The second World Theatre Festival is once again presenting top theatre productions in Zagreb. The success of last year's festival, which introduced directors Robert Lepage, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Josef Nadj, Thomas Ostermeier and Antonio Latella, convinced us of the importance of the mission to make plays from major world stages available to professionals and the wider cultural audiences. The festival insists on presenting the masters: this year Croatia hosts for the first time Luc Bondy, Piotr Fomenko, Rezo Gabriadze and Rimas Tuminas. Bondy is the omnipresent name of German and French theatre, a director who has innovatively interpreted European dramaturgy, equally exciting when directing the world classics or contemporary dramatists. Piotr Fomenko is the head of the Moscow's most prestigious theatre academy GITIS, a director whose works merge tradition and contemporariness of the Russian theatre. Georgian Rezo Gabriadze is a universal artist, writer, puppeteer, sculptor, stage and film director, while his sublime plays at the same time carry powerful human messages. After Nekrosius, we shall meet another representative of the "Lithuanian theatre wonder", Rimas Tuminas, a director of powerful visual symbolism, of a kind that has been long awaited by the public. Francois-Michel Pesenti is an impertinent esthetic provocateur. Staged by the Slovenian national theatre, his Fedra, through its classicist simplicity, gains the power of an avant-garde gesture. Finally, the Ukrainian enfant terrible Andriy Zholdak is to introduce himself as an upholder of the theatre of cruelty but also of a spectacle bursting with energy. From War and Peace to Masquerade and Hamlet, from Sophocles and Tolstoi to Martin Crimp, the Festival reveals the vitality and power of the drama theatre.

Art Directors
Ivica Buljan and Dubravka Vrgoč