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Adapted and directed by Kokan MLADENOVIĆ
Costume Designer Maja MIRKOVIĆ
Set designer Marija KALABIĆ
Music design Marko GRUBIĆ
Choreography Andreja KULEŠEVIĆ
Graphic design, photography
Radovan VUČKOVIĆ
Premiere:
June 26th 2009
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CAST |
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Dundo Maroje, Dubrovnik merchant |
Milija VUKOVIĆ |
Maro, his son |
Nebojša VRANIĆ |
Ugo Tedeško, German nobleman |
Dušan Dule JOVANOVIĆ |
Bokčilo, Dundo Maroje’s servant |
Bojan VELJOVIĆ |
Popiva, Maro Maroje’s servant |
Dejan TONČIĆ |
Pomet, Ugo Tedeško’s servant |
Branislav TRIFUNOVIĆ |
Ondardo de Augusta |
Dragan MARINKOVIĆ |
Sadi, usurer |
Toma TRIFUNOVIĆ |
Niko |
Nikola RAKIĆ |
Vlaho |
Boba STOJMIROVIĆ |
Guard |
Dragan MARINKOVIĆ |
Oštijer |
Predrag MILENKOVIĆ |
Laura, Roman courtesan |
Nikola RAKIĆ |
Petrunjela, her maid |
Miloš SAMOLOV |
Pere, Maro’s fiancée |
Boba STOJMIROVIĆ |
Baba, her chaperon |
Toma TRIFUNOVIĆ |
Musician |
Nikola PANTOVIĆ |
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| KRUŠEVAC THEATRE - KRUŠEVAC |
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A professional theatre in Kruševac was officially founded in 1946. In the first period National Theatre in Kruševac works on upgrading the professionalism and ‘academic’ level of its theatrical style. The repertoire consists of domestic classics and a few Russian-Soviet dramatists. In the second phase, the National Theatre Kruševac plays contemporary European and domestic drama, Dostoyevsky being especially successful. Since 1969 theatre changes its name into Theatre of Kruševac. The third phase – since 1986 till the present day – is marked by artistic will for change and advancement, with the repertoire comprising plays by Ben Johnson, Carlo Goldoni, Aleksandar Popović, Eugene Ionesco, Branislav Pekić, Siniša Kovačević, Dušan Kovačević... The theatre today equally fosters Serbian and foreign drama, as well as the children’s stage. Theatre of Kruševac is among the most active theatre houses in Serbia, with over 250 programs a year, produced or hosted by the theatre. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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Držić’s 'Dundo Maroje'
...As comically charged as he is, he is in fact the bearer of great motivations of our time, insatiable in conquering money, the epitome of that lust and greed for money, that adoration of money, that passion for wealth that characterises the epoch of the blossoming of trade in the cities… Marin Držić sees that slavery to money as human evil and he is ready to desire for a social state in which man would not suffer under the obsession of possession and having.
But Držić’s stance toward money and wealth is not determined only by utopian day-dreaming, but also by an unambiguous confrontation with wealth as privilege. The phalanx between male and female servants has an especially interesting function in his comedy...
Starting with Tripče from Kotor and Bokčilo, through Petrunjela and Popiva to Pometa, they are all in vindications, each one of them looks for something and demands, lays a claim on something higher and farther, each already feels his personality and aspires to affirm it. While Bokčilo possesses an insurmountable need to literary fill himself up at the stingy rich man’s who contents that basic right of his, Pomet stretches his hunger higher and wider and turns it into some kind of desire to lift himself up to power, to wealth, even to reign. Pomet is all obsessed with some fateful play with Fortuna, who has, with a horn of abundance from which he is spilling wealth, already become a great symbol of time. Pomet looks up, feels the ability and strength, and therefore the right to become equal with the wealthy people, to become ‘a lord and a king’ in his own kingdom. He is on the way to become a merchant, to have those adventures of courage, so characteristic for the Renaissance economic prosperity, in that sense to follow his destiny. Such, Pomet is Figaro’s older brother, who will, two hundred years later, from the positions of a servant, revolutionary threaten his feudal lord.
But the focus of this comedy, as well as the entire comediographic opus by Marin Držić, only in socio-political determinants toward reality. The appeal of his comedy lies just as much in their highly enthusiastic renaissance quality, which is why we still consider it topical. Through Držić’s comedies, a new, liberated feeling of life and its values speaks up, in them a playfull relief from dark pressures of the past is active, they are an expression of a completely new, bright, humanised, a humanely, earthly embodied view on the world and life.
 Milan BOGDANOVIĆ, Marin Držić, SKZ, Belgrade
Comedy is an exact genre that doesn’t stand impreciseness, superficiality, mediocrity. Both a drawing and the colours need to be clear. And all needs to smell of life, of our mentality. It needs to be a denial of theatrical clichés and directors’ and actors’ conventions of a Renaissance comedy. Our entire authorial team strived to read scenes and characters of Držić in a fresh way. After analytical rehearsals, we were fascinated how Marin Držić, nicknamed Otter, four centuries ago saw through our nature, our shortcomings and virtues, our exaggerations, our passions, namely all features that form a mentality of a nation and a region. In the first rehearsal I spoke of Dundo Maroje as a comedy of our mentality. I am firstly interested in the plastics of our characters, sound and scent of our country. In my deepest belief Marin Držić is not an epigone of Italian school of comedy. He is an original talent who inbreathed a Slavic spirit of our coastal people to a Renaissance comedy. That is why the discourse of Držić’s characters and their physical self-awareness, their gestures and facial expression, their physical movements should be profoundly ours and familiar. In order to achieve that, truth in our performance has to be accessible all the way through. Actors’ play has to be without any routine and scam; with full credibility and justification, firmly in characters’ shoes.
Miroslav BELOVIĆ - from letter to actors of Dundo Maroje |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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This comedy about the arrogant son, whose return under his father’s
wing is far from a pious repentance, and it only testifies about general
hypocrisy nothing can thwart, examines the biblical myth about the
return of the prodigal son. All the messed up brethren that make up
this story are sent by the author to Rome so he would confront them
there, where their natures and characters „outside of their natural
habitat” seem even more grotesque. The director, nevertheless, places
them in a prison right away, because this Dundo is a comedy
performed by the wards of a correctional institution. Having marked
them rather powerfully with the lattices within which they are placed,
the director agrees to deal with deception as the central theme, so
he translates Držić’s mix of a comedy of natures and types into a
type recognised already by the Greeks as separate, the one that is
funny because of the absurdities of its pretensions, and this is exactly
the result when the Držić’s excellent style and language are performed
by convicts, uneducated and uninclined to any sort of spirituality,
and gathered from all sides of our thieving homeland.
Aleksandra GLOVACKI |
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KOKAN MLADENOVIĆ, director
Born in Niš, 1970. He matriculated from the High Drama School in
class of Mima Vukovic-Kuric and graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Department
for Theatrical and Radio Direction – class of Miroslav Belović and Nikola Jevtić (1993).
Directed (selection): Shakespeare, Bunuel, Miller, Hamlet; Harms, Incidents; Tirso de Molina, The
Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest; Beumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro; A. Popović, The
Evolutionary Road of Bora the Tailor, The Spawning of Carp; Aristophanes, Maričić, Mladenović, Lisistrata; V. Lukić, The Affair of the Innocent Annabelle; V. Ognjenović, How to Make the Master
Laugh, Was There Ever Knez’s Dinner; Agota Kristof, The Notebook; D. Kovačević, The Marathon
Family, The Balkan Spy, The Meeting Point; S. Selenić, Scolding the People in Two Acts; Ibsen, Per
Gint; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Taming of the Shrew; Lj. Simović, The Traveling Theatre Sopalovic; Goran Petrović, K. Mladenović, The Siege of the Saint Salvation
Church; Goran Stefanovski, Bacchanalias; Bulgakov, K. Mladenović, The Master and Margarita;
Mirjana Novaković, K. Mladenović, Fear and Its Servant; Goran Petrović, The Ferry; Tolkien, K.
Mladenović, The Hobbit; J. M. Barrie, M. Stojanović, Peter Pan; Enda Walsh, Disco Pigs, Maja
Pelević, Jumpgirl, Orange Peel, Marin Držić: Dundo (Uncle) Maroje, musical Hair.
Mladenović has directed Alan Ford by Magnus and Bunker at the theatre ‘Pozorište na Terazijama’
as well as Peace, after Aristophanes, by Maričić and Mladenović.
He has received the ‘Bojan Stupica’ Award as well as three Sterija Awards: in 1998, for adaptation, The Affair of the Innocent Annabelle (NT Sombor); in 2000, for adaptation, Scolding the People
in Two Acts (NT Sombor); in 2002, for dramatization, The Siege of the Saint Salvation Church, NT
Sombor) and a number of significant awards at festivals in Serbia and Montenegro. From 1st
July 2009 he is Artistic Director of the Atelier 212 Theatre, Belgrade. |
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Držić has added to the renaissance comedy the satire directed at prodigality and arrogance of the Dubrovnik nobility, at the time when the common people lived rather frugaly. And his famous monologue about the people ’real’ and fake’, good and evil, is a utopian projection of the country where everyone is equal and everyone is the lord of everything. Dundo Maroje was created before Thomas More’s Utopia and Tomaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, and in that noble utopia it is very similar to the country we lived in and which I, personally, loved very much. I was also motivated by the desire to recall again my brilliant professor Miroslav Belović, one of the most significant directors in the history of our theatre, and his set of Dundo Maroje, with Nikola Simić as Pomet and Branko Cvejić as Petrunjela. Belović set Dundo Maroje in a Catholic monastery, and I set it in the Kruševac Correctional Institution. Both monastery and prison are spaces of restrained freedom, places where the celebration of life, as Dundo Maroje truly is, can be highlighted much better.
Kokan MLADENOVIĆ |
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MARIN DRŽIĆ (Dubrovnik, 1508 – Venice, 1567)
A writer of poems, pastorals and comedies. Born in an old, civic family that was collapsing during his youth. After completing his schooling in Dubrovnik, he became a cleric and, according to the old family right, rector of All Saints and St. Peter Church. With the help of the government, from 1538 to 1544 he studied canon law in Siena. Because he attended a performance of a banned comedy in a private apartment, he received a police warning. Since he was more interested in the Renaissance comedy than church law, he didn’t finish his studies. Out of necessity he became a priest, and because of debts a scribe in the Office for Salt Sales. Dissatisfied with his position in the society and in conflict with the nobility, he tried to overturn the aristocratic rule in Dubrovnik and establish a democratic government made up of nobles and laity. For that reason, as a chaplain of the Venetian bishop he left Dubrovnik. In Florence, he asked the Prince of Tuscany, Cosimo I, for money and a few soldiers for a rebellion. Left without an answer, he returned frightened to Venice, where he died the next year.
First he tried his hand at Petrarchan poetry, which did not announce his brilliant gift. After returning from his studies, he wrote a series of pastorals of the Siena type (Tirrena, Venus and Adonis, Placer and the Fairy and others) and erudite, Plautian and original comedies (Dundo Maroje, Novella of Stanac, Gathering, Mande, Arkulin and others). Comedy is the literary genre where his brilliant creative abilities finally find their fullest expression. He made the Dubrovnik nobility laugh and he mocked them, entertained them and unmasked them on open stages. The nobility is in Dundo Maroje, as in his other comedies, duped by laity, the skillful, resilient, resourceful and clever servants using their abilities. |
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Everything is subordinated to play and entertainment
The Renaissance comedy by Marin Držić, director Kokan Mladenović set in the form of ‘theatre within theatre.’ The actors of the Kruševac ensemble create characters of prisoners and leaders in the Kruševac Correctional Institution, who play Držić’s Dundo Maroje. This particular and provocative directorial procedure signifies a different approach to the interpretation of the classical comedy adding to the comical values of the text, especially in the area of situation comedy.
The actors play extremely artificially and exaggeratingly, with the persiflage, physical, facial and verbal affectation, which makes the characters and the action completely grotesque. In presenting Držić’s characters, the prisoners are clumsy, rigid and unnatural, which intensifies the comical meaning in the direction of the absurd. Nebojša Vranić plays Slaviša Ilić Lepi, imprisoned for seduction and material exploitation of foreign currency retired ladies. He plays Maro with affectation and arrogantly, proudly prancing on the stage, adorned with tacky jewelry like a peacock. Vranić clearly shows that Slaviša is delighted to be on stage, with a chance to play the part, which is the source of additional humour, new in relationship to the initial text. Dejan Tončić plays Milić Petrović, locked up for smuggling cigarettes, who plays Popiva. He is also fascinated by being on stage, and his idiotic desire to show himself in the best possible light is the priority in shaping Popiva. Thus Slaviša proudly shows the muscles of his tattooed body, instead of focusing on the creation of the character, which is, because of the distancing from his stage assignment, also an ample source of humour.
Bojan Veljović plays Ivica Gula, senior sergeant in the prison, who shapes the character of Bokčilo, giving him a funny, unnatural, high-pitched voice. He is stiff and clumsy, but he tries really hard to veraciously interpret the character of Bokčilo, which intensifies the comicality, especially because he is so unsuccessful at that play. Dušan Dule Jovanović plays the prisoner Stojan Brada, a driver locked up for driving under influence and destruction of a private building. He received the task to interpret Ugo Tudeško, which he executes confusedly, absently, unconvincingly. The case is similar with the confectioner Kiril, imprisoned for not paying taxes, who, anemically and disinterestedly, plays Baba; because of that tepid indifference, the appearance of Baba has a comical effect (Toma Trifunović). The character of Dundo Maroje is created by the prison warden, more seriously and more rigidly, so he would demonstrate the authority of power (Milija Vuković). The least artificial, i.e. most convincing, is the character of Pomet, probably because he is played by Nikola Belović, called Actor, locked up for frauds, thefts and false representations (Branislav Trifunović).
Men, of course, interpret the female characters of the Držić comedy, which emphasises even more powerfully the grotesque action on the stage. Nikola Rakić plays Daki, the alternative stylist, imprisoned for forfeiting merchandise stamps. He plays Laura, Roman courtesan, who obviously tries to be seductive, gentle and effeminate, and the clash between his maleness and plastic femininity is very comical. The character of Laura’s maid Petrunjela is also funny because she is played by the bearded and fat Đorđe Dobanovački, a butcher’s assistant, locked up for the prohibited sale of meat infected by trichinellosis (Miloš Samolov). He doe not even try to be effeminate; he approaches the role without enthusiasm, he plays as if forced, which causes a different kind of comic effect, intensified because of his physical appearance – the purposefully exposed belly effusively shaking on the stage. The choice of the equipment used by prisoners is also very creative and insatiably funny – kitchen and toilet tools, various brushes grotesquely replace moustaches, wigs, female breasts (costume designer Maja Mirković, set design Marija Kalabić).
Mladenović’s Dundo Maroje is a shining example of unpretentious, pure and entertaining theatre. Authors skillfully, imaginatively and playfully find different ways to make the audience laugh, without mystifying forceful artistic ambitions and sophisticated metaphors. Everything here is subordinated to play and entertainment, crystallised ludism representing an ode to life and theatre.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, August 8th 2009 |
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