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Dramatised and directed by ANA ĐORĐEVIĆ
Set Design VESNA ŠTRBAC
Costume Design LANA CVIJANOVIĆ
Composer ANjA ĐORĐEVIĆ
Premiere:
March 15th 2009 |
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CAST |
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Miša |
RADOVAN VUJOVIĆ |
Ana |
MARIJA VICKOVIĆ |
Klara |
BOJANA MALjEVIĆ |
Evica |
MILENA VASIĆ |
Maks |
NEBOJŠA MILOVANOVIĆ |
Kolja |
BOJAN LAZAROV |
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| YUGOSLAV DRAMA THEATRE - BELGRADE |
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The Yugoslav Drama Theatre (JDP) was founded in 1948 with the aim of attracting the cream of the dramatic talent from all over the FNRY, and of being the Yugoslav counterpart to the Moscow Art Theatre in terms of style and aesthetic quality. Supported by politicians and leading cultural figures, director Bojan Stupica selected the most notable artists from all the theatrical centres of Yugoslavia. The first premiere was held on April 3rd 1948. Bojan Stupica put on 'The King of Betainov' by Ivan Cankar.
The concept for the theatre laid down by politicians was only partially adhered to, whilst from the very beginning in its practical work artistic freedom was championed and the aesthetic credibility of directors and actors was supported. The managers of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre always belonged to the circle of the most notable and most competent of those working in the theatre, regardless of whether they came from the ranks of critics (Velibor Gligoric, Milutin Micic, Petar Volk), dramatists (Jovan Cirilov) or directors (Miroslav Belovic, Bojan Stupica). When creating the repertoire, managers of the JDP initially favoured great world and national classics, but over the course of the 50s they gradually introduced works from contemporary world and national dramaturgy.
Directors at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre always stood out for their new and inventive interpretations of the classics of world and national dramaturgy, through which they were changing the notion of theatre in our country. One can recall Bojan Stupica's interpretation of 'Dundo Maroje' by Marin Drzic and 'Fisherman's Quarrel' by Carlo Goldoni and Mate Milosevic's direction of 'Yegor Bulychov' by Maksim Gorky and 'Grieving Family' by Branislav Nusic. There was also Miroslav Belovic's direction of 'The Boastful Soldier' by Plaut and 'Dundo Maroje' by Marin Drzic, and then Dejan Mijac's direction of 'High Sea' by Branislav Nusic, 'Patriots' by Jovan Sterija Popovic and 'Le Misanthrope', 'Hamlet' directed by Stevo Zigon, and 'The Theatre of Illusions' by Pierre Cornier directed by Slobodan Unkovski. The stage of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre was the place where leading directors from all over Yugoslavia tested their skills: Branko Gavela, Paolo Madeli, Slobodan Unkovski, Haris Pasovic, etc., as well as numerous foreign directors: Jezi Jarocki, Georgij Aleksandrovic - Tovstonogov, Karlos Medina, Vitalij Dvorcin...
Even at a time of great social turmoil, the Yugoslav Drama Theatre welcomed significant works by contemporary writers from all over Yugoslavia. The following authors and their works were promoted at the JDP: Dobrica Cosic - 'Discoveries', Jovan Hristic -'Clean hands' and 'Savaranola and his friends', Velimir Lukic - 'Innocent Anabella's affair', Slobodan Schneider - 'Croatian Faustus', Dusan Kovacevic 'Balkan Spy', Dejan Bukovski - 'Powder Keg', Biljana Srbljanovic -'Belgrade trilogy'. Our performances of their plays were enacted at the Bonner Bienale, the starting poing of their European recognition. An unavoidable part og the history of the JDP is also the story of the great actors who performed on this stage. An unavoidable part of the history of the JDP is also the story of the great actors who performed on this stage.
An unavoidable part of the history of the JDP is also the story of the great actors who performed on this stage.The reputation and success of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre was acknowledged at numerous international and domestic festivals and on guest performances. The Yugoslav Drama Theatre toured not only around Yugoslavia but around the whole of Europe as well, and in doing so it confirmed its international and European dimensions. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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The Encounter with the Self in “The Kraut Girl”: (...) The Kraut Girl is not a story about touching as much as ordinary dying, or about a love affair and its hindrance, but a story about the clash of the feelings of love and duty, a story about an emotional death the size of a tragedy ...
It is not only a story from the past about the clash of feelings and prejudice, it is a story about ourselves today, about the desire to be accepted by others and the paradoxical inability to be accepted. Rejected, disgraced, offended, underestimated in our virtues and overly accused for our shortcomings… at the end of an epoch to which we have given an inglorious ending, we can see, in the love excellence of a Berlin “Kraut girl,” the figure of German love which, even when they respected us, as in the monument to Belgrade defenders, or in Goethe’s translation of Vuk’s folk songs, we feel and know Germans never had for us.
Germans in this case are a different name for Europe. Lazarević's Ana is some sort of symbolic comfort for a continous rejection, it is almost an archetypal image what it would be like if Europe wanted us the way we are. Ragged and tormented, but not less worthy of love, at least until we don't betray it and reject it...
Since the long-gone times of Laza Lazarevića and his story, if anything has changed, it has become worse. For that reason Ana's desire to live in the circumstances which are a sign of civilisational backwardness is not a sign of accepting our features and customs, the misery of material civilisation in Serbs at the end of the 19th, and, one could add right away, at the end of the 20th century... If a real social compulsion were forced on him [the hero], which means that, by using brutal means of persuasion, blackmail and hindrance, his love perspectives had been spoiled, then he would suffer the violence of the surroundings epitomised in real and realistically presented acts. But if he is committing violence to himself, the interiorised social mind in him produces self-castration, he has to give up his desire in order to fulfill his own desire: that substitution of desire is in fact the taking apart of the self in the eyes of the society, which mean with his own eyes, he has to seem impeccable. That is why while a metaphysical potential of the classical tragedy is drawn out of him, in his psychological profile where the space of the impossible is within himself, a tragedy of modern times is born...
Laza Lazarević wrote a story about the encounter of different cultures and - finally - about our encounter with the self. In that tragic abyss, which is so topical today, Lazarević has surpassed his, perhaps even our own, epoch.
 Aleksandar JERKOV |
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Ana Đorđević: Born in Belgrade in 1977. Graduated from the Department of Theatre and Radio Directing of the Faculty of Performance Arts in Belgrade.
Plays directed: Willow, based on Oscar Wilde (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade); N. Kolyada, The Sling (Belgrade Drama Theatre); W. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream (City Theatre Podgorica); Stevan Koprivica, When You Grow Up You’ll Be Me (Boško Buha Theatre), M. Belović, Crane’s Feathers (Children and Youth Theatre, Skopje), Ana Đorđević, The Attic Between Heaven and Earth (Boško Buha Theatre); ( Kiš/Baletić/Đorđević, Andrea’s Sam’s Train Schedule (Yugoslav Drama Theatre), Moliere, Don Juan (Bitef Theatre); Boccaccio, Decameron (Boško Buha Theatre); Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw (National Theatre Subotica). |
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In the patriarchal world, interest, and even benefit, if you will, of the community is above any and all values an individual may hold. In such a society, morality equals being useful to the community and there is no petit bourgeois hypocrisy about that. I wouldn’t even find it interesting to tell a story about obvious hypocrisy, about immorality being portrayed as morality in public. The Kraut Girl is really a story about the need of an individual, born in a patriarchal community, to define themselves as an essentially free individual. This is a story about a man from such an environment who at one point wishes to be free. A battle rages within Misha between a patriarchal man and a truly liberated one who has his morality and his emotions, and love is what sets this battle in motion.
Ana ĐORĐEVIĆ
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Laza Lazarević (Šabac, 1851 – Belgrade, 1890). Studied law in Belgrade and medicine in Berlin. Worked as a physician. He entered the court circles and became the king’s personal doctor. He was a member of the Serbian Scholarly Society and the Academy of Sciences. He died of tuberculosis. Because of his social opinions and conceptual stance praised as much as he was critiqued, Lazarevic is doubtlessly a writer of the best stories in Serbian realism. He started his literary work with the translations of Chernyshevsky, Gogol and Skrib and Darwinian naturalist articles. His role models were Russian realists, but also the oral storytelling tradition. The centre of his interests are social changes taking place within the Serbian patriarchal society of the 1870s and the 1880s. Lazarevic focuses on individual-psychological and moral traits of characters who preserved traditional values, whilst the social motivation and ethnographic details remain in the background. With his realistic narration and lyrical stylisations, harmony of composition, concern for language and particularly the introduction of psychological motivation, Lazarevic is considered to the founder of the Serbian psychological prose writing. Stories: The First Time with the Father at the Matins, The School Icon, Right on Time, Brigands, At the Well, Werther, It Will All Be Blessed by the People, The Wind, He Knows It All and The Kraut Girl (unfinished). |
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Choreography of chairs
This story about the clash of love and the feeling of duty for which the modern time has no understanding, not only because of the lack of the feeling of duty but also because it is hardly capable of love, the director realises with a modern and inventive theatre language. Finally has one almost realistic story, without much mystification, been translated into a modern theatre creation. Besides, the director was not hesitant to reach for the elements of melodrama that were perhaps crucial for achieving responsibility toward the time in which she is creating.
Željko JOVANOVIĆ, Blic, March 19th 2009
Ana Djordjević uses the epistolary form of Laza Lazarević's story as a material for a collage of poetically inspired fragments, which by film editing, unreeling the time forward and backward, by repetition of certain scenes and parallel acts weaves a story about the thwarted love between a Serb and a German girl in the second half of the 19th century. Even though chair rearrangements on the stage during the changes do not always seem as a certain sign, with the unnecessary emphasis on when and where the action is taking place, the play by Ana Djordjević offers the essence of the nagging pain formed as a consequence of self-infliction caused by the banal demands of the environment. (...)
S. O., Yellow Cab, April 10th 2009
Love and Petty-Bourgeois Mentality
(...) Radovan Vujović, in the role of Miša, skillfully showed a series of his metamorphoses. During the time of his arrival to his studies in Berlin, Miša is naive, confused, attractively sincere and completely innocent. Falling in love with Ana brings him an acquaintance with the vertiginous passion and a loss of control, and the abandonment of love produces the paralysing desperation that knocks out life from every part of his being. Marija Vicković with spare, reserved, but expressive means, with extraordinary sensitivity and warmth, shapes a gracious, just, curious Kraut girl, Ana. The actress shows minimalistically her tumultous emotional life, the feelings breaking her, using discreet bodily unrest, muffled twitches, ambivalent looks. The contrast between the mask of reservation she has to wear and the interior discord is an exciting manner of expressing her radical, tragic fate.
Milena Vasić creates the character of Miša's worried sister Evica, touchingly persistent in her attempts to bring her brother back to life. Nebojša Milovanović indirectly plays the stiff, unattractively self-confident, proud and unrestrained and pragmatic Kolja, in bright colors, and Bojana Maljević the limited and poorly educated, but very direct, self-conscious and flirtatious Klara.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, April 12th 2009 |
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