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Director, choice of music
LjUBOSLAV MAJERA
Set Design JAROSLAV VALEK
Cosutme Design JASNA BADNjAREVIĆ
Premiere:
October 15th 2008
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CAST |
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Chichikov |
ALEKSANDAR BOGDANOVIĆ |
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Manilov |
LjUBIŠA MILIŠIĆ |
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Korobochka |
JELENA ŠNEBLIĆ |
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Nozdrev |
JOVAN TORAČKI |
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Sobakevich |
SELIMIR TOŠIĆ |
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Pliushkin |
DRAGAN OSTOJIĆ* |
*member of the National Theatre Kikinda |
Mizhuev |
ZVONKO GOJKOVIĆ |
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Mavra |
ANĐELKA DAVIDOVAC |
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Proshka |
IVAN ĐORĐEVIĆ |
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Chief of Police |
JOVICA JAŠIN |
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First Lady |
SANJA MIKITIŠIN |
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Second Lady |
NATAŠA ILIN |
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Secretary |
DRAGAN ĐORĐEVIĆ |
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Governor |
PRVOSLAV ZAKOVSKI |
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| "TOŠA JOVANOVIĆ" THEATRE - ZRENjANIN |
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The first records of theatre art with the Serbs date back to the 18th century and are associated with Bečkerek , local teacher Jelisejić and his amateur students’ troupes. In 1839 a grain warehouse was adapted into a theatre. The Bečkerek Theatre is one of the oldest playhouses on the ex-Yugoslav territory. The building was completely adapted and reconstructed in 1985. The theatre did not have a professional troupe for about one hundred years (it was a host of Hungarian, German and Serbian theatres), and since 1946 it has had its own company which operates on three stages: drama, chamber and puppet. The theatre was named after the famous Serbian actor of Romanticism, Toša Jovanović.
The professional puppet theatre was founded in 1956 and it produces four premiers in Serbian and two premieres in Hungarian language a year. The Drama and Puppet Theatres merged into the ‘Toša Jovanović’ National Theatre in 1975. The puppet stage performs about 250 shows a year, 100 of which on other stages, and it has received 200 awards at international and national festivals. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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The great writer caught in the character of Chichikov the new, mercantile tendentions of development. That's where such a role of money comes from. Chichikov, “our representative,” mister Chichikov, that rarely vital persona who does not choose the means to reach the goal - to become easily rich... Before the reader is a character gifted, inspired, whose gift and inspiration come from a negative passion. He is a robber, he uses dishonorable means, he gives to everything a form of decency, politeness and courtesy.
Gogol, nevertheless, reveals the interior contradiction between the real value, the essence of life of the Russian nobility, filled with senselessness, rut, inactivity, and the persistent aspiration of Chichikov to hide it all, to cover everything with a blanket of decency, politeness and courtesy.
 Taken from Vitomir VULETIĆ, “Nikolai Gogol and his three ‘idylls’,” Matica Srpska 2004; Russian-Serbian Literary Comparisons, Matica Srpska, 1987
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Chichikov! Meaning- and rhythm-wise truly spell-bound and resonant name of the world literature. In this very way Ljuboslav Majera accentuates his design of Gogol’s unfinished story about an angel/demon on his way through a country landscape, which could be anyone’s, ours, theirs, the one we see or the one we feel in beings tightened and extendable beyond all measure... Landscape underlined with dreamily dressed human souls, a subtle choice of folklore and music, delicate weaving of the director in a decent correspondence with the so-called gogolianism as well as actors who, confined to the graveyard of human décor, find enough (off)stage life in them and the one who stalks us, and it is not called life.
Aleksandar Bogdanovic as Chichikov, plus histrionically mature excursions into the expressions of various colors make this play strike where it is supposed to, at the time when metaphor is both superfluous and sufficient, when on the theatre stage even monuments and ecologic, carefully selected paper bags serve for catching the invisible as much as for selling fog. Seemingly paradoxical action exhausts itself in a straight line in its fullness of implied meaning while the Zrenjanin Dead Souls become an effective signpost/flywheel to the living.
Emotion is the essential element in this play, but that does not mean that from there one does not reach farther and more beautifully.
Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL |
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Ljuboslav Majera, born in 1951 in Bački Petrovac. Earned his degree in theatrical directing at the Academy of Bratislava (1975), in the class of Professors Karol Zahar and Miloš Pietor. Directed over 150 plays of the national and international classical and contemporary repertoire in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Bački Petrovac, Sombor, Kikinda, Kruševac, Zrenjanin, as well as in Slovakia. He tried his hand in puppet plays in Mostar, Subotica and Zrenjanin. He did over a 100 plays for children and adults.
He is the recipient of numerous prizes for directing, among others Extraordinary Sterija prize for directing. In the Zrenjanin Theatre Majera directed in 1998 Sophocles’ Antigone (over 80 performances), which represented the Zrenjanin crew at all the significant festivals in the country and the region, bringing him a few awards. He directed the plays Life and Adventures of the Soldier Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich (2002) and The Little Mermaid by Željko Hubač at the puppet stage. Theatre “Toša Jovanović” awarded him the prize for the year 2007 as the artist who with his work contributed to the affirmation of the Theatre.
Majera is a full professor of acting at the Novi Sad Academy of art, and in March 2008 he was named dean of the Art Academy in Banska Bistrica (Slovakia), where he is a full professor as well.
Majera at Pozorje: 1993 - Kir Janja, SNT Novi Sad, 1995 - Siniša Kovačević, Janez, Novi Sad Drama Theatre, 1997 - Eugen Kočiš, Trip to Nantes, NT Sombor, 1998 - Lj. Simović, Hasan Aga's Wife, Kruševac Theatre, 1999 - Željko Hubač, The Kidnapping and Resurrection of Juliana K.., Kruševac Theatre. 1999 - Evil Woman, NP Sombor, 2000 - Vojislav Savić, Do You, Hear, Mum..., Theatre “A. Duhnovič” Prešov (Slovakia) |
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The story about a complete collapse of moral norms, values turned upside down - concerns very much the society we live in. Our hypertrophy is greater than in Gogol. And what’s worst, we accept that deformation as norm. We adapt to the powers of chaos like Chichikov. The wars we did not, but did lead, are charged to us as a trade with killed people, their souls and possession, the professional values they had. Clerics participate in it, hypocrisy and lies are accepted as a normal state, corruption of the soul and body is so great... we all participate in it, each one of us is part of that common societal grotesque. “Gogolianism” is fit for the stage because everything here is pushed towards exaggeration in order for the essence to be noticed, and theatre always has to touch both ratio and emotion in order to produce a valuable esthetic experience...
Ljuboslav MAJERA - Lj. BAILOVIĆ, Interview, List “Zrenjanin”, October 3 2008 |
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| N. V. Gogol (1809 - 1852), the father of Russian realist prose. He was a petty clerk and lecturer at the Petersburg University. He published his first collection of stories, Evening on a Farm near Dikanka, in 1932, when he met Pushkin, who greatly influenced his career. The collection Mirgorod was published in 1835, after which he started the cycle of the so-called Petersburg stories, which talks about the poverty of the clerks' existence (Nose, Overcoat, The Government Inspector). Careerists, bribers, petty robbers of someone else’s time and effort, drunken thugs and those drowning their sorrow in alcohol entered his work and livened the huge stage of the landowner Russia through the novel Dead Souls and the comedy The Government Inspector. He created characters who in the Russian society became epitomes of laziness, stupidity, selfishness, naivety and corruption. Later, almost terrified with the horrors that in his works truthfully depicted Russia, he started repenting before himself and the society, so he wrote the book Selected Parts from the Correspondence with Friends; without success he tried to shed bright tones to the dark image of Russia and to create positive heroes. The helping hand was given to him by Belinsky in the famous letter. It was in vain: a few days before death he destroyed the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Gogol’s work was of crucial influence in the development of Russian artistic prose; on the basis of his literary procedure, Belinsky formulated the principles of the so-called naturalist school in Russian literature. Chernyshevsky considered him the founder of “the satirical or more precisely the critical direction of Russian realism.” A visionary and a mystic, Gogol reveals Russia to the Russians, and realism to its writers. Works: Petersburg Stories,short-story collections Arabesques, novel Taras Bulba, comedy Wedding etc. |
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Grotesque of (de)spirited corporality
(...) The same kind of wealthy people, who would like to have more at any price, by giving more less, live today, as well as their bent subordinates - poor and miserable, who have drunk, gambled away and desecrated the little they had... Pavel Ivanovič Čičikov is the prototype of Gogol’s “messiah,” the good worker, who in the play of the Zrenjanin theatre undertakes the “bad” (“dirty”) job, buying out souls of the deceased peasants, so he would return them to the state, make money, but consequently free himself from the wrong life. The seemingly paradoxical action is exhausted in its fullness of symbolic meaning, which the director Ljuboslav Majera did not fail to notice, painting the plebs of Gogol’s dead souls as an effective signpost to the living, enriching it with lucid and comic musical and stage solutions (witty graves jumping out of the floor - set design by Jaroslav Valek).
With a direct play and deep “demasking” of the character he plays, Aleksandar Bogdanović carried the greatest weight of the play, interpreting Chichikov as a slave worthy of attention and above, rather then ahead of its time. Thanks to the costumes (of the epoch) by Jasna Badnjarević, the oversized corporal proportions of the other charactes of Dead Souls, an unambiguous commentary of his corruption, even sinfulness, was given, although Majera does not minimise the story, does not give it religious proportions. Even though greatly burdened (by the costumes), the Zrenjanin ensemble correctly performed “Gogolianism,” as director Majera labels the sense of satire and irony in the altruism of the great and provocative Russian realist.
Nozdrev, played by Jovan Torački... is a counterpart to Bogdanović’s Chichikov, as a zealous, compulsive gambler, a clever peasant who is the only one who figures out what is hiding behind Chichikov’s mission... Ljubiša Milišić, who plays the sincerely joyful (“gay”) Manilov, Jelena Šneblić, in the role of the sleepy village “beauty”/witch Korobochka, and Selimir Tošić as the sly, stubborn Sobakevich, have, beside Torački, found the adequate histrionic solution to the given character and the stage execution in bringing out the ambiguity of Gogol's text. Dragan Ostojić, in the impressive role of the extreme miser and tyrant, Pliushkin, succeeded in distinguishing himself with the gift for physical and verbal gags (...)
Igor BURIĆ, Dnevnik, October 16 2008 |
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