2008-2009 Season

Anica Tomić / Jelena Kovačić
Excuse me, Can I Tell You ... ?

Directed by Anica Tomić

Excuse Me, Can I Tell You ...? Presents a socio-psychological study about a society built on repressed traumas. Anica Tomić and Jelena Kovačić offer a powerful, partly raw, but above all, memorable and anxiety-ridden, vision of life immediately after a war. But in doing this, they do not once descend into pathos.The authors uncompromisingly pose a thesis about happiness as the means to mask anxiety and trauma. In the world of four people a smile serves as the customary mask that offers the only way to fight against their horrifying thoughts. Excuse Me, Can I Tell You ...?, above all, is a story about strained and staged happiness, beneath whose facade is hidden the horrors of a war locked away in chaotic memories.

Premiere: 2 October 2008

Frljić’s vision of Gulliver’s Travels is realized in a presentation for young and old alike, inviting each of them to share a common voyage with Lemuel Gulliver. Children can enjoy

the story of the travels of an adventurer and his experiences, while the production offers

adults a view of the social problems of our times. Inspired by the novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Frljić on one hand offers a fantasy travelogue, while on the other hand he presents an irresistible social satire. He balances both aspects of the novel by creating a theatrical world that is equally appealing to both a younger and older audience.

Voices from the Mountains is a theatrical staging of the first Croatian novel, Mountains, by Petar Zoranić entwined with the pastoral motifs of Tirena (Tyrrhenia) by Marin Držić, directed by Rene Medvešek. In an anniversary year it connects Petar Zoranić and Marin Držić in an adventure of theatrical revelation, portraying their similarities and differences, the humanistic vision of one and the Arcadian disquiet of the other. Traveling through time, both literally and figuratively, Voices from the Mountains speaks about those values that, if they are not already forgotten, then they have been pushed to the margins of a time that justifies transitional impotence, losing in its turbulent feebleness the moral compass of the world. In what way can we return them to the alluring superficiality of our everyday lives and how

to ensure that some of the essential points of reference of our lives are not lost or suppressed?

These are questions that will be posed by Zoranić’s and Držić’s characters, who cross the span of five hundred years to become our contemporaries. Rene Medvešek was awarded the Orlando Prize for the Best Artistic Achievement in the Drama Program for his direction and

dramatic composition of Voices from the Mountains at the 59th Dubrovnik Summer

A co-production of Zagreb Youth Theatre and La Comédie de Saint-Etienne and the Théâtre de la Place – Liege to present Polet by Gilles Granouillet, directed by Jean-Claude Berutti. L’Envolée is a family drama, or as the director himself calls it, a comedy-chase. The drama describes the lives of two forty yearold people who have lost contact with each other, but who want to re-establish a relationship despite the various crises that they have passed through. The protagonists are a brother and sister whose children resolve the problem of family fragmentation in a surprising, comical way. Their fragmented fates hint at a picture of today’s times because the text speaks in some way about people who are between the ages of 45 and 55 and who are trying to find themselves in a world that has gone through great changes.

Nina Mitrović, Ivan Vidić, Filip Šovagović, Damir Karakaš, Igor Rajki
Zagreb Pentagram
Directed by Paolo Magelli

The omnibus Zagreb Pentagram, which links five dramatic texts of the noted writers Nina Mitrović, Ivana Vidić, Filip Šovagović, Damir Karakaš and Igor Rajki, describes an authentic, generational view of Zagreb in transition – mostly the exciting years from 1980 until today. The director Paolo Magelli uses the stage to pose questions that concern us and which we come across every day – questions of individual and social responsibility, the burdens of the past, and the uncertainties of the future. The protagonist of this unique theatrical project is the city of Zagreb, and Magelli evokes on the stage all of the temptations and conflicts of a time that has changed us. The wartime and post-war period, the passage from one millennium to another, our ability to cope, or our inability to cope, in an atmosphere of a lost moral compass, questions of individual and social responsibility, the burdens of the past, the disjointedness of the present and the uncertainty of the future will be depicted in a performance whose genre is not easy to describe but which brings together those themes that directly relate to us and which we come across every day. Zagreb Pentagram, speaks in an authentic voice about this modernity, about the city in which and with which we live, about the people that we meet everyday, and finally about ourselves.

In May 2008, Zagreb Youth Theatre became a member of the European Theatre Convention

and thereby joined the Orient Express Theatre Project, which brings together sixtheatres from Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Germany. Tena Štivičić, a dramatist whose premiere of Lightning Bugs was a great success, is the author of the text Seven Days in Zagreb for Zagreb Youth Theatre, while Tijana Zinajić is the director. The goal of the Orient Express project is to create a traveling theatre laboratory, a place for theatre experimentation of “the other” and “the different”, questioning identity on the way from Istanbul through southeastern Europe – the place where East and West meet. The theatre train started from Istanbul in the spring of 2009 and over the next two months it will stop at railway stations in the above countries, where it will stage performances both from the host country and from

the country that was its previous stop. In July 2009, all six productions will be performed at the International Theatre Festival in Stuttgart. The Performance Seven Days in Zagreb deals with the obssessive motives of the transitional period of this time and opens up the contemporary subjects and questions about the feminine and social issues. The Project Orient Express, held in Zagreb at the Main Railway Stationin the period of June, 12th to June, 17th 2009, included the performances As If of the Serbian National Theatre, Seven Days in Zagreb of Zagreb Yout Theatre and Ex-press of the Turkish State Theatre.