As part of the City Theater in Budva, on Tuesday, July 9, on the stage between the churches, the premiere of Lullaby for No Man's Wolf was held, produced by the National Theater from Belgrade, directed by Đurđe Tešić based on the novel of the same name by Ksenia Popović, and written by Bojana Mijović.
The story of four adults in a home for neglected children, who are connected by love and friendship marked by a tragic event, is translated into a dramatic text with a dark atmosphere filled with a sense of anxiety.
The characters are connected by the law of guilt, which does not offer forgiveness, first towards themselves, and then towards others, and their function is reduced to the emotional dimension of the impossibility of overcoming the conflict.
Different levels also symbolically separate the dimension of the conscious which suppresses the unconscious, i.e. real life and returning to the world of memories in the desire to grasp the meaning of one's own existence and the realization of one's own dreams from youth
However, the complex questions of identity and existence, which arise from the idea of "Nobody's Wolf" - a child from a home who makes the choice not to have a surname, remained unproblematic in the dramaturgical treatment of the novel by Ksenija Popović, which certainly leaves more space for these themes.
It can be said that the influence of the film language on the staging of this text is evident - two parallel actions are created by means of montage and flashback techniques, which alternate during the play. One takes place in the past, during the adolescent love between Klara (Marija Vicković) and Vuk (Viktor Savić), but also an unpleasant event that will drive them apart, and the other is intended for the present - where in one day the accounts of all the characters involved in a network of mutual accusations and calls to account.
Both stories are followed with great uncertainty until the end of the play, because the cast - Viktor Savić, Marija Vicković, Vanja Milačić, Bojan Krivokapić and Pavle Jerinić - effectively evokes psychological breakdowns, the inability to communicate and the ability to forgive.
The aesthetics of the scenography (Boris Maksimović) are fully justified. Namely, these two time-separated stories are divided into a dynamic space consisting of two levels: the upper scene is intended for the confrontation of now grown-up people in the present, and this one occasionally passes over the lower one with a sliding mechanism - as a space of events from the past, which led to the situation the characters are in now.
The director Tešić successfully portrayed the desire for life, the fulfillment of hope, but also the energy of mutual non-acceptance and frozen relations between the characters of this drama.
Different levels also symbolically separate the dimension of the conscious which suppresses the unconscious, i.e. real life and returning to the world of memories in the desire to grasp the meaning of one's own existence and the realization of one's own dreams from youth.
Vladimir Pejković's music followed the finesse of the mood of the characters, while every silence represented an insurmountable distance and the impossibility of forgiveness and forgetting, creating an intense feeling of anxiety in the audience.
As an expression, the director chose the constant presence of the actors on the stage even when they are not interpreting their character, thus placing the actors in the role of spectators facing the real audience, thereby opposing the principle of the illusion of a performance act. However, despite this anti-illusionist performance by the director, which left all the changes of space, costumes and the actor's exit from the character revealed, the acting was realistic, and sometimes exaggerated in the desire to encourage the audience to empathize with the characters emotionally.
The director Tešić successfully portrayed the desire for life, the fulfillment of hope, but also the energy of mutual non-acceptance and frozen relations between the characters of this drama, which, however, compared to the novel from which it was created, lost its layered meaning.
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