World Theatre Festival 2007 will be held for the fifth time in the Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM), Croatian National Theatre (HNK) and Comedy Theatre (Komedija) this September. Six theatres from Germany, France, Russia, Slovenia, Hungary and Turkmenistan will stage productions marked by artistic passion, innovative character and exploratory spirit.
Schaubühne Theatre from Berlin and their “Nora” directed by Thomas Ostermeier with their first
performance in Croatia define the aesthetics and the ethics of this festival. It is a modern theatre
which favors new dramaturgy, or interprets well-known texts in the light of social changes. To be at
the service of critical production, or to fulfill cultural and social tasks of the urban community?
The second encounter with Schaubühne brings us “Death of a Salesman” directed by Luk Perceval.
This classic work belonging to the realm of American psychological realism is set in a neo-liberalist
environment present both in Germany and throughout the world. Unscrupulous machinery of profit
destroys the life of lower middle class. Obsession with football, beer, depression and smuggling,
all discover a new side of Miller’s drama.
Joël Pommerat builds a stylistically perfect work “This Child” from shocking imagery of a series of conversations about parent-child relationships. Socially aware, Pommerat is above all an artist of strong gesture who, without any moral judgment, confronts us with the idealistic model of familial happiness to which we all strive.
Árpád Schilling, a lucid interpreter of classic works, interests us as a conscientious and engaged author. „Blackland“ sarcastically sneers at the political elite who gained their fortune by shamelessly stealing the public property and who lead decadent lives, unlike the common people who flounder through the mud of a truly black land.
“The Damned” by Luchino Visconti is a classic work of the European auteur film and a perverse display of decadence in the time of Nazism. Diego de Brea, on the trail of a new sensibility, takes a model and tries it out in a new aesthetic key, in the time which had lost its sense of responsibility and conscience by discarding a humanist culture.
Anna Mele from Turkmenistan, the land of dictatorship, is the only performer in “King Lear”. On his back he carries his burden and the whole stage, bringing the theatre back to its roots, and to a childlike ritual in which, just like in the case of Kantor, the theatre has approached to the mystery of death.
For Pjotr Fomenko the theatre is the art of acting, and directing means living with his actors. “Three Sisters” have become a theatre icon through a large number of interpretations of the original story. In the manner of a restorer, in his last masterpiece Fomenko confronts us with a tragic beauty of Chekhov’s dramaturgy.