RAŠA: Goran Šušljik
IVAN: Nebojša Glogovac
DULE: Vojin Ćetković
IGOR: Damjan Kecojević
MILICA: Tijana Mladenović / Suzana Lukić
FATHER: Josif Tatić

SET DESIGN: Marija Kalabić
COSTUME DESIGN: Jelisaveta Tatić-Čuturilo
DRAMATURGE: Miloš Krečković
DRAMATURGE: Marija Stojanović
VIDEO: Dušan Udicki
Music Darkwood Dub

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Alex Chisholm: I first read Huddersfield some time around the end of September, beginning of October 2003, in a very good, but very literal translation into English. Even before I read it, and that happened in Leeds, where I work, I was intrigued by the title, wondering why is that a Serbian play, taking place in Serbia and with Serbs as characters, is entitled Huddersfield. And when I did read it, even in that first translation, the play overwhelmed me at once. I think this is one of the features of the play, that everyone who came across it really had a similar reaction, it has this sincerity, this powerful dramatic tale that carries you away, you want to find out what happens next, even if the dramatic action itself is not immediately clear, or, I would say, huge. Somebody goes to the loo, has a drink, finds a pair of knickers, spills some ketchup, but still these events within the play become something big, dramatic, intriguing, something that guides you. Something big is happening in this play, something caught in the intimate, personal details in the lives of these people, with something big and powerful behind them. And especially when I was reading about the lions, the image of two lions, the yellow one from Zrenjanin  and the white lion from Huddersfield – I can’t say I understood that image completely that very moment, but it was clear to me that there was something incredibly poetical and intriguing that play, something important that I wanted to explore.

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Uglješa Šajtinac, a prose writer and dramatist, was born in Banat 34 years ago. The Prop-manager, A Right to a Russian, Do You Speak Australian have been performed at home, and

Huddersfield in Great Britain. In 1999 he graduated in dramaturgy at the FDU in Belgrade.

Alex Chisholm studied history at Oxford University, where she also studied with Sir Ian McKellen, Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre. She completed her postgraduate studies at Drama Studio London.

Alex has been working as Literary Manager at the West Yorkshire Playhouse since December 2001. There she directed, among other plays, Sunbeam Terrace by Mark Catley and Huddersfield by Uglješa Šajtinac in the English version by Chris Thorpe. She has also directed over 300 play readings, including a play by Filip Vujošević, for Birmingham Rep and Hampstead Theatre.

Before she joined the West Yorkshire Playhouse, she had spent seven years as a freelance director, working for the Royal National Theatre, the Chichester Festival Theatre and Pains Plough, a British leading traveling theatre performing contemporary plays. In 1993 she founded her own “Convivio” Theatre Company, and directed Pelleas and Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck and her own adaptation of A Night with Constantine Cavafy.

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… This drama, the drama of a thirty-year-old, has a new vocabulary, not exceptionally rich or luxuriant, but deadly, and not very scrupulous. Not extensive either, if we leave out the abundance of swearwords, the vocabulary of scorn and disgust. New cynics and new rebels. Big cities and small, cramped, difficult lives which make you sick… The lifelike, almost documentary wasteland, and above it, or between the lines, the traces of untrammeled humanity, and yet non-extinguished love, warmth, compassion, understanding… Ivan, played by Nebojša Glogovac, the type of an unfulfilled, seduced bookish man and a dreamer, the calm neurotic, sentimental and shy, who experiences sin and fears, a man of God and a victim of men. And thus confused, he looks like a ‘normal’ being in this dehumanized environment. It is not easy to play Mishkin either (Dostoyevsky), but Glogovac managed to make good nature interesting and paradoxical… Raša, played by Goran Šušljik, ‘gone crackers’, still an undergraduate student, wanted too much, started too much. He grew up between the fairy tale and porn. Bitter, his mouth full of swearwords, where, had he been luckier, there might be verses!.. A performance by the young, for the young. Even with an extensive arsenal of swearwords, a gentle performance, luckily without sentiment, but with grief over the spirituality that is slowly dying…

I Swear, And I Would Like to Sing, Muharem Pervić, Politika, 14 March 2005     

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