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Directed by JOVAN GRUJIĆ
Artistic Director of the Project
NIKITA MILIVOJEVIĆ
Set Design SAŠA SENKOVIĆ
Costume Design MOMIRKA BAILOVIĆ
Stage Movement IVAN JEVTOVIĆ
Premiere:
August 10th 2008
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CAST |
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Rosencrantz |
MILjAN PRLjETA |
Guildenstern |
JUGOSLAV KRAJNOV |
First Actor |
IVAN TOMAŠEVIĆ |
Hamlet |
VLADIMIR ĆIRKOVIĆ |
Ophelia |
ANĐELA STAMENKOVIĆ |
Claudius |
ZORAN ANDREJIN |
Gertrude |
MARINA CINKOCKI |
Polonius |
DRAGAN ZORIĆ |
Traveling Troupe |
Predrag Damnjanović, Petar Milićević, Mladen Sovilj,
Miloš Jelisavac, Radan Vilotić, Stevan Piale |
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The theatre located in the Evangelical Church that never was near Bajloni Market was founded by theatre festival BITEF in 1989, twenty years after the festival itself began.
The Church, built during the Second World War, was never used as a place of worship. It was never completed, nor consecrated, so the city authorities decided to use this space as a theatre. BITEF theatre stages plays every October, but also puts together its own repertoire, while continuously cultivating alternative theatre and diverse theatre expression. “The art starts where certain mysterious and unknown forces collide within a man and time. I am happy that Belgrade will become a place where artists and audiences are going to try to reach within the secret of human existence”, said Mira Trailović, the force behind the Belgrade Festival and its theatre, speaking at the opening of BITEF on 3rd March 1989. Threatre Director Nikita Milivojević has been BITEF’s art director since 2005. He says that a good alternative theatreis beneficial for the complete theatre environment. “We still prefer institutions and I am in favour of alternative theatre in terms of it being bold enough to try, to take risks. BITEF is such place for me - creative, different, fostering different opinions, challenging, etc. It’s a good thing that somebody remembered to create something like this.”
Milivojević continues: “BITEF has gone through different phases during its development. If we observe it as an idea, then we can consider it a vision. You have to have a place where you are trying to establish a different way of thinking. We are opening another Bitef within BITEF. This is a new off scene that is going to be opened in May.” The 20th anniversary of BITEF Theatre was marked by a premiere performance of a Nikita Milivojević play called ‘Winter Gardens’ (“Zimske bašte”) on 3rd March. The play, which is co-produced by BITEF Theatre, the Venice Biennale and Berlin’s Festspiele, had its world premiere a week earlier - on 25th and 26th February at the Venice Biennale.
“The idea behind BITEF is that the theatre takes part in various co-productions with different theatres and festivals. This is why BITEF exists and differs from other theatres in this city.
 Nikita MILIVOJEVIĆ - Jelena JOVANOVIĆ, CorD Magazine, April 2009 |
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Youth Theatre has two stages: the children's stage and the evening stage. Its ensemble consists of sixteen permanent characters.
The Puppet Theatre, held in September 1931, was the first play performed in Youth Theatre. Over the next few years, a steady turnover of puppeteers continually renewed the group. As their reputation grew, they began to work with resources of better quality. The company played not only on the main stage in Novi Sad, but also often toured around the province of Vojvodina. Plays were performed on Sundays, the only day the audience was unoccupied and able to attend. Tickets were very cheap, and the group often offered performances free of charge.
Youth Theatre was closed during World War II. Afterwards, it reopened under the new name of "Vojvodinian Puppet Theatre". Unfortunately, circumstances were difficult because of the large number of puppets and equipment which were lost or stolen during the war. However, the manager of the Serbian National Theatre, then called the Vojvodinian National Theatre, provided his support to help revive the company.
Soon after, the theatre changed its name to "City Puppet Theatre". From 1952 to 1968, it was simply called the "Puppet Theatre". In November 1968, its name changed again, this time to Youth Theatre, which has remained since that time. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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| ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD |
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard, first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[1] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The main source of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time.
The title is taken directly from a passage by an ambassador in the final scene of Hamlet that is quoted in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play concerns the misadventures and musings of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet who are childhood friends of the Prince, focusing on their actions with the events of Hamlet as background. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is structured as the inverse of Hamlet; the title characters are the leads, not supporting players, and Hamlet himself has only a small part. The duo appears on stage here when they are off-stage in Shakespeare's play, with the exception of a few short scenes in which the dramatic events of both plays coincide. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are used by the King in an attempt to discover Hamlet's motives and to plot against him. Hamlet, however, mocks them derisively and outwits them, so that they, rather than he, are killed in the end. Thus, from Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's perspective, the action in Hamlet is largely nonsensically comical. |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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What we call metatheatre most often in practice means playing with confinements, logically marked contours of theatric, and every other art, sense, even of life and their widest context of the visible on the stage. Stoppard’s clever and fabulous Hamlet sequence and that what in the chosen sequence he intellectually added following the theatre of the absurd and existential drama can be the object of those kind and various different observations, but it is also clear that it is a matter of the dramatically extremely powerful mix of the masterful and creative, also a great theatric challenge for which we did not have too many answers.
Emptiness of that kind is very well filled by Jovan Grujic's play, marked by little mishaps originating from the co-production/ambience sphere, but also by the excellent tandem play by Jugoslav Krajnov and Milan Prljeta who, without flaw or fear, tried to equal the performances of Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in the cult film by the same name. Using profusely the motif of the traveling actors’ troupe, Grujic, with certain absurdist, burlesque measure, contrasts the theme of the evil, distorted epoch in which heroes and their parodist counterparts are equally unsuccessfully searching for their place under the sun.
That would be the best part of the play, if it weren’t for the beautiful Cortanovci frame of real nature and firm walls in the dusk that swallow everything around except for the attention of spectators and the rhythmical, lively play in which Stoppard’s model is exemplarily well placed.
Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL |
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Jovan Grujić (Kovin, 1972). Graduated theatre directing at the Art Academy Braća Karić in the class of Professor Nikita Milivojević and Professor Anita Mančić.
He led theatre workshops: the acting school in Indjija and in Kovin (since 2004).
He was assistant to Nikita Milivojević in plays Tesla by M. Crnjanski (2005) and The Unrewarded Love Effort by W. Shakespeare (2007).
During 2006 he realised two prominent works as a director: Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy by W. Gombrowicz at Bitef Theatre (graduating play) and Othello by W. Shakespeare at Boško Buha Theatre. |
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IN THE PLAY OF THE BIG PEOPLE, THE LITTLE PEOPLE SUFFER ... |
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“We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current,” is the sentence Guildenstern pronounces at the end of the piece, which describes his awareness that he basically does not know anything, that life and events are sliding away from him in an unknown direction, that signs he followed cannot bring him to a solution.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two supporting characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are this time, led by the skillful hand of Tom Stoppard, set in the position of main characters. However, this is only an illusion, Stoppard keeps Shakespeare’s direction and does not change their fate, he only changes the situations. They remain supporting characters, determined to make only a few moves, only what is given to them, not managing in the chaotic world in which they found themselves, not having the key nor the connection. Denmark is the unstoppably sinking ship - “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” - it is breaking at seams, times are really bad! That is the real surrounding of the two main heroes, in fact the main supporting actors, in which they try to connect the threads, unaware at any time of the seriousness of their plight. Thus the comicality and absurdity of the event in which they are found is increased. Suffering from the lack of information, they are constantly found on the seesaw between reality and fiction, and their effort to penetrate the essence, understand and explain what is happening around them, creates a tragicomic effect which, as always, leaves a bitter taste in the end. Isn’t the revelation that we do not determine our own fate, that it is only an illusion that we hold the threads in our own hands and that we all are “part of some larger movement,” bitter? In essence, the tragic comedy of the situation in which Rose and Guil found themselves, is the same as the tragic comedy and farce of our time. We cannot predict anything, except that we cannot predict anything. There is no answer. Only questions.
We are interested in the ordinary person, the one we daily meet on the street, in a shop, on the bus, the person with his/her little and great ambitions, wishes, avarice, cravings, the person who thinks his opinion and decisions are important, and they are not, the person who refuses to understand that “when the big people play, we little people always suffer.”
Jovan GRUJIĆ |
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| Tom Stoppard (Tomáš Straussler, Zlin, Czech Republic, 1937). Although born in the Czech Republic, he has been living in England since the age of nine when he emigrated with his parents. Having abandoned schooling, at 17 he started working as a journalist, and then as a freelance theatre critic. Soon he started writing plays for theatre himself. (Enter a Free Man, The Real Inspector Hound, After Magritte, Jumpers, Artists Descending a Staircase, Born Yesterday, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Night and Day, 15-minute Hamlet, On the Razzle, The Real Thing, Rough Crossing, Dalliance, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Intention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Enrico IV, Rock 'n' Roll), radio and TV dramas. He achieved greatest success with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), which instantly placed him among the leading contemporary playwrights. Translated plays by other authors: Mrozek, Nestroy, Schnitzler and Havel, and occupies himself with writing screenplays (better known here: Three Man in a Boat, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, The Russian House, Shakespeare in Love). He received Oscar in 1999 for best screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love (1998). |
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On the Ruins of the Mind
Starting from the characters and motifs from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tom Stoppard wrote in 1966 the text Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a grotesque farce interpreting aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedy in a very characteristic, absurd, ironic, pseudo-philosophical manner. Maybe even more than to Shakespeare, Stoppard is indebted here to the imagination of Samuel Beckett, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also represent the rather inspired replicas pronounced by Vladimir and Estragon from the anti-drama Waiting for Godot. One of Beckett’s first works, this text decisively reveals the extravagant talent of the author who unceasingly, persistently and ironically plays with the dramatic tradition (from Elizabethan, though the salon comedies of Oscar Wilde and the poetic drama of T.S. Eliot, to Pirandello’s theatricalism and Beckett’s minimalism/existentialism).
The play directed by Jovan Grujić was performed in the open, ambience-filled, very adequate space of “Villa Stanković” in Čortanovci, whose impressive medieval style perfectly integrated into the substance of the play. The director succeeded in persistently transferring the stylistic and conceptual multi-layered nature of the text. The protagonists, Rosencrantz, (Miljan Prljeta) and Guildenstern (Jugoslav Krajnov), are set accurately, complexly, realistically, psychologically, with nuance, through which, on the one hand, that tragedy was convincingly shown. Their position as manipulated marionettes was clearly depicted, as well as their defeating constraint to oblivion and lack of consciousness. With the drastic slowing down of certain scenes and the insistence on the frequent presence of a dense, metaphorical void in their communication, the multi-layered Beckettian feeling of uneasy relativism was also created. Thus, with complex characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard’s dramatic ambivalence, subversive irony and imminent philosophical skepticism was adequately realised.
All the other characters in the pay are simpler, they are clearly set on stage, also in accordance with the demands of the text. With such, extremely plastic acting, a functional, entertaining, but also analytical distance from Shakespeare’s narrative, was established. Claudius (Zoran Andrejin) and Gertrude (Marina Zubić-Cinkocki) are conceptualised stiffly, mechanically. With their grotesque nature they recall Jarry’s royal couple, and with their infantile features - the protagonists of Buchner’s satire Leons and Lena. Vladimir Ćirković, convincingly caricature-like, performs in the role of the washed-out Hamlet, Petar Milićević plays the confused Horatio, Dragan Zorić - Polonius, Anđela Stamenković - the insane Ophelia. The mosaic of deformed reflections of Shakespeare tragic characters was effectively formed.
Ivan Tomašević, as the leader of the traveling acting troupe, also suggestively embodied the typical Shakespearean, critical view of theatre. He was playfully joined by Predrag Damnjanović, as Alfred, as well as Mladen Sovilj, Miloš Jelisavac, Radan Vilotić and Stevan Piale in the extremely fake roles of traveling actors. Their plastic performance poses questions about the meaning of theatre, its esthetic, entertaining, political functions.
In the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Jovan Grujić, Stoppard’s concise, destructive philosophic irony convincingly speaks out. The writer’s intellectual humor was truthfully conveyed as the means for placating the desperation connected to the unbridgeable existentialist dilemmas and unrests, but also concrete political circumstances. The play, as well as the text, is constructed on the ruins of the mind, it digs in the marsh of paradox and nonsense, in order to find there, perhaps, the roots of faltering logic, the lost sense and some kind of answers.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, August 2008 |
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