It is very difficult in this time of great tension to carry out the so-called civil activities such as, for example, watching theater performances and writing about them, while not bringing theater feelings and thoughts that preoccupy us. Theater, more than any other art, exists in its community and everything that happens affects the theater because it affects the actors themselves, but also the audience who, coming to the theater, consciously or unconsciously seeks in present answers to the questions that life imposes on them. Such a feeling washed over us when, going in the opposite direction from the student demonstrations, we went to the National Theater last Thursday to watch a reprise of Moliere An imaginary patient.
Imaginary patient is a musical comedy with ballet elements. It is a specific genre introduced by Moliere himself, the aim of which was to entertain King Louis XIV, his patron, as much as possible by combining two popular genres, ballet and comedy, with dance and musical numbers being a kind of comedy interlude . Imaginary patient is a significant comedy also because it is Moliere's last play, after the performance of which the famous actor and comedy writer died. It's a terrible irony of fate since a comedian who suffered from a serious illness died playing a hypochondriac. Imaginary patient is a comedy about a hypochondriac who puts his obsession, an imagined illness, before the happiness and needs of all his family members. In this play, hypochondria is actually a way for the main character to focus the attention of his neighbors on himself instead of acting as a responsible father who cares about the well-being of the family. He achieves his insane purpose by literally buying attention with money (from doctors who sell him various cleaning products and quacks) or by emotionally blackmailing his loved ones by asking them to subordinate their happiness and needs to his mania. And what does all this have to do with us?
The National Theater is performing at a time when there is a real flood of quacks offering miraculous products for cleansing the body (cleansing from parasites is a hit at the moment!). At every step, through media ads, they scare us that our health is at risk and that urgently, if our life is good, we must start drinking this or applying that. Our pharmacies and drugstores are flooded with supplements that everyone can buy and consume completely freely and on their own - the depth of the wallet is the only limit to this madness. But there is something else An imaginary patient makes it extra current, which is the main character's mania. Namely, Argan (played by Ivan Bosiljčić) maniacally insists that everyone is constantly looking at him, that everyone thinks only of him, that it is the hardest for him and that everyone who tries to point out something outside of Argan's obsession is the most ordinary rascals and ungrateful. It is logical that such a guy unfailingly gathers around him hypocrites, sycophants and predators who, in response to Argan's madness, steal money and threaten the future and happiness of his daughter Anželika (Iva Milanović).
Director Nikola Zavišić and scenographer Jelena Radaković combine the atmosphere of the Louis XIV era with the modern era. The action of this play takes place in a golden age - Louis XIV called himself the king of the sun, and we, some claim, live in a golden age. In that golden space, mirrors are arranged (Versailles was full of them) in which the audience reflects, so that we also become part of the play's decor. Black characters in grotesque costumes move around that golden space. This combination of gold, black and mirror gives additional aesthetics to the space, which makes sense since the director and his collaborators want to recreate the authentic genre of the play in a contemporary theater context – a comedy with a ballet interlude. From the setting itself, we cannot conclude why the reconstruction of the genre was needed. Was it supposed to be a rhythmic counterpoint to the comic events? Should he have associated us with the fact that then and now artists are left to the good will of the government, which treats them as banal and harmless entertainers while they fight silent and dark battles with themselves behind the curtain? It could be both, but also something completely different. The problem may be that these dance transitions do not have the power to lift us up and take us away in the way that ballet points in a classical ballet or a contemporary musical do. On the other hand, the music of composer Jovan Stamatović-Karić was very effective in many places. The way in which Ivan Bosiljčić parodies the feelings of the character Argan by vocally parrying the piano very well shows the character's desire to "tune" his performance in order to achieve a better effect. At the same time, the "tuning" of the intonation makes the performance even more playful.
What we see as the main problem of the play is the excessive playfulness of the acting, which seems to have become an end in itself. The director Nikola Zavišić, together with the playwright Periša Perišić, designed the concept of the play very well, but he did not succeed in "uniting" the acting with that concept, instead each actor was left to himself and his sense of proportion. As is usually the case, some did better and some did a little worse. Ivan Bosiljčić as Argan, Sonja Kolačarić as Belina and Anastasija Mandić as Toaneta were good, and Iva Milanović as Anželika overdid it. Nevertheless, for all of them, we had the feeling that they could have played somehow differently in this decor, maybe a little less grotesque or at least with clearer differences in the approach to the character in different situations (the dramatic tension in the comedy grows from beginning to end, and is not a straight line) . It's as if neither the director, nor the playwright, nor the actors knew exactly what they wanted with the characters, instead they filled the stage with various gags that create a counter-effect in the overall impression. The play seems slow, sluggish and crowded even though the actors are not acting slow. We assume that the director Nikola Zavišić and the actors wanted to show us a world that seems to be continuously switched on "to six" and is at the boiling point. The problem is that they failed to fully convince us in the audience that they have a complete theatrical vision of this important play.
