Only a few months after the first performance at the Schaubühne in Berlin, the latest play by the famous French playwright Yasmina Reza, 'Bella Figura', directed by Boris Liješević, and Ksenija Marinković, the new champion of this theater, played one of the main roles. .
Boris Liješević is accompanied by the voice of one of the most engaged and talented Serbian directors of the middle generation in the region, and he gained his status several years ago with the play 'Waiting Room' performed by Atelje 212, in which he explored the consequences of the so-called Serbian transition.
The Zagreb audience had the opportunity to see his famous 'Elijah's Chair', based on the novel by Igor Štiks.
He works as an assistant at the Department of Intermediate Directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Novi Sad.
French playwright and writer Yasmina Reza is considered one of the most interesting theater authors in Europe at the moment. What makes it significant and what problems and questions does it open up in its texts?
- Yasmina Reza is not included in the circle of English playwrights from the 90s, such as Mark Ravenhill or David Harrower, who brought something drastically new and socially unacceptable to the theater stage. But she feels the current time, which coincides with the idea of Peter Brook, who said that 'theatre is the present moment'. She writes about people she knows and meets in shops, companies and banks, who are then recognized in the characters of her plays all over Europe. Although she has recently been politically active, she does not introduce that element into her dramas and does not refer to the current political situation. She is most interested in male-female relations, what begins when politics ends. However, much more serious and important topics are always brewing under that surface. When she begins the topic of intimate relationships, we know she will portray the characters in an unusual and sometimes frightening light.
You are accompanied by the voice of the engaged director. What did you emphasize in 'Bella Figura'?
- I often deal with engaging topics, I come from the school of Bora Drašković, which means that as a director I react to the world I live in and then interpret it in plays, but at the same time I sometimes interpret that world in pieces that do not seem socially engaged, but have some connections with me or with what I am currently experiencing or have experienced. So I also deal with other topics because I think it's healthy to occasionally change genres, topics, and style so that there is no "fading" and mannerism. As always, I emphasize the acting, and in the case of 'Belle figure', also the shaping of the space. I experience directing without mystification: we shape one stone at each rehearsal, like when building a stone house.
So far, you have directed numerous plays and received many prestigious awards. Which play was the turning point for you and directed you in your career?
- That was the play 'Waiting Room', which has been playing for the seventh year in Atelje 212, and is about the Serbian transition ten years after the fall of Milošević. I wrote the text together with the playwright Branko Dimitrijević, and it is based on the confessions of real people who revealed to me their authentic experiences of dealing with the consequences of social transition, from job loss to longing for a safer life, so in the end I got a vivid picture of Serbia. For example, one of the stories refers to the director of a private factory who had to fire people and went through psychological crises, and the other brings the fate of a man who made his way from a salesman in a hypermarket of a large retail chain to a brand manager, who completely lost his private life and suffering from stress. That phase of the interview was very important to me, when during the conversation with people emotions appeared, which I then tried to bring into the play. I entered that project of documentary theater as a tabula rasa, without any recipe and awareness of whether a theater performance could be created based on those stories, but with great courage and willingness to die. That play put the wind at my back.
What role did the play 'Elijah's Chair', produced by the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, based on the novel by the Croatian writer Igor Štiks, which won the prestigious Grand Prix 'Mira Trailović' at the 45th Bitef, play a role in your career?
- It was a powerful play, the first in Belgrade to talk about wartime Sarajevo under siege, and everything came together - actors, direction and theme. I read the book back in 2008 and I was most attracted by the exciting and complex and even contradictory relationship between father and son, and I immediately knew that I wanted to make a play based on it. After that, I made several more plays in the same documentary style. For example, in 'Fertile Days' I dealt with couples who have problems conceiving, and in the piece 'Fathers built', staged in Podgorica, the focus was on social problems caused by the disastrous impact of sudden wealth. The play 'Peti Park', pre-premièred this summer at Belef, was particularly important to me. And that play was created on the basis of a true event: it deals with the struggle of a group of citizens to save Fifth Park, a green area in Zvezdara, where the local government decided to cut down the trees and destroy the basketball court and erect a building. The citizens' resistance lasted for three full years, and even turned into a kind of Fifth Park movement, which used to gather around five thousand people at protests. In the end, they managed to chase away the excavators and prevent the construction of the building, but they could not agree on the appearance of the park and now it is a meadow. That case can also be understood as a metaphor for a country where people accept the call for rebellion and revolution, but power weakens when it is necessary to be united and build a new one.
Tportal
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