ZAGREB THEATRE FESTIVAL 2008.
The festival turns its focus to Berlin, which presents us with two appealing theatres. Volksbühne is among the most innovative ones in Europe. This theatre, run by the brilliant Frank Castorf, with its thematic cycles, adaptations of key novels, film projections and philosophical debates builds a repertoire abounding in folk erotica and radical post-drama experiments. This is where Dimiter Gotscheff directed Chekhov’s Ivanov like an intense drama with elements of a performance, depriving it of its pastoral decorations and encircling it with a thick metropolitan fog from AlexanderPlatz. Events do not happen with the passing of time, but like in alternative narratives, beneath Chekhovian reality there is another pre-ontological era where individuals travel in different times.
This World Theatre Festival ends with a different Ivanov, directed by Tamás Ascher from Budapest. Ascher is the most sincere interpreter of Chekhov’s plays. He moves the melancholic drama in socialist Hungary. To the brutal ordinariness and vulgarity he adds the fine, complex atmosphere through which lost heroes tread. The set reminds of provincial discotheques from the 70s, and we recognise its bar chairs from our own embellished past. The Katona Theatre is not only a Hungarian sensation. A group of the best actors and directors which separated from the National Theatre of Budapest reminds of the secession of Croatian Gavella Theatre from the tired HNK (Croatian National Theatre). At Katona they nourish precise acting and intellectually stimulating and dignified directing. They are capable of unifying a classic repertoire with a contemporary creation. Thus melancholic Chekhov suddenly becomes a carnivorous comedy performed with a miraculous energy and directed with a refined fancy. This performance is a sensation of the highest calibre that we’ve seen in the previous seasons. What is the secret of its innovative freshness? In our time, where shocking incidents are a part of the system, this Ivanov is a turn towards the directness of an ethical attitude. In other words, the subversiveness of Ascher’s actions is in his naïve directness which has almost vanished from the contemporary theatre.
With their Nora, Thomas Ostermeier and Schaubühne Theatre were guests at the first World Theatre Festival and marked it with a psychologically analytic character, polished and cold cruelty. Ostermeiers’ world is a inscenation of the upper middle class in a society of global capital, deep in the rituals filled with artificially created pleasures. This year we will see his Hamlet. Staging it, he concentrated on the scenes in which Shakespeare shows the contemporary political systems through the Danish court. Murderers, corruption and passions serve the want for power and seem like themes from the modern Russian novels. Marius von Mayenburg and Ostermeier use Shakespeare in a time when democracy is left without its substance, and art is deprived of the last traces of spiritual transcendence.
Two Belgium appearances speak of the domination of Flemish scene which has inspired the European theatre for over two decades.
The direct starting point of the performance Another Dusty Sleepy Delta Day by Jan Fabre and Ivana Jozić was the death of both of the author’s parents. It is an intimate reflexion of the agony of a mother who had long fought her illness, not having the choice of euthanasia before her. It is an ode to love as an obverse of death. The viewer accepts Fabre’s intimate story by decoding it in form, as if subjecting it to a dream. This procedure, in spite of its melodramatic character, is such that the suppressed core of the story goes back through the excess of the form of the performance, through the expressive pathos of the music which follows a documentarily difficult context. Fabre’s countrymen begin with completely different theatrical suppositions. The theatre company tg STAN stages 2 Antigone by Jean Cocteau and Jean Anouilh. tg STAN has for years been an attraction at theatre festivals. A stubborn persistency to defy authorities has made them just as popular among audiences throughout Europe as among the critics. Where does the intellectual impressiveness of their shows come from? By showing all-time classics or complex contemporary writers such as Bernhardt or Handke, tg STAN creates a universal process of recognition, and it seems that every reading recognises itself in it.
Waiting for Godot as staged by Silviu Purcărete selects the membranes of memory and archeologically lists the levels of human, cultural and religious evolutions of the past century. They intertwine in order to create one big Nothing. It seemed that Beckett’s classic wouldn’t stand the changes of our times, the end of Cold War and the creation of a free democratic world. But how wrong we were! Godot has made a step further in the consumer society in which we as subjects are no longer interpolated on the basis of our ideological identity. The implied message hidden between the lines concerns the obscene pleasure which we enjoy for having accepted oblivience. This utopian show teaches us that we need to abandon the idea of Godot as a model of humility and submissiveness to authority, and persist on our own thing despite of obstacles.
Dubravka Vrgoč and Ivica Buljan
