Ivor Martinić

A PLAY ABOUT MIRJANA AND THOSE AROUND HER

Director and Translator                       Iva Milošević

Premiere at “Bojan Stupica” Stage of Yugoslav drama Theatre: February 18 2010 at 8.30 p.m

Composer

Assistant Director

Production Manager

Lucio

Stage Manager

ABOUT THE PLAY

I take a lot of time with titles, a title  has to tell me things about the structure of the play and its subject. However banal these titles may seem, I feel they point to exactly what takes place in the play itself. Which I need a lot, I need to know exactly what it is that I want to tell a story about. I don’t write real life nor do I believe that life is theatre. I portray life and I do have the need to continually realise what mechanisms I do it with. It is this very  imitation of life that impresses me. And that’s why my titles are as they are, almost working titles, to keep warning me that what I write is really a play.
Ivor Martinić

I like the title of The Play About Mirjana and the Ones Around Her. The play creates a world that is completely unreal, composed of Beckettesque feelings of a lack of meaning of living. It allows us to project our repressed feelings of anxiety about absence of something very important in our lives onto the characters and thus draw the hidden up to the surface. What the actors and I work with is observing the extreme in seemingly non-dramatic lives. We call our characters ‘the little people’. They agree to moderation of lives that leads to complete mechanisation and objectification of being, whose effect is forgetting how to communicate with other beings, sinking into repetition, into a life as an imitation of a series of everyday rituals that follow an imposed script. You copy without even realising why you do it. The art of enjoying the diversity can bring about the fullness of living. One mustn’t fear being different, one must learn from it. The backbone that carries us will not be lost through that. On the contrary!
Iva Milošević

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ivor Martinić - Senior year student at the Department of Dramaturgy of Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. He writes plays, poetry, prose, screenplays. His work has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Norwegian and Slovene, and some of the translations have been published. His play Simply: (Unhappy) received the III Marin Drzic Award, and the play This Is Where the Title of the Play about Ante is Written   received the REZ Society Fabrique en Croatie Award. The play was performed on Croatian Radio, translated into French and English and presented at the World Festival of Young Playwrights Word Interplay 2007 in Australia. It was first performed on the stage of City Youth Theatre in Split. The Play About Mirjana and the Ones Around Her was premiered on Croatian Radio (2009) and also took part at the 61st Prix Italia in Bologna. Immediately following its Belgrade premiere, The Play About Mirjana and the Ones Around Her will be staged in Ljubljana. Other Ivor’s radio plays include: The Past, Return (both from 2007, Croatian Radio entry at the 21st Prix Europa competition in Berlin) and No Title (2008). He collaborated as a dramaturg with several Croatian theatres and wrote dramatisations.

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Iva Milošević - Graduated from the Department of Theatre and Radio Directing of Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. She directed Magic Afternoon by Wolfgang Bauer (Bitef Theatre), Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill (YDP, Bojan Stupica Stage), Kasimir and Karoline by Odon von Horvath (National Theatre Sombor), Bash by Neil LaBute (YDP, Bojan Stupica Stage), Road to Nirvana by Arthur Kopit (Atelje 212), Little Mermaid by H.C. Andersen/Srdjan Koljevic (Little Theatre ‘Dusko Radovic’), Snake Pit by Vassily Sigarev (Atelje 212), The Wolf and The Seven Young Kids, by Grimm Brothers/Ljubinka Stojanovic (‘Pinokio’ Puppet Theatre), Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane (YDP, Bojan Stupica Stage), Princess and the Frog by H.C. Andersen/Igor Bojovic (Bosko Buha Theatre), Painkillers by Neda Radulovic (SNP), The Celebration by Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov (Atelje 212).

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REVIEWS

The Play About Mirjana and the Ones Around Her, a realistic portrayal of the lives of some quite ordinary people, however trivial it may appear at a first glance, represents a journey into our very selves and points out the silent void of people who have long ago forgotten the reason for their existence.
(…)
Enjoying this tragicomic play, as it were, we can also recognise parts of our own lives, very often stuck in a rut of the everyday. For this picturesque tale of Mirjana and the ones around her actually represents a serious portrayal of a trivial reality that touches our lives, shapes them, constrains them or even usurps them entirely.

This is why this play is a significant one, because, along with observing things with clarity and seeing them for what they really are, it also invites us to embark on a personal quest for meaning and self-determination.

Ana Todorovic Radetic, B92

…. Iva Milošević stages this tale by a young Croatian writer with a pronounced sense of measure and detail, without which it wouldn’t be what it appears to be. Thanks to director’s primarily honest relation to her heroes, the full circle of our (personal) and all other failures has been drawn. This concretely means that this story of a Mirjana of our times and her environment has the flavour of what used to be the world of Chubura and other mythic parts of Belgrade…

Zeljko Jovanovic, Blic

…. With acting expression reduced, on the verge of Brechtian technique, with a Beckettesque sense of the absurd as director’s solution, Iva Milošević succeeds in conveying Mirjana’s linear sense of passing time, in which Mirjana Karanović as Mirjana was at the same time completely estranged from others, who are bordering on emblematic. They are intruders in her life. The others are characters reduced to marionettes, characterised by inability to communicate. They are flat and they are mere products of the context in which they live. Daughter (Jelena Petrović) in her pubescent exhilaration, is expressive, but her shouting is transformed into a monotonous cry. Gorčin Stojanović’s set designing solution indicates relations within the play. The set comprises a façade of a building with windows from which other people occasionally emerge, entering or leaving Mirjana’s place through these windows. Branka Petrić as Mirjana’s mother emphasises the inability to empathise as a category, even in relation to her own daughter. All other actors (Marko Baćović, Andjelika Simić, Fedja Stojanović, Cvijeta Mesić and Bojan Lazarov) have exposed people who don’t step out of the boundaries of the roles assigned to them, the boundaries of learned behaviour and well planned time (‘for time is money’) which even includes scheduling one’s own death. People have long ago become both consumers and goods, and long ago lost the ability to be by themselves. This production is, it seems, significant because of its seemingly discreet unveiling of the horror of the abyss lurking behind the images of illusion.
Ana Isakovic, Danas

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