt par un trop plein d’images, une abondance de lieux scéniques, de comédiens, d’animaux, une hypertrophie des symboles et une sorte de zapping permanent qui noient le sujet de cette fresque se voulant épique. La guirlande phallique allumée tout au long du spectacle a bel et bien veillé sur Siméon: malgré une éducation très religieuse, il ne pourra échapper à son destin et couchera avec sa mère. Alors qu’on espérait une pièce parlant d’une perversité oscillant entre fascination et répulsion - rappelant l’intrigante relation malsaine et incestueuse explorée par Georges Bataille - la relation avec la mère est hélas expéditive. Tout est écrit, le cercle infernal est tracé et un ruisseau de sang sur la croix blanche nous laisse à penser qu’effectivement, le sang ce n’est pas de l’eau. Le spectacle prend donc un tournant d’illusion racoleuse; la forme en met plein les yeux mais le fond ne touche pas, voire agace. Les références sans cesse aux mythes d’Œdipe, Noé, Moïse ou encore de Médée fatiguent et se répètent. Le ton provocateur annoncé en première partie s’englue et laisse place à des successions d’effets: après le défilé animal (chèvres, oies, chevaux), succède le défilé mécanique (mobylette, voiture), on n’attendait plus que le bus... Dommage, on se retrouve face à un joli paquet cadeau bien emballé et tape-à-l’œil mais vide à l’intérieur...
Florence LE JUEZ, France |
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The circus histEry!
W. Shakespeare, Jan Kott The CIRCUS HISTORY | BITEF and The Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade | Director SONJA VUKICEVIC
I don’t like clowns! They are always laughing, many times without any reason at all! I find this strange, but also terrifying! I mean: “How can you laugh without paying attention all around you? Maybe I’m crying! Please, respect my tears!” On the other hand... “How can you laugh when you’re in sufferance, how can you do the same thing, all the time?”
Last year I went at the International Shakespeare Festival from Craiova, in Romania! I assisted a shakespearology meeting that had only one conclusion: each period we discover Shakespeare! There are some great writers who do this! For the romanticists for example is Victor Hugo, for the realists is Ibsen, and so on! For the twentieth century, it is Jan Kott who managed to show an unknown face of Shakespeare! In The circus history the clowns are crying! They are all so “humans”! There was nothing artificial! That’s why maybe I felt like I’m one of them! The characters are trying to find out the light but there’s only darkness all around them! The nature is evil! The world it was not created for them! They are all “fortune tellers” trying to reach the stairway to heaven! But there’s no way out!
I don’t know why we usually think that black is a funeral color! We should remind that white is the imperial funeral color! The skin of a man who died slowly is white! And then, we eat some popcorn - isn’t this ironic? In Sonja Vukicevic’s show I felt so much Jan Kott’s Great Mechanism, this way of “sweet self destruction” that keeps eating us, like some kind of worm! We all seem to die, without any reason at all! We try to plant the seeds of a new generation, but the Mechanism has poisoned our sons - he doomed our future - he leads us!
The characters kill each other! They believe in hierarchy: Superhumans and Slaves, strength and weakness, life and death - such foolish games! It’s all ash to ash, and dust to dust! The sweat is covering their faces - it is so hard to act, but the show must go on! Isn’t this what we are all doing? Keep living?
Of course, the spectators may eat, may even play games at the mobile phone! That’s the point: let’s keep pretending that everything’s just fine! It is not about us that they are talking!
And when I got to think that maybe the apocalypse could save them, I was wrong: “I die, you live!” - let’s start again!
...the same tragedy...
Alexandru STEFAN, Romania |
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SLAPSTICK NATIONALISM
Marius Ivaskevicius MADAGASCAR (MADAGASKARAS)
| The State Small Theatre of Vilnius (Valstybinis Vilniaus Mazasis Teatras), Vilnius (Lithuania) | Director RIMAS TUMINAS
Just dreaming of the sea often seems more tempting than to face the wet, cold reality of its actual waves. Its splashes of water tend to wake up the naive dreamer. In the show Madagascar, played by the State Small Theatre of Vilnius from Lithuania, this dreamer is Kazimieras Pokshtas, who from his early childhood sees himself destined to turn the faces of his fellow Lithuanians to a new horizon, to a place where they can reinvent Lithuanianhood: the Island of Madagascar. His story is told parallel to the story of the simple girls Sally and Milly, who have turned their faces towards their own sea: finding their true love and true adventure in the promising western city of Paris. In both stories the characters eventually have to give up their dream. In the case of Sally and Milly Paris turns out to be a place of sexual frustrated women and drunken men. Casimir’s dream is replaced by yet another utopia: relocating the people of Lithuania to the moon. Dreams, in his case, can only get better.
Director Rimas Tuminas choses to tell these stories in a style that reminds of slapstick and silent movies. In both genres, the characters rely on big gestures and overexaggerated emotions, and so do the characters in Madagascar. Especially actor Ramunas Cicénas shows his comic talent when playing Casimir as a smoking, book reading and rebellious baby. But also Leonardas Pobedonoscevas, playing the Lithuanian ambassador who comes up with the idea of using the moon as spare Lithuania, shows his talent for physical acting.
Tuminas choice for a burlesque actingstyle is a dangerous one. Being funny is difficult enough. Being funny in a physical way, is twice as difficult. The success of this kind of humour depends on precise timing, precise dosage, and precise choreography of movement. Although the young Lithuanian cast clearly are having fun, and although their enthousiasm is infectious now and then, they lack the precision to be the hilarious physical actors they are hoping to be. Apart from that: two hours of this exaggerated way of acting is a bit too tiring on an audience. It seems that director Tuminas is afraid the audience will get bored when there’s nothing funny happening on stage. He is forgetting that non-stop humour, without change of pace, or change of atmophere, can be even more boring.
And there is another danger in trying to be funny all of the time. The play, written by popular Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaskevicius, has a deeply political significance. One of the most recent countries to join the European Union, Lithuania has the same national identical crisis all member states have. Admission to the Union can seem like an utopia, a dreamlike sea that must be seen, and which will make your forget all your previous worries. But eventually being a member, it never is what you expected, maybe it can even be disappointing. Even more if one takes into account that many inhabitants of European countries - and undoubtly also the Lithuanians, but also the Dutch for example - feel like that they have to exchange their own cultural identity for a bigger, all encompassing European identity. How much of your identity do you give up to become part of this Union? These are interesting issues, but by treating it in an ironic manner as the State Small Theatre of Vilnius does, they lose their significance, because it tells the audience not to take them seriously. The lighthearted humour distracts from the real issues and they get lost under a nice and innocent icing. National politics are never nice. They hurt. This doesn’t mean that Tuminas should have staged his show as a serious tragedy. But a slighly better dosage of humour, and a staging that was a bit more balanced and precise, could have made Madagascar into not only a funny, but also an important political statement.
Robbert VAN HEUVEN, The Netherlands |
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THE DISEASE OF DISCONTENT
F. M. Dostoevsky UNCLE'S DREAM | The Serbian National Theatre,
Novi Sad | Director EGON SAVIN
While the demands of an audience change according to individual needs, as well as production, cultural and contextual considerations, one central requirement of theatre transcends all variables: the need to engage. Without that emotional investment, theatre makes as much sense as dining without eating. And while most audience members at last night’s performance of Uncle’s Dream were delighted by director Egon Savin’s theatrical gastronomy, it was quite apparent that the meal on offer was not to everybody’s taste.
Based on F. M. Dostoevsky’s 1859 novella of the same name, Uncle’s Dream centres on the dastardly ambitions of Marija, an overbearing snob who is desperate to escape the humdrum of provinical life. She hates her bumbling husband and despises her equally pretentious neighbours, dreaming only of social standing, money and life in Spain. Her ticket? Her beautiful daughter, who in her personification of parochial isolation presents a tragic shell of womanhood. Reluctantly, she is courted by the besotted Pavel, but when his uncle, a aristocratic duke of advanced years and questionable mental health comes to town, Marija sees an opportunity too good to miss.
It is apparent that Savin, who also adapted the text, just wants to tell a good story well. A noble aim and one in which he is not unsuccessful. The production is coherent, well-paced, and beautifully presented on a sprawling, austere set by Darko Nedeljkovic that does much to convey the sense of claustrophobia felt by people imprisoned not only by their geography but also by their mentality. If the play is the thing, however, the characterisation is a problem. There are some fantastic performances, particularly Predrag Edjus’ hilarious Uncle Knez - whose vanity and vulgarity exposes the deceit in Marija’s declaration that: “If there is anything noble... about society, it must reside in the higher circles”. But much of the cast is uneven. The pivotal character of Zinaida feels curiously underdeveloped. Certainly she is beautiful, but in Milica Grujicic’s manifestation, she is little else. Her rejection of the moral squalor of her mother and neighbours is conveyed by her physical posture, distance and stance, but the mettle of her integrity is unconvincing. In this production, Zinaida is a mannequin in both form and function.
Gordana Djurdjevic-Dimic’s interpretation of Marija is also problematic. Bombastic and lacking in nuance and depth, her performance was determinedly pitched at melodrama. Her motivations felt unconvincing, and while some point to her love for Zinaida as evidence of depth, her pathological affection felt more to do with what she represented (salvation) than who she was. Still, even though the acting may be a little too over-seasoned for delicate palettes, Uncle’s Dream is an inoffensive historical tragi-comedy that demonstrates the dark crevices of the human spirit.
Tamara GAUSI, Great Britain |
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management preserves the right to change
the schedule
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2007
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