Thus, in the 2000s, during the height of the Yugoslav economic crisis (stabilization, inflation, devaluation), Von Horvath's "Don Juan Returns from the War" was staged in Belgrade, with Stojan Dečermić in the lead role. The same text was played in XNUMX in Podgorica, as part of the big CNP project "Requiem for the XNUMXth Century", with Branimir Popović in the lead role.
Ana Vukotić's play based on his text "Faith, love, hope", premiered the night before yesterday at the Montenegrin National Theatre, belongs to those plays that have to fight for their aesthetic space, simply, thanks to the fact that the dominant theater aesthetics in Montenegro rests on some other assumptions.
Even the (ironically intoned) title - "Faith, love, hope" evokes big, biblical words, which usually serve to anesthetize real pain and suffering, and have always been the basis of all possible manipulations of people.
Ana Vukotić's directorial approach favored the art-approach in relation to the (possible) spirit of grotesque or parody. And, in the end, the result is a semantically layered play, a stage essay on dehumanization, a "death dance" of the desperate, where the difference between the dead and the living is only in the linguistic treatment. Vukotićka continued her stage research, although the impression is that her new play leans more on Mitterer's "Deadly Sins" than the other two plays she did based on Macdonald and Moliere.
One of the most important moments in von Horvat's text "Faith, love, hope" is language, and in this sense, the translator, the famous philosopher Vladimir Vukićević, had quite a challenging task. Which he, it seems, did quite successfully. The language of the crisis, in this case, is a bureaucratized and dehumanized language, so hideous that this fact alone carries a certain humorous potential, which, no doubt, was one of the key moments in the era when this text was written.
Von Horvath, as in some other texts, wants to show the destructive effect of capitalism on the so-called little people, showing the agony of dehumanization and humiliation that such a system brings. The context of the great crisis between the world wars made this text (and the search for a permit of 150 marks!) seem extremely topical today, at a time of (similar) global crisis.
The key moment of Ana Vukotić's directorial process involved a "strictly controlled" stage play. A type of acting that is outside the classical realistic manners, precisely to play out von Horvat's idea of the disintegration of the personality, which, in a certain way, is kept in order by the inertia of language, and not by some usual motivational plane.
In that key, Vanja Milačić made her return to the CNP stage a real theatrical event. Energetic, but when necessary also restrained, as if making an ironic arc from tragic heroines to parodic deconstruction... Excellent Mišo Obradović, always witty Dejan Ivanić, great Nada Vukčević and Gorana Marković in their stylized acting, accurate Zoran Vujović, Simo Trebješanin, Stevan Radusinović, Gojko Burzanović and Dušan Kovačević, the precise Kristina Stevović and Jelena Minić, the entire ensemble, in fact, to the greatest extent followed the idea of "collective play", that is, a way to create a kind of interpretative mosaic that leaves a fuller, more complete picture... An exceptional miniature was also created by the oldest actor on the stage, Momo Pićurić, who functions on stage most of the time as an emblem of total hopelessness and lostness, with a computer that he carries in the way that a believer is not a holy icon.
One of the most exciting segments of this play is the scenography - the Slovenian artist Bojan Hojnik created one of the most functional and visually impressive stage solutions we have seen in recent years, while the costumes (a great job by Sandra Dekanić) are also fully in function of the overall concept.
With this performance, Ana Vukotić continued her well-thought-out theatrical path - it is obvious that she does plays only when she has and wants to say something, when the theatrical problem she is dealing with overwhelms her completely. That is why, until now, each of her performances has been a theatrical event of the highest order and a complete hit. The play "Faith, Love, Hope" fits perfectly into such a creative manner.
Bonus video:
