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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 5th 2008 |
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WEDNESDAY - MAY 28th 2008 |
Grand Stage, Serbian National Theatre
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20:00 |
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Sophocles
OEDIPUS REX
National Theatre (Belgrade) |
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Adaptation and Direction VIDA OGNjENOVIĆ
Dramaturge MOLINA UDOVIČKI-FOTEZ
Professional consultant BOŽO KOPRIVICA
Stage Speech LjILjANA MRKIĆ-POPOVIĆ
Set designer GEROSLAV ZARIĆ
Costume designer BOJANA NIKITOVIĆ
Composer ZORAN ERIĆ
Translation GAGA ROSIĆ
Premiere:
October 20th 2007 |
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Oedipus, the king of Thebes |
IGOR ĐORĐEVIĆ |
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Teiresias, a blind prophet of Thebes |
PREDRAG EJDUS |
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Prime Minister |
BORIS PINGOVIĆ |
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Creont, Jocasta's brother |
NENAD STOJMENOVIĆ |
Minister Councilor |
NEBOJŠA KUNDAČINA |
A Cabinet Chief |
MILOŠ ĐORĐEVIĆ |
Jocasta, Oedipus's wife |
ALEKSANDRA NIKOLIĆ |
Messenger from Corinth |
DARKO TOMOVIĆ |
Laius's Shepherd |
BRANKO JERINIĆ |
TV journalist / Editor |
JELENA HELC |
Cabinet Secretary |
MILENA JAKŠIĆ |
Cabinet Secretary |
UROŠ UROŠEVIĆ |
Journalist 1 |
ANA STOJANOVIĆ |
Journalist 2 |
JELENA ŠKONDRIĆ |
Cameraman 1 |
STEFAN BUZUROVIĆ |
Cameraman 2 |
IVAN IVANOV |
Photoreporters |
Saša Tanasković, Gordana Perovski, Nebojša Đekić, Milojko Žižović |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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| ... a revolutionary, contemporary version of the classical text which places power and the attitude to power at the heart of the drama, transforming Oedipus’s destiny into a parable about a reformer’s fate... the main character becomes a contemporary politician, fast and resourceful, which finally kills him and makes him tragic ... |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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On the stage of the National Theatre in Belgrade, Vida Ognjenovic has carved up the mountain of tragedy such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King into seven appropriately short, impressive scenes whose tense and theatrically well-object oriented logic preserves - through ideography, icons, jargon, mime, material, procedural, and technological inventory of the recognizable cabinet/media drama – all the elements of the classical original model still powerfully alive, bringing them into conformity with the spirit of the time that we are currently spending and the space in which we spend our everyday existences. The doings of Hubris and fate are here in the foreground too, but the predestination speaks to us not only from a clear picture of the individual greatness of the hero who meets his fall, nor from the collective verbal gesture of the choir seen as an earthly receiver mirroring some higher force. The voice of the fate, in this spectacular play, just like in our current moment, is broken, delegated to a net of apparatuses of power and administrators who feel the premonition but fail to act with interest, they speak but fail to tell, except when, alternately, that is to say, simultaneously, they say »yes, yes« and »no, no«, like in the first, paradigmatic scene with the Minister Advisor and the Chief of Cabinet. Here, they are the ones who are given to speak first and to be first on the stage again and again - not Oedipus who is given the precedence in the original. They, like the force itself, know everything in advance, and he is yet to seek the truth, thus heroically failing to see it until the truth reveals itself in a tragically forceful way, from ‘the machinery’ which he has joined, only to leave it self-annulled and (self)blinded.
Into such re-interpretatively set polyloguous play, Vida Ognjenovic purposefully and logically introduces techno-prosthetic figures of video recordings and live interviews with the media and cabinet congregation whose characters have been given an effective written superstructure. There are also a few completely imaginary bravuras, while an important part of this consistently performed job, belongs to the destructive positioning of somewhat widened, reverse bon vivant, prophetic character of Tiresias. Contemporary stratum of the play is strongly emphasized by its horizontal cabinet-like ground plan with the strong, two-way symbolical vertical of the staircase (Geroslav Zaric), while the restrainedly expressive music by Zoran Eric serves the same purpose, as well as political-business costume of Bojana Nikitovic, and effective shades of light. And exactly fitting the demands of such a play, chiselled to the model yet still independent, in the roles are: Igor Djordjevic (Oedipus), Predrag Ejdus (Tiresias), Nenad Stojmenovic (Creon), Aleksandra Nikolic (Jocasta), Nebojsa Kundacina (Minister Advisor) and others, according to the space they were entrusted with.
Vladimir KOPICL |
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SOPHOCLES
Sophocles or Sofokles (circa. 496 BC – 406 BC) was the second of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived to the present day. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 120 or more plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form, namely Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus.
Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third character and thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot.
His birth took place a few years before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. His artistic career began in earnest in 468 BC when he took first prize in the Dionysia theatre competition over the reigning master of Athenian drama, Aeschylus.
Sophocles died in 406 or 405 BC, having seen within his lifetime both the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars and the terrible bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War. |
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(...) It is the overthrow of the tyrannos, of man who seiyed power and thought himself "equated to the gods". The bold metaphor of the priest introduces another of the images which parallel in their development the reversal of the hero, and whichsuggest that Oedipus is a figure symbolic of human intelligence and achievement in general. He is not only helmsman, ploughman, inventor, legisletor, liberator, revealer, doctor – he is also equator mathematician, calculator. One of the Oedipus'favorite words is "measure" and this is of course a significant metaphor: measure, mensuration, number, calculation – these are among the most important inventions which have brought man to power. Aeschylus'Prometeus, the mythical civilizer of human life, counts number among the foremost of his gifts to man.
Bernard KNOX, Sophocles'"Oedipus" (1951) |
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VIDA OGNjENOVIĆ
She graduated literature from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade (1963) and directing from the Faculty of Dramatic Art (1965). She began her post graduated studies at Sorbonne in Paris, and received her Master's degree at the University of Minesota, USA (1972).
In the 1977 she was nominated Head of the National Theatre in Belgrade and after that stayed as a director in the same theatre. As a visiting professor she taught at major Universities in the USA. She is a full professor at the Academy of Art in Novi Sad.
She directed more than 100 theatre performances also TV and radio dramas. She wrote many dramas which were staged and performed throughout former Yugoslavia.
For her work she received all the significant theatre awards: Sterija Award for the best text (Was there Prince's dinner?, 1991; Yegor's Road, 2001), Sterija Award for the best directing (Yegor's Road, 2001), Sterija Award for dramatization (Root, trunk and epilogue, 1984), October Award of Belgrade and Golden Wreath of the Festival in Sarajevo for directing (Mephisto, 1984, 1985), "Joakim Vujić" Award for the text (How to make Master laugh, 1998), Award from the Budva City Theatre for dramatic work (2007) and many others.
She published six books: Poisoned Dandelion Milk, An Old Clock (short stories), A House of Dead Scents, Journey into Travel Book, Adulterers (novels), and seven books of dramas. Her prose and dramas were translated into many languages.
She also worked as the Yugoslav (later Serbia and Montenegro) ambassador to Norway. |
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A Parable on a Reformer’s Fate
In our perception Oedipus is seen as an embodiment of success, a capable ruler who overcomes everything. The only thing he cannot overcome is other people’s envy. Plotting to overthrow him, they estimate that such a man cannot simply be killed, but has to be made disgusting to people. This is the very reason why, besides returning to the original myth, the starting point of the new Oedipus the King lies also in the historical fact, according to which Oedipus was actually killed because of the conspiracy which came as a result of his advocating patriarchy. The adaptation was preceded by an analysis of the texts on possible interpretations of the tragedy and tragic guilt, and although it can be linked to our circumstances, it is not a criticism of our society and concrete situations, but a criticism of the triumph of mediocrity.
Vida OGNjENOVIĆ
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Day Knows Not What Night Will Bring
(...) However, Oedipus the King is an extremely personal story. It is to drive a man mad; one cannot believe what might happen to him, what strokes of fate and higher forces he is subject to. Although warned, Oedipus reveals that day knows not what night brings only too late. Even to a mighty lord who rules over a state, it isn’t easy to be the master of his own life, his own fate. I have done everything to avoid and prevent an unfortunate, evil fate, doom, omen; to stay away from sin and incest; and yet, this bad lot befell me. I watched, I saw, but I failed to watch and see far enough. Knowledge is weak, fragile, especially the closed, burdened by power and governing, arrogant and conceited, political knowledge. How spacious, rich, opaque, vast, how only to a certain extent readable it is - the expense of uncertainty, ignorance...
A successful man is not automatically a happy, accomplished man. A politician, the one who rules and governs over others, is himself helpless before a wider, deeper and higher order of things, laws and the mighty power of the ‘king of chance’. As if the question reads: can a politician, a public figure in the language of power, with the nature of his own perception, be humanly happy even when he is politically successful?
Vida Ognjenović did not sway from the question thus posed, but she did not radicalise it either. Her play does not whisper, personalise, poeticise. It speaks the language of cabinets, announcements, television screens and ministerial public statements. She primarily articulates the miserable, distorted conciseness of politics, its mind, language, mise-en-scene, how it speaks and acts. A literarily, classically, often even epically disposed soul and temperament, in an encounter with the classical Sophocles’s tragedy, Vida Ognjenović is exemplarily economical, emotively balanced, critically mature and convincing.
Vida Ognjenović has taken Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King, modernised it and pushed towards the political drama of Sartrean provenience. It almost seems that in this drama of a search for the culprit, the drama of conspiracy, investigation and inquiry, even a Poirot would come in handy! Tense, laying down her cards one by one, step by step revealing conspiracy and truth which is no longer only political, everyday, public, but the other one as well, the secret one, hidden in the dark poet’s eye, in insight and hint. What lies in the heart of this intelligent and intriguing play is the confrontation of these two truths - one resolute and sealed off, political; and the other, further reaching, prophetic one, stripped of the external symbols of power.
(...) On a more general level, this National Theatre production points to the present political reality. Wrongdoings cannot be hushed up, buried. The unsolved ones poison life, plague, spread misery, deepen the negative heritage and memory.
Journalists, spokespeople, television, reports, press conferences and releases; the futilities, phrases, language, manner, the folklore of politics; a well-balanced ironical space and kingdom of crafty political logic and lexis; the ancient scornful view of the political spirit upon everything that is poetical and beyond reason. Igor Đorđević’s Oedipus speaks of power, guilt and duty energetically, passionately and persuasively, striving with all his force and skills to stay in power. Teiresias speaks of secrets and wisdom, ignorance and unpredictability, powerlessness. Where political power is excessive, unlimited, there the poetic, prophet’s truth stands little chance! Oedipus fails to see how he lives, for he thinks about how to keep the seat of power for ever! Without pride and in power, alive, silently and cautiously. It is never too late for sin. Teiresias is liquidated so that the rule over Thebes would stay without the influence of the clairvoyant and wise, those who see further and deeper. Vida Ognjenović’s play rationally and convincingly embodies the mise-en-scene, intonations, language, gestures, movements and drama of a political being locked in the current moment, deprived of the ability to understand those with different eyes, insights, knowledge and premonitions (...)
Muharem PERVIĆ (Politika, 22nd October 2007)
A Political Thriller
(...) Vida Ognjenović treats the two levels of the story equally: the issue of guilt, not in a philosophical or moral, but purely political sense, relying on the antic belief that it is better for people to take the punishment of the guilty into their own hands than to leave it to the gods. She leads a story about a political conspiracy, a net entirely composed of weakness the hero is unable to defy, because he is so much greater that he cannot even see it.
Ognjenović weaves a pure story, without sentiments, jettisoning all ornamentation, followed every step of the way by set designer Geroslav Zarić and costumes designer Bojana Nikitović. This political thriller is underscored by Zoran Erić’s music. We get catharsis at the end. At the very finish there is an emerging human cry of Oedipus and Jocasta, as well as the all-seeing blind prophet of Teiresias, in serious and moving interpretations by Igor Đorđević, Aleksandra Nikolić and Predrag Ejdus. The ancient Greek chorus, translated into premiers, ministers and secretaries has also received a serious actors’ interpretation of dehumanised pragmatism, against which, afraid as a warning, stands Branko Jerinić’s shepherd, his feet planted firmly on the ground.
Sanja GLOVACKI (Večernje novosti, 21st October 2007) |
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.The
management preserves the right to change
the schedule.
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2008.
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