Four years after the premiere of Mate Matišić’s play I Am Who I’m Not, which garnered significant attention within theatrical circles, Paolo Magelli, the legendary director of Italian roots and distinguished European career, returns to the Zagreb Youth Theatre. This also marks his return to the works of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, following his dual staging of the Russian classics Uncle Vanya / Three Sisters in 1997 – productions that remain etched in memory as landmark performances not only for ZKM but for Croatian theatre as a whole.
On this occasion, the director, now at the peak of his life and artistic maturity, has chosen to grapple with the young – or more precisely, the youngest – Chekhov and his first play for the stage, A Play Without a Title (1878), later referred to as Platonov after one of its protagonists, the village schoolteacher Mikhail Vasilievich Platonov. This play introduces both the poetics and motifs of this Russian dramatist, from the spatial and temporal setting in a provincial area on the brink of societal collapse to the easily recognisable characters of rural doctors and teachers, disillusioned elites and intelligentsia, and leisurely idlers, all striving in their own ways to maintain the illusion of a better and largely imagined past. Through precise shifts in focus, these unrestrained, direct, even frenetic characters present a full spectrum of timeless personal and societal issues. Unlike Chekhov’s other works, which are firmly structured both ideologically and formally, A Play Without a Title demands a clear and concrete dramaturgical and performative approach, something Paolo Magelli – in collaboration with his long-standing dramaturge Željka Udovičić Pleština and, of course, the ever-enthusiastic ensemble of the Zagreb Youth Theatre – is certain to deliver.
