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Directed by LARY ZAPPIA
Set Design VESNA ŠTRBAC
Costume Design SNEŽANA KOVAČEVIĆ
Composer DUŠKO RAPOTEC UTE
Repetiteur RADICA LjUBIČIĆ
Stage Speech DEJAN SREDOJEVIĆ
Premiere:
February 3rd 2009
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CAST |
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Mrs. Žutilov |
IVANA PAVIĆEVIĆ |
Nandor |
SVETISLAV JELISAVČIĆ |
Milči |
NEMANjA JOVANOVIĆ |
Eva |
DRAGANA VRANjANAC |
Miss Lepršić |
TIJANA KARAIČIĆ |
Zelenić |
SLOBODAN LjUBIČIĆ |
Miss Šerbulić |
BILjANA ZDRAVKOVIĆ |
Miss Smrdić |
TANjA JOVANOVIĆ |
Miss Gavrilović |
BOJANA ZEČEVIĆ |
Nagy Elvira |
ANDRIJANA SIMOVIĆ |
Recentflow |
SLOBODAN FILIPOVIĆ |
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Theatre life in Užice dates from 1856, when the Theatric Society was founded as a programmatic activity of the Reading Room (the first library in town, founded the same year). Theatric society was placed in the Kaljević home (the respected president of the County Courthouse and a merchant). The Užice Theatre was founded by Stojadin Obradović, the manager of the Reading Room (as his letter to prince Miloš Obrenović from 1859 testifies). The first theatre play in Užice was performed on February 15, 1862. It was the piece “The Battle of Chachak 1815.” That same year, the plays “Death of Stephan of Dechani” and “Brigands” were performed. In 1866 the sparse audience watched the play “Brigand Veljko.” (...) Not until the first days of the Užice Republic in 1941 did the Partisan Art Unit perform national and Soviet writers.
The Theatre today - The Užice National Theatre was founded as the Regional National Theatre by the decision of the Serbian Ministry of Education on August 10th, 1945. The new building was opened in 1967. The founder of the Užice National Theatre is the Užice County Parliament, and it is today the only professional theatre on the territory of south-western Serbia, the territory historically known as the Užice area. With the conclusion of the 2007/08 season, the theatre has performed 501 premieres until.
The Užice National Theatre has become a theatric phenomenon: far from a metropolis, with less than comfortable technical and financial conditions, without a great media attention, it creates a great theatrical “noise,” national and European. The newest success of this ensemble at the 39th Theatre Biannual in Venice, as the first theatre from Serbia who participated at that prestigious European festival... Which affirms the old saying that provincialism is the state of mind, not the distance from the metropolis.
 Nenad KOVAČEVIĆ |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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“Patriots” by Jovan Sterija Popović, directed by Lary Zappia, a director from Croatia, was performed with great success at the stage of the National Theatre in Užice. Sterija’s Smrdićs, Šerbulićs ili Žutilovs have a timeless form, they unfailingly appear on every important historical crossroad, and the Croatian director eliminated their contents, they were belittled to nonsense, which is indestructible. Zappia gave the Užice actresses male roles, and they, in simple black costumes by Snežana Kovačević, on the stripped stage of the set designer Vesna Štrbac, speak the language of movement, newspaper reports and the won and lost battles. These patriots are not Serb-lovers, they are, above all, silver-lovers. Only occasionally, the price for which in the appropriate moment Hungarians become Serbs and vice versa, rises or falls (...) The transposition of male characters into female (“faults and virtues are not the privilege of gender”), the effective set design in which facts are written on a great, white surface of an endless roto-paper, and disappear together with their essence, leave the patriots on the stage as Sterija would have wanted (...) These patriots have gone a step further, they reveal, beside the imperfection of our memory, today’s dark kingdom in which the battle flags are paler, the anthems are “washed out,” but the old passion for money, choosing sides and the victory of ego has remained.
N. JANKOVIĆ |
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Lary Zappia: graduated University of Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Professor Dejan Mijač and assistant professor Egon Savin, received his master’s degree at the University of Calgary, Canada. Theatre director - freelancer. He has been working professionally since 1989. He directed around fifty different projects (opera, musical, drama, comedy, vaudeville) in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lithuania, Italy and Canada in large, institutionalised theatres, as well as in non-institutionalised groups. Together with the actor Nenad Šegvić, co-founder of the Rijeka HKD Theatre. Beside theatre directing, he is engaged in scholarly and educational work, as well as translating. He is the recipient of a series of professional and university prizes and scholarships. |
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I want to believe it is not accidental that the directing of a Serbian classic was entrusted to a “foreigner”; I want to believe that decision is the reflection of the time our play talks about - the time which, at least momentarily, lost its “crucial” nature. Patriots have cyclically appeared in the form of crucial warnings measuring important moments of recent Serbian history when the question of patriotism and patriots was of decisive significance to the moral state of the nation: the time of Informbiro, the time of the first Kosovo unrests, the time of settling accounts with the last war ... In a century and a half of Sterija’s Patriots, different languages have changed with reckless speed: the language of the street, the language of media, the language of weapons... If someone asked me what language is now dominating, I would not know what to answer. The language of light apathy? The language of urban egoism? The language of silence? I am listening to the created silence and observing who will now occupy limelight? And what language will he speak? Perhaps no one will appear? Maybe all the patriots have had their turn? While I am thus waiting, from the dark of the backstage women appear. Women don’t need a biedermeier salon - they only need a histrionic void of the empty stage in which they construct with passion and imagination their somewhat dark kingdom made out of paper. I am watching them and I see how now (...) colors on the flags are washed out, how the anthems have changed so many times they don’t even have verses, and how out of the ritual (...) only the form has remained, while the contents was gradually lost somewhere on the road. Nevertheless, in the rustling of paper, the breathing of honour-greed, the sigh of extortion can still be heard - at least for the nationalistic emblems from natron-paper. Flaws and virtues are obviously not the privilege of gender. Life is equally, magically imperfect in all forms. And, as Cioran says, it is possible only thanks to the imperfection of our imagination and - even more importantly - memory.
Lary ZAPPIA |
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Jovan Sterija Popović (January 13, 1806 - March 10, 1856)
The pioneer of Serbian comediography. He went to school in Vršac, Sremski Karlovci, Temišvar and Budapest. He earned his law degree in Kežmarak, Slovakia. After finishing his studies (1830), he worked as a professor, and after 1853, when he passed the bar exam, as an attorney in Vršac. In 1840 he moved to Kragujevac Lyceum to teach “natural law.” Next year he moves, together with this highest educational institution in Serbia, to Belgrade. The “Constitution-defending” government named him in 1842 secretary of education. He is one of the founders of the Society of Serbian Literacy (today Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), the National Museum and the Belgrade Reading Room - Library. He laid foundation to the modern Serbian education, he authored many textbooks. He remained secretary until 1848, when he resigned and returned to Vršac where he spent the rest of his life. He started his literary career with the collection of poems Davorje, one of the best books of reflexive poetry of the epoch, followed by the tragedy The Death of Stefan Dečanski. He earned the recognition of his contemporaries and the reputation as the “Serbian Moliere” with the comedies: Liar and Para-liar, The Swank Pumpkin, The Miser, The Evil Woman, Reconciliation. In them, he eternised the petty-bourgeois mentality and provincialism. In his work, he blended art with the societal truth. He de-masked wrong education, love of fashion, snobbism, he mocked fake erudition of the “Slavonic Serbs” and their deformed Slavonic language. After Sterija’s death, his comedy Patriots, deriding fake patriotism, appeared in public. |
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Let this performance be like a private history of Serbian movement. Everything that was good, history will describe; here only passions and selfishness are presented. And that my intention is not to put blemish on the people but to teach them and make them aware how vice is active in the greatest matter, every patriot with common sense will agree with me.
I did not make the present performance, but all that is found in it, as well as the expressions and words, I picked up from life and from newspapers ...
As long as we brag like that, covering weaknesses and faults, and study in history how many heroic heads each ancestor has cut off, and not where he slipped from the road, we shall limp and we shall not be better for a single iota, because yokels and young people, who are fed that, don’t even think we can be mistaken, and they accept everything given to them as pure truth and good works. Let’s throw an eye on our best known history. That which was more insane, more exaggerated, and more senseless, had more admirers, and the voice of moderation was considered un-patriotism, opposition and treason, because every man is inclined toward extremes, so when he doesn’t know a misfortune could happen, he runs after it, and gets angry at every intelligent word. That’s why it is no wonder that the mean and the spoiled, and those are everywhere, under the guise of patriotism use every opportunity for selfishness, and give the most insane advice, not paying attention whether they thus harm their county or their people. For the selfish one it is sufficient when he is well off and when he can convince the yokel, and what next to do he is not worried.
Jovan Sterija POPOVIĆ, Foreword to The Patriots |
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A direct portrait of evil
Director Lary Zappia set Patriots, the fiery and unrelentlessly direct piece by Sterija about hollow, declarative nationalism, at the stage of the National Theatre in Užice very courageously, choosing the minimalist, Brechtian approach. The set is designed functionally, very stingily: a few chairs, a series of macabre hanging light bulbs, roto-paper on which performers write the name of the piece they are playing, dates etc, props are rare. This extreme atomisation of stage marks, the spectrally muffled lighting, as well as the limitation to black and white colors, beside visual attraction, have a clear metaphorical meaning (set designer Vesna Štrbac, costume designer Snežana Kovačević).
One of the most radical directorial procedures in this play is the gender transposition of characters - Lepršić, Smrdić, Gavrilović have become Miss Lepršić, Miss Smrdić, Miss Gavrilović, while Miss Zelenić, Milčika and Nančika became Zelenić, Milči, Nandor. This inversion can be understood as articulation of the idea about transfering responsiblity to the female gender, i.e. the thesis that women are the principle culprits in the recent reckless zeal of enforced patriotism. (...)
Tijana Karaičić plays Miss Lepršić who embodies the most terrifying form of fake patriotism - immoderate, aggressive, tragically blinding. Ivana Pavićević creates the character of Mrs. Žutilov in a more restrained and rational manner, and Tanja Jovanović and Biljana Zdravković play Miss Smrdić and Miss Šerbulić, chatty and dumb petty bourgeois women. Bojana Zečević, justifyably more restrained and cooler, takes on the role of Miss Gavrilović who is their antipode, some kind of lucid rationaliser who questions all their stances, restraining their relentless eruption of insincere nationalism.
In accordance with the basic idea about female guilt in causing this hellish tsunami of fictitious patriotism, the male characters in the play are completely in the women’s shadow, marginalised, helpless, underdeveloped. Slobodan Ljubičić softly plays Zelenić, who calmly, confidently and benevolently pours out a series of nationalistic cliches, which, due to the simplified softness of his speach, has a pathetic significance. Svetislav Jelisavčić creates the character of Nandor, Mrs. Žutilov's husband, also modest and reserved, and Nemanja Jovanović plays Milči, their son, overly timid, a little autistic, which can all be understood as part of the idea of the return of matriarchate.
The consistently radical directorial approach by Lary Zappia in the stage interpretation of Sterija's “Patriots” fully justifies the idea of its production and can serve as an excellent example of the new, inventive, brave interpretation of our dramatic tradition. Rejecting the possibility of illustrative, old-fashioned and dead treatment of the classics, the director relentlessly set out towards the examination of the contemporary meanings of this text, but also the stage language itself. Lary Zappia found a very penetrative and brutally direct way of presenting the essential evil that produces the disgustingly fake, pumped-up, silicon patriotism.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, February 16th 2009 |
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