The five best theater plays in 2024.

What does theater mean to us? How do we remember some performances? By talking about important topics in a unique and bold way? Because the actors play in such a way that they reveal new dimensions to the dramatic characters? By the fact that the directors find the right amount of theatrical approach that draws our attention to what we would have missed without their skill? Because in the theater we feel like part of a large and harmonious community?

Photo: Promo

5. "Bitch's Powers Trilogy: Chapter I, The Bride and Good Night Cinderella"

Theater is a place where we gather to share experiences about important topics. One of the important topics in 2024 is femicide. The most radical performance at this year's Bitef is dedicated to her and one of the most radical performances seen at Bitef in the last ten years. Powers of a Bitch Trilogy: Chapter I, The Bride and Good Night Cinderella Caroline Bianchi. The performance deals with the topic of rape and the form and ethics of performance as an artistic act.

Carolina Bianchi investigates the fate of the performer Pippa Baka, who hitchhiked from Italy to Jerusalem dressed in a wedding dress, convinced that people should be trusted and that art brings beauty. However, the artist was raped and killed before the end of the trip. Carolina Bianchi examines the limits of consistency and courage in performance and the connection between the suffering of the performer and the suffering of women in real life. Carolina Bianchi is charismatic and very convincing. She is self-sacrificing (or would it be better to say a real experiment on herself?) by drinking in front of us the so-called "rape drug". We follow how the drug affects her, how she struggles to stay conscious and how she finally falls asleep right in front of us. Then her male and female performers come on stage and perform dramatic and associative scenes dedicated to girls who have been raped and at the same time show us what can be done with a drugged body.

Photo: Promo

4. "Bird cage"

On the summer stage of the Belgrade Drama Theater at the very end of August, as part of the "New Voices" project, we watched another performance of the new theater generation. The pre-production of the piece Birdcage Nikola Stanišić directed by Slobodan Stanković.

Drama Birdcage talks about the difficult and cruel life of the inmates in a juvenile correctional facility. The special value of this play is the young actors, all of whom were excellent. What is characteristic of their acting process is that they differentiated their characters by way of speech, gesture and physical posture and that they consistently carried out this process throughout the entire performance. Their names are: Nikola Mijatović, Rista Milutinović, Budimir Stošić, Bratislav Zdravković, Mihailo Laptošević, Vukašin Jovanović and Stevan Smiljanić. Remember their names! If theater managements are wise enough, we will have a new generation of brilliant young actors.

Photo: Promo

3. "Wax People"

And the play People of wax NP Sombor is significant because it presented us in the best light another new young artist - director Ivan Vanja Alac. In the drama People of wax the writer Mate Matišić summarized the entire traumatic experience of Croatian society spanning several decades: the consequences of the wars of the 1990s, (un)concealed inter-ethnic intolerance, class prejudices, the conflict between the countryside and the city, the artist and his model from life.

The writer put all these (and many more!) fears and discomforts into a modern dramatic form, in three stories connected by the writer himself. Alac didn't "go crazy" to demonstrate to us some kind of exhibitionist directorial concept. He follows the text very scrupulously, only allowing himself a metaphor. The director also clearly follows the writer's intentions regarding the relationship between the characters and how the plot develops. The main asset of the director and the play are the actors of the Sombor Theater led by Saša Torlaković who plays the main character.

Photo: Promo

2.  "disappearing"

In the time of the general search for a new, domestic playwright on the Serbian stage, two contemporary Croatian dramatic texts had significant stagings. One is mentioned People of wax Mate Matisic, and the other is Disappearing by Tomislav Zajec in Atelier 212. The theme of this piece is the sexual abuse of children. We all know that terrible things happen in our society, but we intimately hope that the crimes are still far from us and that media sources are the only thing that connects us to them.

Director Sanja Mitrović warns us that we live more and more in the world of media, and less and less in the real world, and that we therefore lose our sense of reality and allow the creators of the media illusion to shape our consciousness. And in fact, criminals live around us and carry out their plans. They succeed in this precisely because we hope that accidents happen only to others, and that our life is as safe as it is safe to walk on earth. A criminal can hypocritically cry over the fate of a child like Karlo (excellent Svetozar Cvetković) cries at the beginning of the play, but what will we do is the question that the play imposes Disappearing Atelier 212.

 1. "1981."

The year 1981 is important because it was then that crises that still shake society today became public, but political events were not the primary focus of the author's project 1981 directed by Tomij Janežič at the Novi Sad Theater. The work on the plays probably began with the gathered people telling their family stories, and then acting them out on stage through improvisations. As the work progressed, the actors became more and more familiar with each other's family stories. The better they got to know each other, the more their stories intersected, mixed and became the stories of a new, theatrical family. They were no longer the aunts-grandmothers-aunts of actor so-and-so, but those relatives became relatives of all of them.

The actors and the director assured us that these stories are life itself, and we in the audience had no problem going from scene to scene, from genre to genre, laughing and crying and connecting their family stories with our experience and our memory of 1981. a year. A performance 1981 it testifies to what is the greatest strength of good theater always and forever - the magical and unique meeting, now and here, of actors and audience.

Through the theater, they become one, unique, unrepeatable and tightly bound human community that lives its life intensively in those few hours that the play lasts.