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Directed by NIKOLA PEJAKOVIĆ
Dramaturgy RADMILA SMILjANIĆ
Set Design DRAGANA PURKOVIĆ-MACAN
Costume Design IVANA JOVANOVIĆ
Music PETAR BILBIJA
Stage Speech MILORAD TELEBAK
Assistant director
ALEKSANDAR PEJAKOVIĆ
Assistant set designer JOVANA ROMČEVIĆ
Premiere:
October 18 2008 |
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Jevrem Prokić |
ŽELjKO STJEPANOVIĆ |
Pavka |
NIKOLINA ĐORĐEVIĆ |
Sreta |
BORIS ŠAVIJA |
Spira |
LjUBIŠA SAVANOVIĆ |
Spirinica |
ANjA STANIĆ |
Ivković |
ŽELjKO ERKIĆ |
Jovica Jerković |
ALEKSANDAR STOJKOVIĆ |
Danica |
ĐURĐA VUKAŠINOVIĆ |
Marina |
NATAŠA IVANČEVIĆ |
Sima Sokić |
ZLATAN VIDOVIĆ |
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| NATIONAL THEATRE OF REPUBLIKA SRPSKA - BANjA LUKA (BiH/RS) |
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(...) The place and the role of the Banja Luka professional theatre (the only one in the Republic of Srpska, beside “The Children’s Theatre of RS”, also in Banja Luka!), which always (and today) was more than theatre of one town, its “title and call” to be NATIONAL, are surely the new coordinates, and it has be considered in terms of the programmatic, repertoire-wise and all the other aspirations of the local (and today’s) theatre workers. (...) Since the founding (by the act of the Governor Milosavljević on September 2nd, 1930), “National Theatre of the Province of Vrbas”, until its premiere (in the, for this occasion, remodeled space of “Sokolana”) on October 18 of the same year, almost fifty days had passed. It was founded as the second on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina (after the one in Sarajevo), it did not have time to form itself, take shape and affirm itself, and World War Two came, the period of Ustasha-German occupation, then the tribulations of the period of “the renewal and construction,” various miseries and the already traditional labeling of theatre art as a peculiar “luxury.” The decimation of the ensemble and the country we lived in went almost hand in hand, so we entered the year 1993 with only nine members of the artistic ensemble (eight actors and the set designer). And here, after the end of hostilities on our territories, again (without resignation!) we remark how, with the for plays, faith and hope, there are hurdles and trials in front of us. Luckily, we have overcome them and we will overcome them.
 Branko BRĐANIN, dramaturge of the NTRS |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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“People’s Deputy is meant for waiting, because the elections of deputy took place with many episodes, which served as an occasion for many arguments in the press. And thus the People’s Deputy has become impossible. In the piece there is a lot that insults deputies and government members. The people’s deputy, the main character in the piece, is shown as an idiot. Would that suit the deputies who are, just as this one, merchants, artisans, peasants? And when the deputy speaks: that he will in the parliament speak as he is told by the ministers in Belgrade (“ministers will teach him”), can that be accepted by the stage under the supreme control of the government? What government, which wise statesmen can allow this in an institution dependent on their supreme care?”
Milorad POPOVIĆ Šapčanin |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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As it is supposed to, even with some disarray and possible excess evidently consciously added polit-gender, metaphorical and other unfairness in setting certain characters, the comediographic hit of the old master set on stage in Banja Luka is topically sharpened, locally enlightened, mockingly hilarious, luckily not only in ambition but mainly in the realized stage sum. That theatrical totality, as much as of it there is, does not come down only to a compatible work of the actors, but also to the overall orientation of this play, with all the six irresistible fried piglets, animalistically onomatopoeic music and numerous other witticisms from the word-play sphere, usable immediately or with delay, if you are inclined to delay.
A play in which the rational and the irrational, totally typical and totally hyperbolic, somewhat slanted, harmoniously accompany one another, albeit through some large or hardly visible crease, still negligible when talking about the overall impression, the one in which nothing hurts and all is remembered, with entertainment and laughter caused by the excess of reality still very adequate for Nusic’s invectives.
Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL |
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| Nikola Pejaković was born in 1966 in Banjaluka, where he graduated middle and art highschool, and at 19 he moved to Belgrade and enrolled in the Faculty of Performance Arts, department of theatre directing. After studies he rarely worked as director in theatre, but when the road takes him to theatre, he does set design and costume and music - giving an absolute athorial stamp to the play. He wrote screenplays for the films Pretty Village Pretty Flame, War Alive, Clearing, as well as the series Storks Will Come Back. He directed TV series Solidary Brothers, and as an actor he marked all the three sequels of the film We Are Not Angels, The Heavenly Hook, War Alive, Ice Cold, Two Hours of Quality Programme, Tell Me Why You Left Me, The Fall into Paradise, Guča, as well as the TV series Open Door, Solidary Brothers, Black Gruja... He composes music for film and theatre. He recorded his first album “Mum, don’t cry,” in which he is the author of all the songs, the main vocal, he plays most guitars and certain piano parts. In Zvezdara Theatre he directed and played in the play Kontuzov based on the text of one of the greatest European dramatists, Hristo Bojčev. |
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Nušić is a great and modern writer. And, as such, great, he shouldn’t be touched without a great need. To take and extend his piece along the stage for the sake of filling the repertoire, actors’ vanity or for some other, doubtful reason, is pure nonsense and a sin towards the writer. I am a witness that in most cases his writing was used as a sure cash cow of the theatre rulers, Managers or Directors, who thought that Nušić is a patch used to mend every theatre sac. Some have also touched Shakespeare as well, and he ordinarily broke their necks, twisting them and pushing them back, into the embrace of their own mediocrity and artistic quadriplegia. Fearing my own directorial mediocrity (and I have been a cripple for a long time), and aware of this theatrical abuse, I entered Nušić’s world carefully. I was lucky I had him and these actors, so I somehow swam out to the surface and saved my skin. At least it seems like that to me, since we were invited to Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad... Nušić requires attention.
Nikola PEJAKOVIĆ |
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| Branislav Nušić (Belgrade, 1864 - 1938), alias Ben Akiba. He studied law in Belgrade and Graz; served at consulates of Kingdom of Serbia and founded and managed theatre companies in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Skoplje and Sarajevo. As a youth, he was engaged in journalism and founded and edited numeous gazettes and journals. He received the title of an academic of Royal Academy of Science in 1933. His works predominantly belong to the period of realism, but in his plays he follows in the vein of Kosta Trifković and Jovan Sterija Popović. He wrote bourgeois plays and drawing-room comedies (It Has To Be So, The High Seas, An Ordinary Man, The First Trial), whereas his greatest success were comedies about bourgeouis society of Srebia at the turn of the century. In a houmouristic and satiric way, he addresed the themes of government, the flipside of parliamentarism and primitive beaurocratism: People's Deputy, Suspicios Character, Protection, Madame Minister, A Bereft Family, The Deceased, Authority (unfinished). He also wrote fairy tale like plays Lilly and Pine, Eternity, A Woman With No Heart. As a writer of fiction, he wrote a series of stories in the collections of Tales Of A Corporal, Leaflets, Ramadan Nights, feulltones in three volumes under the title of Ben Akiba, autobiographic and memoir works entitled Nineteen Fifteen, about the retreat of Serbian army and people to Greece via Albania, travel reports from Kosovo, and the witty Autobiography. |
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(...) Nikola Pejaković chose the way of travestying Nušić’s world and, strangely, this very procedure allowed the director to put the sign of equality between the spirit of Nušić’s time and the time we live in. (...) That was the celestial moment which Željko Stjepanović used to show, by playing Jevrem Prokić, the virtuoso strength of his creative being. All the interior creative powers burst like geyser from him and he succeeded, almost unstoppably, to last on the stage in his impressive creative excitement. He managed to dissolve the visual armor of his character and to lift all his significant potentials to the boiling point, to the magical. Speech and movement blended into unity, one component was in the service of the other, they incited one another and did not allow this artist to stop, to forget himself, to take a breather in his creative impulse. He turned into a spasm, his speech sometime became a cry of human impotence to reach the other shore, the expression of his face changed, his inflections turned into a metaphor of excitement, the tone scale of his speech grew into a musical cascade. Jevrem Prokić has lost every kind of folkloric dimension of himself and thus became a modern interlocutor of the contemporary theatre.
Vojislav VUJANOVIĆ, 25th Theatre Festival BiH Bulletin, Brčko District, November 2008
(...) The toilet paper roll wrapped into a poster is in fact a starting symbol in the understanding of the conception of the Banjaluka play, if one adds to that the fact that the poster is done in the now already classical manner of the election candidate presentation on this politically volatile Balkan soil, a primary vision of understanding theatrical poetics offered by the People’s Deputy interpreted by NPRS is acquired. (...) Like grotesque characters of the cult comic strips in the former Yugoslavia, “Alan Ford,” or “The Tarana Family,” a series of freaks crippled by politics, or political engagement, parades in front of us, and is there anyone in these parts who in the period since 1883 until today has not been damaged by the action of this “immeasurable power”? (...) The transformation of characters, who thereby acquire completely different functions, served the director to defend his conception as an extremely engaged satire that grows into a hyperbole from which an extreme grotesque can be read. We find the hyperbole in the fact that Jevrem Prokić is not a merchant, but an illiterate butcher who distributed the meat of dead animals to the military, by which a different angle of looking at other protagonists was achieved. Thus an added refrain in the expression of actors is often heard: “to slaughter,” “I will slaughter you,” and that kind of “butcher” reality made another postmodern paraphrase in the music domain possible.
Aleksandar-Saša GRANDIĆ, 25th Theatre Festival BiH Bulletin, Brčko District, November 2008
(...) Pejaković’s set is, according to the form, comical, and according to the contents - more than serious, it is a grotesquely simple play, with full gas, farcical over the top, colored characters to whom defeats suit well. In general, it does not offer caricature portraits of today’s politicians, it does corresponds to current politics, but only as much as we see in it ourselves, as much as we want to recognize it. His gallery of characters, the merry-go-round of caricatures and various features of characters we daily encounter, characters who get idée fixes to rule... they think time has come for them to say a few important words, and they decided to show their little teeth, and, what is most dangerous, those are the same people who would like to determine the fates of people and states, to turn the wheel of history. (...)
Dragoljub VASIĆ, 25th Theatre Festival BiH Bulletin, Brčko District, November 2008 |
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