Unpleasant confrontations

The director Kokan Mladenović advocates for a theater that, beyond any cheap topicality, confronts our reality in a serious, intellectual and artistically relevant manner. It has already been pointed out several times that Mladenović has a developed ability to recognize provocative and contemporary content in local plays from the recent past (Affair innocent Annabelle, How to laugh master, Ruženje people u dva share), contents that provide essential justification for a new stage interpretation of these works. Probably one of the main reasons for staging the drama should be found in those artistic and intellectual determinations of the director Traveling theater Šopalović Ljubomir Simović on the big stage of the National Theatre, where this important achievement of our national dramaturgy has long been a place.

However, the essential reason for the existence of this play should really be talked about in the conditional, because that reason is barely visible in the thematically and meaningfully extremely unclear directorial setting. If one knows the aforementioned director's intentions and with a lot of good intentions, it can be assumed that in the play of the National Theater, Mladenović wants to use Simović's play - which originally raises the questions of where the border is between real and theatrical reality and whether playing plays in war is ethically acceptable - to critically reexamine the position of today's Serbian theater, its many years of conformist refusal to come to grips with reality. This idea can be guessed from only a few solutions, first of all from the director-actor setting of the characters from the Šopalović theater troupe, which reveals their lack of interest in the suffering of people in real life and the triviality of their lofty views about theater.

However, if this caricaturally stylized and dramatically reduced interpretation, primarily of Vera Čukić (Jelisaveta), should have the function of parodying and criticizing the aesthetic and ethical positions taken by traveling actors, the question arises why the same approach appears in the interpretation of the characters from " of real life"; why does Danijela Ugrenović provide an external, dramatically devoid of substance and comically exaggerated interpretation of Gina's character, why does Vladan Gajović only offer an incomprehensible superficial caricature of a drunken Blagoj? Therefore, this general lack of differentiation of acting styles calls into question the assumption made about the "significance" of the set of characters from the theater troupe, and therefore the perceived director's concept.

When one abandons the well-intentioned attempt to analyze the director's concept, one comes to an unpleasant confrontation with what actually takes place on stage: a thematically and meaningfully unarticulated action, a monotonous rhythm that results, seemingly paradoxically, from an almost continuously raised general tone (a euphemism for the stage race and dreku), external directorial solutions. These external directorial solutions also include some drastic manipulations of the text, such as the introduction of Sekula and Domazet, two heroes who are only mentioned in the play. These interventions, of course, would not be problematic if they had a dramatic justification; no justification can be seen for the appearance of Sekula, while in the case of the replacement of the Volksdeutsche Majcen by the Serbian collaborator Domazet, in addition to the obvious desire to create a stage effect with the scene with the slaughter of the pig, the thought that the Serbs are their own worst enemies, which, by the way, is not at all important to this story.

When the car goes downhill, it destroys everything in front of it; The scenography by Miodrag Tabački and the music by Zoran Hristić complete the negative impression of the play. The giant frame of the gallows, which fills the real portal of the stage, is followed in perspective by several constructed, cheaply made and unnecessarily bulky theater portals - this scenographic solution represents an all-too-obvious metaphor for the conflict between the real world and the world of illusions. The publicized intention of the composer Zoran Hristić to use "Wagnerian" music to create an association with the political abuse of the works of the great artist remains quite inaccessible; what is, on the other hand, available to the musical layman is a distinct illustrativeness (emphatically lyrical tones for lyrical scenes, thunderous and pompous tones for dramatic ones), which creates a dilemma as to whether the function of such stage music is parodic.

In the end, it should be pointed out that the strict judgment about the show Traveling theater Šopalović of the National Theater stems from the justifiably high demands placed on the director Kokan Mladenović and his prestigious team of authors, but also the fact that the poor result was not achieved with an insignificant text, but with one of the most significant dramas of our post-war literature.