55th STERIJINO POZORJE FESTIVAL 2010

Director Andraš URBAN / Urbán András

Dramaturge Olivera ĐORĐEVIĆ

Set Designer Marija KALABIĆ

Costume Designer Dragica LAUŠEVIĆ

Composer Feliks LAJKO / Lajkó Félix

Repetiteur Geza KUČERA ml. / Kucsera Géza

Premiere: January 12th 2010

CAST
Banović Strahinja	Srđan SEKULIĆ
His Mother	Vesna KLJAJIĆ-RISTOVIĆ
His Wife	Minja PEKOVIĆ
Milutin, servant	Marko MAKIVIĆ
Vlah Alija	Miloš STANKOVIĆ
Jug Bogdan	Jovan RISTOVSKI
Vojin Jugović	Ljubiša RISTOVIĆ
Damjan Jugović	Vladimir GRBIĆ
Komnen Jugović	Branko LUKAČ
Boško Jugović	Milan VEJNOVIĆ
Servant in the Jugović’s house	Zoran BUČEVAC

T H E A T R E......

NATIONAL THEATRE / NÉPSZÍNHÁZ - SUBOTICA

The history of theatrical life in Subotica takes us back to 18th century when, as records show, there were two forms of theatrical performances: plays performed at schools and those prepared by German professional actors who maintained their leading position until the appearance of Hungarian theatre. In 1874 Hungarian actors left Subotica getting replaced by actors from the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad. The theatre in Subotica was very popular and this town constantly worked on the project of building a house worthy of Thalia. In 1853 the Rogina bara (swamp) was reclaimed (nowadays Korzo) and the Town Assembly engaged Master Skultéti to build the theatre building on this site. The versatile theatrical artist György Telepi undertook to do the interior. The new building emerged in a year, but its Corinthian Columns were not inscribed with the name of the theatre but the Pest Hotel, because the town fathers considered it more profitable. In 1904 came a reconstruction: the stage was widened, a balcony was constructed and the name of the City Theatre was written on the edifice. In the spring of 1915 the theatre was destroyed in a fire. The Pest Hotel escaped the same destiny, and the small theatre hall was left untouched. In 1924 the restructuring of the theatre building lost in the fire commenced. The new theatre house was inaugurated in 1927 with the opera Imperial Bride by Rimsky Korsakov performed by the National Theatre from Belgrade. In autumn 1945 the Subotica theatre building became permanent home to professional troupes. After over 90 years the town finally got its permanent company and its theatre. On 19th September 1945 the Presidency of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina decided to establish its two ensembles: the Croatian National Theatre and the Hungarian National Theatre. It was made official on 28th October 1945 by Mirko Bogovic’s play Matija Gubec directed by Branko Spoljar, while the newly founded Hungarian Theatre opened with its first premiere - Béla Balazs’s The Dance of Witches directed by Laszlo Pataki on 29th October 1945. By the decision of the Executive Board of AP Vojvodina, on 1st January 1951 the two companies merged into one single company of the National Theatre-Népszínház. In autumn 1952 the music ensemble grew into the Opera only to be closed by the end of the season 1953/54. This period in the theatre’s history is known as its “Golden Age”. Subotica had as much as three stages, and in the summer of 1952 it got a rotating stage as well. One of the stages was the Summer Stage at Lake Palic. Subotica became a true festival town. Following the 1958 statute of the theatre the Croatian Drama became the Drama in Serbo-Croatian Language, while Hungarian Drama became the Drama in Hungarian Language. In 1970 the project of the theatre building restructuring was completed, but in 1974 the inspectors decided to close it because the installations in the building were too old. In the following year, after the reconstruction, the theatre started operating in its original house once again. In 1985 it was concluded that the foundations of the building were unstable and that it had to be demolished so the Council for Reconstruction was established. Ljubisa Ristic came to the theatre in the following year, where he stayed for the next ten years, during which time Ristic together with Nada Kokotovic gathered a great group of directors and performers from many centres in Yugoslavia. The Dramas were cancelled and a single artistic ensemble with a concept of an unconventional theatrical expression was formed instead.
The National Theatre Népszínház became traditional once again in 1995. When SO Subotica decided it would financially participate in the theatre building restructuring in 1997, this initiated the process of reaching a decision on the destiny of the building. A competition for designing the new building was announced and the company YUSTAT from Belgrade won the contract, but the financing slowed down due to the bombing. After the rehabilitation the roof above the main staircase fell down, so from March to October 2002, having no place of their own, the ensemble had their plays as guests on different stages. In October 2002 the staircase restructuring was completed and the season opened on the home stage. In 2003, the project of adaptation, restructuring and construction of the theatre building was finally finished and the spring of 2007 has been set as the date for commencement of the works. Both Dramas of the Subotica Theatre will perform on the Jadran Stage until the new building is finished.

P E R F O R M A N C E......

HISTORY AND MODERNITY

V
I
D
E
O

A
L
B
U
M

...Even though Mihajlović’s play about Prince Strahinja, a ruler of the little and heroic Banjska, has as its dramatic base a well known motif, taken from the treasury of our national epos others have already set for stage (Milan Ogrizović, Budimir Grahovac), it is still a multi-layered, in its motives and its reasons… and completely original work.
Historical events, inseparable from the imagination that has crowned it in the laboratory of ethnic tradition with a legendary nimbus, have an advantage in Mihajlović’s Prince Strahinja only in the first act, which is envisaged more as an exposition of a complex situation, more as an unpretentious introduction to a psychological and moral dilemma… From the first to the second act, Mihajlović has translated the national legend, which has been petrified in a myth, from the epic hierarchy of duration into the intellectual hierarchy of values. …A System of intellectual divergences and switch-overs. Without a conceptual modernisation of human dilemmas in its stances and relationship, intellectual creation of relations between humans, between humans and the society and humans and history, the humane motifs of this drama would remain within the borders of the naive/romantic….
…The rock of temptation is not found in the act of modernisation, but the character it acquires; what kind of intellectual and moral actualisation that legendary matter offers and enables, what is its life capacity like and how big is it, which of its elements are suitable for the work of spirit and the soar of imagination, and which one is surrounded by a gray horizon and enclosed by sharpened spikes of finiteness?
…Thoughts and ideas, stances and positions certain characters express and materialise seem to be taken from some existentialist breviary for lay use. The entire trial scene, with all that precedes it in the home of the Jugovićs, with the cerebrally differentiated stances toward adultery and treason, from the extremely emphasised humanism , even denial of one’s own personality (Prince Strahinja), through the enthusiastic and youthful human immediacy (Boško Jugović), and the full maturity that knows of only one logic, the logic of social interests and political penetratability (Vojin Jugović), to the skeptical, relativistic thought and passive, powerless irony whose colour and volume were determined by life compromises (Jug Bogdan) – that entire trial scene, in the cool shadow of the queen who is not seen nor heard, but whose authority is for that very reason heavier and more distressing, there is something of Sartre’s and Camus’ supremacy of conceptual engagement over direct life impulses. At this task of subjective conceptual and moral determination, in the articulate nuances of a scale bounded by a geometrical scheme, entirely outside of their epic norms and above their ethical credo, the characters in this play are broken after the gentlest encounter with reality as if they were made of a finest crystal…
[Prince Strahinja’s beloved] was seen by the author complexly and in an extraordinary subtle weaving of contradictory impulses and urges. For him, she is “a woman with a secret she herself probably does not know and keeps on creating, a woman dissatisfied with herself and everything around her, with dissatisfaction sanguine, perhaps mitigated, but sincere and incurable. Too much into herself and therefore myopic. Born for sacrifice, for a criminal and collaborator at the same time.”

Eli FINCI, After the Play, Sterijino Pozorje, 1978

When epic themes with patriotic or political tension as background are concerned, it is very easy to slip into clichés and turn the play into an amateur recital. We were convinced innumerable times that particular personal interests and private motives stand behind grand words about patriotism. Even today we like to spit out slogans, so we wouldn’t think about why no one, for example, does not clean the snow. Mihiz’s Prince Strahinja has been set on Serbian stages only three times, and thinking about who could direct it, I was sure that Urban would be the last man who would make a cliché play out of that text, and that he would let it “sift” through his personal prism where there will be no place for awe.

Olivera ĐORĐEVIĆ, director of Drama in Serbian

S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T......

Urban’s reading of Mihiz’s psychological/existential/pseudohistorical drama is stripped and direct, emotionally penetrating, powerful, stylistically homegeneous and coherent, thematically topical and made topical even further, having in mind our eternal problem of passionate nationalism, xenophobia, pseudo-patriotism, political manipulation, national history, myths, religion. Clearly following currents of the author’s ideas, the director throws the characters of the play into a hole, space recalling a fighting ring, whereby the fact of destruction is effectively, symbolically determined, but also the importance of combat, wars, aggression in the lives of actors. The viewers are placed very close to the performers, a little above the stage, they surround them on all sides, and are therefore drawn into the action, their passivity is reduced, and their emotional perception increased. The play is defined by the presence of a number of motifs, meaningful rendering of the play more contemporary, references to contemporary forms of social aggression, a special focus on the manipulation of religious feelings etc.

Ana TASIĆ

D
I
R
E
C
T
O
R

A
N
D
R
A
S

U
R
B
A
N

ANDRAŠ URBAN / Urbán András
Born in 1970 in Senta. As a 17-year old, he created an independent theatric and literary workshop (he was the author, director and actor). Later he formed the theatre Aiowa, which treated theatre as a specific, but still all-art ideological action.
He enrolled in the Novi Sad Academy of Arts, studied film and theatre direction, directed in Subotica National Theatre. In the mid-90s, he abandoned his studies and theatre work, and lived in privacy for years.
He graduated direction in 2000, in the class of Prof. Vlatko Gilić and Bora Drašković, and started working intensely in theatre again. With the support of the Szeged MASZK and his own ensemble, he created “independent” theatre plays. He is the founder of the international theatre festival Desiré Central Station. He worked in Novi Sad and Belgrade, led art workshops in Romania, traveled on a study trip to Japan. Since 2005, he has been the director of the Hungarian City Theatre Dezso Kostolanyi in Subotica.
He looks at theatre as an enlightened place of occasional provocative action, where a specific aspect of art reality is thought, spoken and organised.
The play is for him communication and the other reality existing for itself, but it is created in the relationship between the performer, performed reality and the viewer. He directs through an interactive communication with the actor.
Directions (selection): own projects Lizards, Dew; G. Buchner Woyzeck; Shakespeare, Hamlet, Dejan Dukovski, Fuck Him, He Started It First; F. Arrabal, Picnic on the Battlefront; Jordan Radičkov, Lazarica (Balkanstage Bulgaria); Janos Pilinski/Urban, Children; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Sylvia Plath/Urban, The Girl Who Barked at the Moon; Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew; Brecht, the Hardcore Machine (Berlin); D. Kovačević, Sabirni centar; Danilo Kiš, Turbo Paradiso (after the Encyclopedia of the Dead).
Short Films: Someone and Someone, Glass (AU Novi Sad–TV Novi Sad); As If We Didn’t Exist (AU Novi Sad)
Partisan from the Dawn, short stories, zEtna
Prizes and Awards: First Prize at the Festival of Small and Experimental Stages in Pančevo, Special Prize of the Bitef Jury (Wojzeck, Hamlet), Prize for Direction and for Innovations at the Inspection of Alternative Theatres in Szeged, Award by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture for theatric creation Jászai Mari, Sterija Prize of the Round Table at the 53rd Pozorje 2008 (Urbi et orbi), Prize of the Infant Festival for the best play (Brecht the hardcore machine), award for best director at the Festival Fortress, award Pro urbe of the City of Subotica.

D I R E C T O R ...

NORMAL HUMAN DIALOGUE, IN CONTRAST TO AGGRESSION

I was interested in the personal level of the story and nonconformity to life expected of an individual in the context of political and social events. I wanted us to emphasise the humane relationship towards reality; today we easily get over aggression and crime, as if it did not interest us and we do not think that the environment that waits for the traitor and victim devours itself. I would like us to initiate this dialogue with the audience as well, because a clear, pure, normal human dialogue, in contrast to aggression, is a catharsis that holds the idea of this play.

Politika, February 12th 2010

A
U
T
H
O
R

B
O
R
I
S
L
A
V

M
I
H
A
J
L
O
V
I
Ć

BORISLAV MIHAJLOVIĆ - MIHIZ (Irig, 1922 – Belgrade, 1997)
Writer, critic, essayist, playwright, travel writer, dramaturge, poet and polemicist…
He completed the classic grammar school in Sremski Karlovci in 1941. Earned a BA at the Department of South Slavic Literature and Serbo-Croatian Language of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1950. He was the assistant at the Vuk’s and Dositej’s Museum in Belgrade. He worked in the weekly magazine NIN from 1951 until 1956 as a literary critic. Head of the Matica Srpska Library from 1955 until 1956, when he returned to Belgrade and worked as an art counselor and director of Avala Film. In 1967 he became the editor of the Publishing House Prosveta, but after four years he left this institution because of its editorial policy. With Mira Trailović he created the now cult theatre Atelier 212, and was its art counselor from 1971 until 1983. He wrote for the following publications: NIN, Politika, Književne novine, Književna reč, Dnevnik, the Zagreb Vjesnik, the Ljubljana Delo, the Vienna Die Presse etc. He received the Sterija Prize for the dramatisation of Nušić’s Autobiography (1961), for original play Prince Strahinja (1963) for which in 1965 he received the Prize of the Union of Yugoslav Playwrights Marin Držić, and Correspondence, adaptation of The Golden Fleece by Borislav Pekića (1982). He received the prize Djordje Jovanovic for Portraits (1989). He received the prize Miloš Crnjanski (1982) for the book Autobiography about Others and the prize Branko Ćopićo (1994).
Most significant works: Poems (1947), Essays (1951), From the Same Reader, articles and polemics (1956), Literary Conversations, chosen criticism (1971), plays: Death and the Dervish (1989), The Battle of Kolubara in two parts (dramatization of the novel The Time of Death by Dobrica Ćosić, 1983, 1985), Traitors (1986), Portraits (1988), Autobiography – About Others I–II (1990–1993), Kazivanja i ukazivanja, essays, reminiscences (1994). Belgrade theatres, as well as other stages across the country staged other Mihiz’s plays – Commander Seiler (National Theatre Beograd, performed at Pozorje 1967), Prince Marko, The Accused Petar Todorović.
More important dramatisations: Poetska panorama Vojvodine, Stradija (SNP Novi Sad, performed at Pozorje 1959),, Lopov, Lulu, Ranjeni orao, Međa Vuka Manitoga, Gorski vijenac, Kolubarska bitka, Valjevska bolnica.
He wrote a few screenplays and collaborated on them: Orlovi rano lete (directed by Soja Jovanović), Midnight Bells (directed by Orson Wells), Soldier and Dog (d. Andzej Vajda), Man and Bird (d. Dušan Markavejev), The Ambush (d. Žika Pavlović) etc.

Prize „Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz“ (Foundation „Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz“ and Serbian Reading Room Irig). The prize has been awarded since 2005 for play writing and it is under the auspices of the Izvršno Veće Vojvodine and the Serbian Ministry of Culture. Winners thus far: Milena Marković, Maja Pelević, Marija Karaklajić, Milena Bogavac, Milica Piletić.

R E V I E W S......

Dissecting National Myths
Prince Strahinja by Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz is a multi-meaning, multi-layered, psychological/ existentialist drama (1963), close to Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s texts (because of the treatment of male-female and family relationships, questions of biological heritage and origin), as well as the pieces by Gide, Cocteau, Camus, Sartre or Anouilh, which have, starting with a myth, demystified tradition and history, turned them upside down and interpreted it in the context of a new time. Starting from Serbian medieval history and myth (the story takes place before the Battle of Kosovo), and interweaving the intimate and political flow, Mihiz has taken down a series of social prejudices and limited, one-sided reading of History. A pseudo-historical, deeply ironic drama that problematises contemporary anthropological dilemmas, individual freedom, mechanisms of political manipulation, abuse of the terms of morals and honour has been articulately built.
Consistently following the flows of the author’s thoughts, the director Andras Urban throws the characters into a hole, a space resembling a ring, and thus effectively, symbolically, defines the abyss of their existence, as well as the importance of combative, bellicose aspect of the plot (the audience is placed very close to the performers, a little above the stage, it surrounds it from all sides). The set design is minimalised, actors play in a deserted space, which can be metaphorically interpreted—the characters are buried in their finiteness, blindness of (pseudo)patriotism, and this does not leave any space for another life. In this kind of reductionism of stage signs, fine changes in lighting have a significant dramatic and symbolical function, as well as the music that continuously follows the action (composer Felix Lajko). The power of the Mother Jugović, who does not physically appear on the stage, is marked a few times by the change of lighting, thus delicately expressing her great influence from the shadow.
Specific Urbanian asceticism of play requires a particular, penetrative acting quality, a multilayered, refined tragedy. The actors of the Subotica theatre gave their best effort, the results are different, sometimes uneven, but in general they function quite well. Prince Strahinja (Srđan Sekulić) is the bearer of individuality, rationality of resistance towards omnipresent finiteness. The woman (Minja Peković), cool and faceless, articulates a protest against helplessness in that patriarchal surrounding, recalling an Ibsen rebellious heroine who self-assuredly destroys the foundations of the social order. The Jugovićs are, on the other hand, a manifestation of unbearable aggression, a bestial, untamed, vindictive group of bullies, drawn by an irrational, animalistic, flammable passion for making war.
In Urban’s powerful, stylistically homogenous and coherent, and thematically conceptually very topical play, the critique of the institution of the church, i.e. the fake pseudo-religiosity is emphasised and very sharpened (dramaturge Olivera Đorđević). The assembling of the Jugovićs, their wild, animalistic, frighteningly passionate preparation for war, as well as for the trial of the Woman, follows a collective, ritualistic reading of the Bible, as well as the singing of (pseudo)religious songs, their demonic play in the dark, a symbolic death dance. At the same time, the famous Lazar’s curse, “Who is a Serb and of Serbian descent… and doesn’t come to the Battle of Kosovo…” becomes some sort of a deviated anthem, horrible mantra with which the Jugovićs violently justify the war to themselves. In those scenes the abuse of religious and patriotic feelings is significantly problematised. The mechanisms of socio-political manipulation are directly revealed, the guts of myth and tradition are dissected, the slogans and declarative war cries are destroyed; they are alienated from their superficial meaning. The truth, naked and painful, is thrown into our eyes, vomited into our face, demanding a confrontation with ourselves.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, December 16th 2010