The play "Hotel slobodan promet" by Žorž Fejdo directed by Boris Liješević premiered at the Yugoslav Drama Theater on December 23. The play stars Nikola Đuričko, Srđan Timarov, Nataša Tapušković, Anđelika Simić, Dragan Jovanović, Bojan Dimitrijević, then young actors Milica Gojković, Miodrag Dragičević, Amar Ćorović, Anđela Jovanović, Marija Klanac, Sanja Marković and Tea Gjorgjioska.
The play of the actors, who are mostly generationally close - it is well coordinated and functions as an organism - brings a moment of time that we all live as it is experienced by actors on a generational level, and this could only be achieved through mutual trust and cooperation that we unmistakably feel in the audience. Which is a paradox in a way - because what is Fejdo talking about? About the world of impersonal relationships. What carries the story is the mechanism of storytelling, vaudeville, misunderstandings... Relationships are impersonal and values, in the world of Fejdo's heroes, are upside down. Fejdo created during the Belle Epoque, this piece was written at the very end of the XNUMXth century, and the Belle Epoque tried to intimate its relationship with the world of capital. It is a marriage of two value systems that is doomed to failure, because capital is insensitive to artistic expression. The Belle Epoque did not give access to the brutality of capital. The fruit of that relationship is the extravagance of abduction, unique products, but for the enjoyment of the individual, for the enjoyment of someone there... It is an impersonal field on which Fejdo places his heroes - an architect and an entrepreneur and their wives... One attempt at infidelity in the hotel "Slobodan promet". That's why in the end no one discovers the evil - they don't want to see it - everyone, as the director says, returns to their own hole as soon as they got their nose out of it, because it's known there.
The piece is set today in the second decade of the XNUMXst century when capitalism operates in all its brutality. Ideologies change faces over time, but remain the same. Everything is justified in order to free movement of capital. Capital becomes a persona, it declares inhuman actions humane if they serve it. Until when? Until we wake up and say enough is enough.
The director carefully orchestrates Fejdo's scores, in my impression, this play is like a building, with many steps and confusions, what Liješević does not shy away from is to show all the gloom of Fejdo's world, which beats beneath that civil surface, the presence of mud, that's the impression I had during the whole play. In contrast to Fejdo's speed in turns, the other side can be seen - that world mired in some kind of half-sleep, depersonalized. Shifting the genre - that's what it does - reading vaudeville today - don't read it as a light comedy, it's perhaps a special reading of a farce that opens the way for the viewer to its core, to which we go feeling all its absurdity and senselessness and again - showing the world without hesitation which is terrifying in its coldness and impersonality. The valuable thing in the director's process is that he illuminates, in a decisive way, what Fejdo is talking about, and what people don't want to see - people don't actually meet in life, they pass each other without even meeting. Which is tragic. None of the heroes actually see the other. The actors skilfully transfer that experience to the audience. It rocks. What Liješević perceives from the counter that the painting perceives is that art in this and in that, in every time, is a departure from the freedom of human consciousness, a desire that invites us to examine other realities.
I went to the show as a theater critic, carrying the excitement before the premiere and expertly leaving expectations at the door. To meet purely the performance and I in one space of meeting and dialogue. I got out and went down to the train station in that mixture of excitement after a good show and being nourished by the experience wondering: are we going through similar questions during the balancing of our lives? It confirms that old belief that the theater is a dangerous place, because it kisses you directly on the mouth. There is no circumvention. Well, you see what you will do.
The merging of different worlds or that which is always the same
Playwright Miloš Krečković brings images and language, the rhythm is accurate and clear in the recognizable dynamics of Fajdo. Aleksandar Denić's scenography talks about the merging of different worlds or, more precisely, about what is always the same.
The large towers on the canvas that open the scene are of course any modern settlement, the stamp of capitalism today (of course they can also be Belgrade on the water), and the hotel... the hotel is powerful in its dilapidation - it represents a line that shows/connects different times.
He testifies to the state of absurdity in man and the cry for meaning as its opposite. Along with the image of the hotel, Maja Mirković's costumes speak of the modernity of the characters and theme, as well as the stage movement by Sonja Vukićević.
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