ABOUT PERFORMANCE
Let’s start with the question of – what are all the things we mean when we say ‘love’? Isn’t that the complicated word encompassing a whole series of emotions, fairly different and opposing between themselves, ranging from the ones we define as nice to the ones we define as ugly; in that sense, can love be ‘one’? Love could rather be a process, a mutable constant becoming unifying through diversity. The four Musil’s heroes stand as examples of such a thing, Thomas, Maria, Anselm, Regina, for which reason the play is titled as it is, in plural – dreamers. These four people have grown up together, they’ve known each other their entire lives, from their earliest childhood, and what is it that takes place on that journey of development? How much and what kind of dreams of love pile up in thirty or so years? When you’ve known someone for so long and when you’ve been through key stages of your personal development with someone, does the question of love ever come up, is it ever posed, or do love and non-love become categories that go without saying, therefore perhaps even inconsequential? Yes, this is a play about love, indeed it is, but about the kind of love that is not a sudden, enlightening blaze, rather about love as an integral or even inevitable segment of lives, about love that is not solely ascension, but very often a hindrance as well.
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REVIEWS
Brave Dreamers
Dreamers by Robert Musil are an unusual play (1908), with elements of bourgeois play closely related to Ibsen, expressionism of Strindberg’s later phases, Chekhov’s poetry of despair, even the drawing room cynicism of Oscar Wilde. This formal and stylistic specificity of the play turned out to be an inspiring starting point for a bold and sassy, minimalistically elegant direction of Miloš Lolić (dramaturg Perisa Perisic).
Metaphorically enclosed in a sort of a wooden box (set designer Jasmina Holbus), the seven characters take part in weaving a series of amorous schemes, provoking jealousy, passion, despair, madness. Actors Nikola Vujović, Dubravka Kovjanić, Vanja Ejdus-Kostić, Goran Jevtić, Cvijeta Mesić, Fedja Stojanović and Radovan Vujović perform in a harmoniously stylised, hypnotically accurate, fairly static fashion, delivering their lines to microphones at almost all times.
Due to this radical inclusion of microphones, entailing the exploration of the relation between of body and technology, actors and characters, voice and lines, a constant toying with presence, Miloš Lolić’s production can be defined as post-dramatic. Text is no longer a priority here, rather it’s treated as grounds for a risky examination of the structure of theatre. But not only that. At the level of theme, which is partly overshadowed by formal issues, the play is oriented towards the field of love, shaky, elusive, inexhaustible in terms of ideas. Love and passion are treated in their grandiose ambivalence ruthlessly creating deep wounds but, at the same time, whirlingly establishing the meaning of life.
The entire course of the play is accompanied by melancholy music performed by pianist Srdjan Markovic, creating lyrical meanings, exceptionally important in this highly aestheticised staging. It points to a different kind of world, to a poetry and beauty, unattainable, non-existent in such cold, formalised relations between the characters.
Ana Tasić, Politika, 11th December 2008
Dreamers with Microphones
My longstanding wish to see the only play by Robert Musil, Dreamers, on stage has been granted by YDP this December. Branko Cvejić and Gorčin Stojanović entrusted the direction of this chamber play to a still young director, Miloš Lolić, whose profile has for these six seasons since he had staged Krleža’s youthful one act Adam and Eve nevertheless been clear enough for them to know whose hands they put this strange and rarely staged play into, a play rarely produced even in German speaking parts of the world. They knew this wouldn’t be a mainstream show on the treadmill of our capitalist realism. (…)
In this complex work, both the young Nikola, Dubravka, Vanja, Goran, Radovan and slightly older Cvijeta and Fedja followed their objectives in a clean cut blocking and particular stylisation, so rare in our theatre that more often than not relies on sheer gift, rather than precise movement, style and even more precise thought.
The play Dreamers on Bojan Stupica is an example of a theatre experiment having to be defended primarily by high professionalism and commitment, rather than by some sort of ‘ingenious’ arbitrary flamboyance.
Jovan Ćirilov, Blic, 20th December 2008.
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CAST
