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Director and Language Adaptation
Iva MILOŠEVIĆ
Set Designer Gorčin STOJANOVIĆ
Costume Designer Maja MIRKOVIĆ
Composer Vladimir PEJKOVIĆ
Assistant Director Tea PUHARIĆ
Assistant Set Designer Ivan KRNJIĆ
Production Manager Vladimir PERIŠIĆ
Premiere:
February 18th 2010
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CAST |
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Mirjana |
Mirjana KARANOVIĆ |
Veronika |
Jelena PETROVIĆ |
Violeta |
Branka PETRIĆ |
Simon |
Marko BAĆOVIĆ |
Grozdana |
Anđelika SIMIĆ |
Jakov |
Feđa STOJANOVIĆ |
Ankica |
Cvijeta MESIĆ |
Lucio |
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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(...) There’s no more Godot for whom one could wait in vain (which would be something), because Mirjana and these around her know not only that Godot will not come, but also something much more horror than that: that Godot has already passed, and those who have seen him – have seen him. They haven’t, and they won’t either. The world that was given to us, which we are diligently maintaining in the state we found it, and we intend to leave it like it is, or a little worse, is the world in which no one looks above, towards heaven (where there is nothing but gigantic fiery balls shining to No one and warming up Nothing), nor to the side, nor god forbid inside oneself, but only in front of oneself, and by no means farther than the nose: the world of small family rituals, marital and extramarital affairs in which there are no more dangers nor passions because no one cares about them anymore, finally, the world of small lousy jobs that serve no one but sheer maintenance of a machinery continuously clattering not intended to create something but just to continue its existence. Catering to that machine – which is not even ‘evil,’ because ‘evil,’ just as ‘good,’ is a hopelessly anachronistic term, the one that belongs to the hibernated historical time – is the only thing left. For Mirjana and those around her, the routine emitters of a picture of life and themselves in that life, which actually does not represent anything real, nor is this expected of it: it will be sufficient to fulfill certain form.
(...) In that world even suicide is planned and saved for two years, it is some kind of project as well; the existential horror vacui thus acquires a definite, almost vaudeville-like feature, not becoming less terrible for it. It’s just that the horror loses its significance and dignity.
The piece by Ivor Martinić is as witty as the melancholic report from that most horrifying part of the Twilight Zone: the one in which there is nothing ‘unnatural,’ there is only a coldness of Real Lives gaping from it, reduced to a mechanism of various relations without relationships¸ as a logical consequence of life without living (...)
 Teofil PANČIĆ |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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The play about Mirjana is in fact a collection of images from the life
of a divorced woman with a pubescent daughter and some people
from the surroundings. Everyday life is completely empty, but purified
from banality by being magnified to absurdity. The circumstances
of their lives are nothing but lack of love. Mirjana shares that life
without love with everyone around her. The author does not examine
who is guilty. His story implies that there cannot be any love after a
certain age, which might be the consequence of his extreme youth,
in part of the impression offered by life.
Aleksandra GLOVACKI |
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IVA MILOŠEVIĆ, director
Graduated from the Department of Theatre and Radio Directing of Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. She directed Magic Afternoon by Wolfgang Bauer (Bitef Theatre), Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill (YDT), Kasimir and Karoline by Ödön von Horvath (National Theatre Sombor), Bash by Neil LaBute (YDT), Road to Nirvana by Arthur Kopit (Atelje 212), Little Mermaid by H. C. Andersen/Srđan Koljević (Little Theatre ‘Duško Radović’), Snake Pit by Vassily Sigarev (Atelje 212), The Wolf and The Seven Young Kids by Grimm Brothers/Ljubinka Stojanović (‘Pinocchio’ Puppet Theatre), Phaedra’s Love by Sarah Kane (YDT), Princess and the Frog by H. C. Andersen/Igor Bojović (‘Boško Buha’ Theatre), Painkillers by Neda Radulović (SNT Novi Sad), The Celebration by Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov (Atelje 212). |
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I like the title of The Play About Mirjana and These Around Her. The play creates a world that is completely unreal, composed of Beckettesque feelings of a lack of meaning in life. It allows us to project our repressed feelings of anxiety about the absence of something very important in our lives onto the characters and thus draw the hidden things to the surface. What the actors and I work with is observing the extreme in seemingly non-dramatic lives. We call our characters ‘the little people’. They conform to a moderation of lives that leads to a complete mechanisation and objectification of being, which as its effect has forgetting how to communicate with other beings, sinking into repetition, into a life as an imitation of a series of everyday rituals that follow an imposed script. You copy without even realising why you do it. The art of enjoying diversity can bring about the fullness of living. One mustn’t fear being different, one must learn from it. The backbone that carries us will not be lost through that. On the contrary!
Iva MILOŠEVIĆ |
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IVOR MARTINIĆ
Senior year student at the Department of Dramaturgy of Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. He writes plays, poetry, prose, screenplays. His work has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Norwegian, and Slovenian, and some of the translations have been published. His play Simply: (Unhappy) received the III Marin Držić Award, and the play This Is Where the Title of the Play about Ante is Written received the REZ Society Fabrique en Croatie Award. The play was performed on Croatian Radio, translated into French and English and presented at the World Festival of Young Playwrights World Interplay 2007 in Australia. It was first performed on the stage of City Youth Theatre in Split. The Play About Mirjana and These Around Her was premiered on Croatian Radio (2009) and also took part at the 61st Prix Italia in Bologna. Immediately following its Belgrade premiere, The Play About Mirjana and These Around Her will be staged in Ljubljana. Other Ivor’s radio plays include: A Nun, a Boy and Other Passers By (2006), The Past, Return (both from 2007, Croatian Radio entry at the 21st Prix Europa competition in Berlin) and No Title (2008). The short play Just Because of the Umbrella was included in the main programme of the festival Short&Sweet in Sydney (2008). He collaborated as a dramaturge with several Croatian theatres and wrote dramatisations. |
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WHAT I WRITE IS REALLY A PLAY |
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I take a lot of time with titles, a title has to tell me something about the structure of the play and its subject. However banal these titles may seem, I feel they point to exactly what takes place in the play itself. And I need that very much, so I would know exactly what it is exactly I want to tell. I don’t write real life nor do I believe that life is theatre. I portray life and I do have a need to continually realise what mechanism I do it with. It is this very imitation of life that impresses me. And that’s why my titles are as they are, almost working titles, to keep warning me that what I write is really a play.
Ivor MARTINIĆ |
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About the Title and Things Aroung It
Somehow it is assumed that a review of the play set after The Play About Mirjana and These Around Her by the young Croatian dramatist Ivor Martinić should begin with this witty title. Beside the passing autopoetic pun – it is immediately “revealed” that this is a dramatic artifact – this title also points to the domination of the story’s heroine, because the stories of “these around her” are only its echo, projection. This effect is achieved by virtual overlapping of scenes, without the elaboration of changing spaces, as well as the framing of the action with Mirjana’s appearance and the introductory trivial “confession” in the style of the narrator’s introduction (“I am Mirjana, I am sitting at the table, I had a sip of coffee... I am smoking, I am living”). The main effect of the title consists in pointing to the unpretentiousness of the story, which is only another word for meaninglessness of both Mirjana’s fate and the fate of these around her: of little people stuck in their absurdly empty lives.
The absurdness of petty bourgeois life – for this is what we are talking about here – is not, surely, a novelty in drama: Martinić is continuing Ionesco’s tradition of the absurd (not Beckett’s), and, since we are talking about influences, the emulation of the work by Biljana Srbljanović is also evident, her family and other stories with mutual harrowing within trivial existences, with a special emphasis on the relationship between mothers and daughters (...)
The feeling of absurdity was recognized and successfully materialised on stage in the performance at the “Bojan Stupica” of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. In collaboration with the set designer Gorčin Stojanović, the directress Iva Milošević has set, across the entire stage, a two-storey facade with windows through which the interior of apartments can be seen – identical in their sterile facelessness – through which, instead of through (unexisting) doors, one enters and exits. The spatial station of the heroine Mirjana, a petty bourgeois corner with an old-fashioned armchair and a coffee table, is found in front of this wall, thus doubling its function: it represents interior and exterior at the same time. Beside solving the technical challenge of undefined spaces and their blending, created by the text itself, the duplicity exterior-interior and entering through windows have achieved the poetic requirement of transferring the dramatic into the stage absurd. Space and movement in it are not only formal features of the stage absurd, for they also build free metaphorical meanings: it is emphasised that this is a play about Mirjana, and the stories of “these around her” are only little windows in her consciousness, while breaking in through windows can also be an ironic sign of the petty-bourgeois invasion of privacy.
The directress aspired to permeate the character set and story with the absurd as well, to distance herself from the realistic characterisation, and to alienate everything dramatic with irony. Mirjana Karanović presented her namesake as a very monolythic character, not in the sense of the firmness of personality, but of some kind of social numbness: she cannot be significantly moved by anything, and the absurd-ironic expression of that state is the extremely mechanical reaction to the announcement of her mother’s death, although through this torpor one can detect deeply repressed emotions. The ironic distancing appears also in the absent, ambiguous and strange smile by Branka Petrić in the role of Mirjana’s mother Violeta, as well as in the comically effective, at the same time hysterical and robotised request by Ankica, interpreted by Cvijeta Mesić, that her husband at least keep an impression of their relationship. The mildest, most fluid, and therefore most convincing interweaving of different tonalities appears in the play by Marko Baćević whose Simon is at the same time an ironic sketch of a futile pry and a covnincing depiction of a person sincerely interested in others (...)
Ivan MEDENICA, NIN, Belgrade |
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