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Director JANUSZ KICA
Set Design Slavica RADOVIĆ NADAREVIĆ
Costume Design Doris KRISTIĆ
Light Design Marinko MARIČIĆ
Speech Đurđa ŠKAVIĆ
Music for the song My Son Frano ĐUROVIĆ
Music Jun MIYAKE, Tom WAITS, Muse, Tord GUSTAVSEN TRIO
Photo Mara BRATOŠ
Assistant Set Designer Nora FRANZMEIER
Assistant Costume Designer Marta ŽEGURA
Premiere:
November 26th 2011
Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
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CAST |
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Mia |
KSENIJA MARINKOVIĆ |
Branko |
VEDRAN ŽIVOLIĆ |
Robert |
SRETEN MOKROVIĆ |
Doris |
LUCIJA ŠERBEDŽIJA |
Ana |
DORIS ŠARIĆ-KUKULJICA |
Oliver |
DAMIR ŠABAN |
Rita |
URŠA RAUKAR |
Mihael |
KREŠIMIR MIKIĆ |
Sara |
JADRANKA ĐOKIĆ |
Tin |
GORAN BOGDAN |
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| ZAGREB YOUTH THEATRE - ZAGREB (Croatia) |
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Zagreb Youth Theatre, placed at Teslina 7, in the very center of the city of Zagreb, is a part of multimedia youth center, together with Radio 101, Youth television, and several popular places for the Zagreb youth gatherings. As one of the oldest theatres of this kind, it is considered to be the cradle of the Croatian theatre, since many generations of actors and people in culture began here in the Youth Studio, today known as ZYT College. When it comes to repertoire, ZYT is a very specific theatre since the ensemble has so far performed, with equal success, children’s plays and highly artistic performances of Croatian and world literature for the most demanding audiences. So it is clear that ZYT performs successfully not only it primary activity as a theatre, but also achieves a wider social task to educate children and youth. With all of it’s materially measurable advantages, one of the main characteristics of Zagreb Youth Theatre is the image it holds in the public eye. Famous plays directed by famous directors, carefully and in a contemporary manner arranged program and numerous initiatives wich have greatly enriched the cultural content that Zagreb can offer to the public eye, are just some of the reasons why the ZYT constantly draws and thrills audiences of all generations.
Over the last few years ZYT has received 50 awards at the national and international theatre festivals in Brussels, Berlin, Frieburg, Nitra, Moscow, Heildeberg, Wiesbaden, Plzen, Varna, Helsinki, Vienna, Beograd, Skopje, Ljubljana, Nova Gorica, New York, Costa Rica...
ZYT began with the European Theatre Project in January 2006 and continues regularily in the upcoming season as we wish to enable the Zagreb audience to follow all the important foreign theatre achievements outside the programs of festivals (which is always limited by the program concept). This project has been recognized as a long awaited theatre project and it has gained the status of an event not to be missed. As a part of the project we have by now introduced the following theatres: Theatre Metastatio from Prato, Space Productions Sarajevo, Theatre Seindendan from Tokyo, Slovenian National Theatre from Nova Gorica, Yugoslavian Drama Theatre from Belgrade, Ballet Preljocaj from Paris, Slovenian theatre from Trieste, theatre group Farm in the Cave from Prague, En Knap Group from Ljubljana, Slovenian Youth Theatre from Ljubljana, dance group Inbal Pinto from Tel Aviv, Royal Flemish Theatre from Bruxelles, Theatre from Heildeberg and Theatre an der Parkaue from Berlin, Slovenian Theatre in Trieste, Slovenian Youth Theatre in Ljubljana.
In 2007 Zagreb Youth Theatre co-operated with theatre of Jan Fabre in the perfor-mance Requiem for a Metamorphoses, which was presented at the Salzburg Festival and in 2008 with the same theatre co-produced the performance of Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day, which had the opening night at Avignon festival. The ZYT produced together with La Commedie de Saint Étienne performance L’Énvolée and it was presented at the end of 2008 in Zagreb and in 2009 in Saint Étienne.
In May 2008. Zagreb Youth Theatre became a member of the European Theatre Convention and thereby joined the Orient Express Theatre Project, which brings together six theatres from Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Germany. In Zagreb the project was held at the Main Railway Station in the period of June 12th to June 17th 2009 and included the performances: As If of the Serbian National Theatre, Seven Days in Zagreb of Zagreb Youth Theatre and Ex-press of the Turkish State Theatre. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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A dramatic portrait of a dissolved family in transitional, miserable times is a commonplace in both literature and life. Ivor Martinić wrote a play in that very crease between life and litearature, dedicated to the son who walks a little slower and to all of us who daily trip on reality, often without noticing those who in the quickness of our walking do not succeed to follow us. Our walk is always corrected and adjusted, our movements are measured and muted, our speech is precise and reasonable, our fates are directed and controlled... others are guiltyfor everything else that comes out of the frame of our well kept world. Others. (...) The other was once in the place of our enemy, and then we defeated him with ease, now he is in the horizon of our unquenched longing and remains forever in the space of the unknown. We therefore want him and fear him at the same time, and through that reciprocity of the impossible, in the difference that separates us forever, we always primarily indulge in suffering for ourselves, and only then for the Other. (...)
 Dubravka VRGOČ, Programme of the play |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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In the space of a giant white box that, set on a classical stage, markingly symbolises a bare family space with constantly lowered curtains, Janusz Kica sets out to a discreet and patient search for the secrets, interpersonal relations, maturation and life with the other, but also the alternate. The question of the other is reflected on several levels: physical disability, homosexuality, old age and geriatric demention. The multi-layeredness and maturity of the dramatic text of the author still in his late twenties impresses, and with his tragi-comic threads he colours his characters, set in almost all imaginable family relations. And in these relationships, through three generations, life can be nauseating and cheeful, and its real image sometimes deeply concealed as in Chekhov’s pauses between replicas, in the unuttered words, like the truth in crevasses.
Ksenija RADULOVIĆ |
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Janusz Kica. Born in 1957 in Wroclaw, Poland. He completed Theatre Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in 1981. During the government overturn in Poland (1981) he was in West Germany, and he remained there. In Cologne he started studying Performance Arts and Art Hristory. He worked as assistant director and assistant set designer. From 1986 to 1989 he was a permanent assistant director, and then director, at the Wuppertaller Bühnen, the theatre made famous by Pina Bausch. One of his first directing assignments in that theatre was Theobald/Kipling’s The Jungle Book. He set the same text on stage at ZKM in 1990.
He worked in other German cities, in Slovenia and Austria. He collaborated with Peter Stein and Andrzej Wajda. For Kafka’s America and A Midsummer Night’s Dream he received awards for directing at the Borštnik Meetings, a Slovenian national festival, at which his Tamed Shrew was also awarded, and Calderón’s Life is a Dream and Fischer’s Meanwhile (SNG Nova Gorica; participated at Pozorje 2006, in Circles) received awards as well. In Slovenia, he set Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, Kafka’s Trial, The Spanish Piece by Jasmina Reza...
In Vienna he directed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, in Mainz Glowacki’s The Fourth Sister, adaptation of Mann’s The Magic Mountain...
Plays directed in Croatia (selection): ZKM –The Three Musketeers by A. Dumas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by W. Shakeaspeare… Locusts by B. Srbljanović received three awards at the 51th Pozorje in 2006: for best performance, acting and stage; Firefox by Tena Štivičić; In Three Kings (Comedy); Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Kleist’s Amphitryon (Dubrovnik Summer Festival); Goldoni’s Holiday Trilogy and Demons by Dostoevsky (HNK Zagreb); Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (The Split Summer Festival). |
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Ivor Martinić, playwright, poet, prose writer, screenwriter, dramaturge
Born in 1984 in Split. Studied dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts in Zagreb. Since 2005 has been working as a dramaturge and author of adaptations for productions at the Children’s Theatre Dubrava, theatre Little Staage, Theatre & TD, Eurokaz, at the Summer Nights in Rijeka and in ZKM. Often collaborates with the Croatian Radio, in whose dramatic programme all his plays have been performed. In 2005 he received the award “Marin Držić” for the play Simply: (Unhappy). For the play Here the Title of the Play about Ante is Written he received the award Fabriqué et Croatie by the society REZ and the award Mali Marulić at the Festival of Croatian Drama for Chilren. The Play About Mirjana and Those Around Her premiered at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, directed by Iva Milošević (the play was shown in the competitive selection of Pozorje 2010). This text was set at the City Theatre in Ljubljana and Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb.
Martinić’s plays have been translated to English, French, German, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Italian and Spanish languages, and some of those translations have been published.
He is one of the founders of the web site of Croatian Drama Drame.hr.
Other radio-dramas:A Nun, A Boy and Other Passers By, The Pats, Return, No Title. |
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Given up on one’s own life
The young dramatist Ivor Martinić started shining two years ago at the regional theatric sky and has been shining increasingly strong ever since. His plays simply and lucidly hit today’s traumas: gloomy atmospheres and stingy dialogues reveal painful spots of human interrelationships, of dysfunctional families and our own selves, already numb from existential miseries and psycho-social nightmares. A black-humoured manner in which Martinić combines personal handicaps with the picture of society that has no time for troubles of the close ones resounds in the title My Son Just Walks a Little Slower.
The story talks about three generations of a family in whose centre is a young man in a wheel chair, mostly alone since childhood, all the others are more often absent than present, they are concerned with their interest or care only about their own little problems. The series of great family dramas has already occurred, and the members of the family are only casual observers of their own unhappy lives. It’s as if they have already given up on life: some raise tantrums about trifles, others are deeply sunk into apathy, still others keep only memories about their failed lives. The father doesn’t love the mother, her sister doesn’t love her husband, children are staggering in search of quick excitements, and the mother, feeling that the entire family is on her shoulders, neglects her sick son.
The secret of Martinić’s pieces, in which nothing is expressed until the end, and much is just surmised, in small but significant gestures, which assumes that actors have to enter the role with all their beings, betting everything on one card, showing us the internal state and not the external action. (...)
Apart from several brilliant roles, the greatest value of this performance is an excellent text by Ivor Martinić, which cannot leave anyone indifferent. New dramatic texts in Croatia and Serbia, if beside Martinić’s, the works of Ivana Sajko, Biljana Srbljanović, Goran Ferčec, Dušan Spasojević and Milena Marković are mentioned, are therapeutic because they depict the sorrowful landscapes of our reality, devastated by human neglect and selfishness, and make many re-examine their conscience.
Bojan MUNJIN, Novosti, 2.12.2011
Waiting for the Director
(...) Martinić in this piece succeeds in the subtle depiction of glimmers of non-glamorous beauty of living inside a gloomy everyday life, without any desire for moralisation, destructive pessimism or naive psychological approach, and in that attempt the subtle and unobtrusive director’s hand of Janusz Kica proved to be a good collaborator. Kica sets on stage an almost integral version of the piece keeping in the premiere all the important narrative spots of a dramatic text, and succeeds in his attempt to present himself primarily as an experience sideman who extracts to the fore the play of his younger colleague, but not by taking the line of less resistance with a directorial lack of imagination. Starting with the choice of actors, which is not based on age or physical identification by the interpreters with their characters, through a simple and functional set design/box by Slavica Radović, to the choice of music, devised as a playlist next to which actors indulge in misfortunes of their own roles easier, all on the stage is directed toward a depiction of the atmosphere of the dramatic text and the fate of characters, who from that text unpleasantly stare at the audience. (...)
Matko BOTIĆ, www.kazalište.hr, 29.11.2011 |
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