A cocktail of vanity, fear and ambition

There are plays that end with applause, while others begin or come to life only after it. Thus, after the first applause, the new play of the Podgorica City Theatre “Cocktail after the premiere” began, which premiered on Friday, and then on Saturday evening on the big stage of the Cultural and Information Centre “Budo Tomović”. And it looks like it will have a long life.

Loud applause and a standing ovation greeted the ensemble of the play at the end of its premiere performance, the plot of which focuses on the events that take place after the performance, behind the scenes, after the gifts, applause and performance, posing the question of who we are when the spotlights go out, the costumes come off, the masks fall off, and the key in the lock brings absolute freedom.

A play within a play, it presents to the audience Shakespeare's "Othello", a play described as "perhaps the most famous literary exploration of the destructive power of jealousy and suspicion", and against whose backdrop we later watch a kind of "sequel", but in a different format. After the gift, it seems as if an abyss begins, accompanied by laughter all the time, while high style and glamour merge into the urges and bitterness of everyday life. After the curtain falls, the process, the performance and the role become the subject of the plot, but also a hierarchical problem.

Dramatic text Valentina Krasnogorova, he directed at the Evening Stage of the City Theatre Oleg Tolochenko, a director from Russia who has been living in Montenegro, in Bar, for a few years, and with this play he is presenting himself to the domestic public for the first time. His successful debut on the Montenegrin stage is both a refreshment for the theater repertoire of domestic theater houses and a recommendation for the audience - a measured, confident and thoughtful manuscript.

The play's special fullness is given by the direction, the choice of restraint and reduced luxury. Tolochenko does not resort to overly strong accents, pathos, hyperbolic expression or any tension, but rather allows human nature to speak, the quality of the text to stand out, and the actors to live, mutually encourage and elevate each other and round off the whole. This opens up space for the ensemble for nuances, for small shifts in tone and gaze that together build tension much more effectively than grand gestures.

Excellently performed by the actors, with room for interplay, growth and expansion. However, it seems much more demanding and "difficult", precisely because of the simplicity and naturalness in which there is no hiding, effects or "overacting". Actors: Miloš Pejović, Pavle Popović, Sanja Popović, Omar Bajramspahić, Danica Rajković, Smiljana Martinović i Zoran Dragicevic, here they step out of the established registers, relieved of expectations, humorous, but precise. Each of their characters carries their own weakness, interest and a measure of fear. Each character has their own story and their own life, on stage, at the cocktail party after the premiere, after it. It is from this collision that the dynamics arise that hold the attention for two full hours, without idleness, without fatigue, intelligent, (black) humorous, with measure, but refreshing.

"Cocktail after the premiere" seems to play with ourselves, with the boundary between tragedy and comedy, between realism and farce, irony... This is where drama lies, free from Shakespearean verse, third-person direction and stage rules, the drama in which various layers of humanity come to light, including those in which vanity, envy, jealousy, and even quiet/tumultuous joy over someone else's failure lies, which no one acknowledges, but many recognize.

It is situated in a certain interspace between theatre and everyday life, between artistic act and real life, between role and personality, from the dry realism of daily disputes to complete absurdity, from comedy to tragedy, between black and white. Moreover, the play does not speak exclusively about theatre, but about the system and life, so the story is much broader than its own topic and can be applied to any collective in which ambition overrides solidarity, and the individual overrides community.

The action set in a theater brings insight into a limited world, but also into the soul of a small person. The doors are closing, and solitude means security, freedom and other rules. Beauty and success confront themselves, harmony and equality become an illusion, and the question of position and power, or hierarchy and equality, comes to light. Who is replaceable - everyone, who is privileged - rare, and almost everyone deep down wants to become "sultan instead of sultan".

Although everything seems to function according to the rules, as in a system in which everyone knows their place, in a moment of crisis it will turn out that positions are neither stable nor fair, that fame and power resonate within everyone, and the question of existence and security is never clear.

In that microcosm of the theater after the premiere, when almost everyone can't wait to eat and drink, and rarely to exchange impressions, opinions and fears, everything that we live on the stage of our own lives is gathered. "To eat and drink" becomes the core, towards the essence. The question is when is enough and are hunger, thirst and fun sometimes a reflection of gluttony, gluttony, greed, primitivism, and not need?

"I play the queen, but I don't have enough for my pants," is a line that, among many others, encourages reflection on the position of artists, something we rarely think about when watching them on stage, but also on the question of the position of workers in general, while we talk about equality, and then about capitalism that takes everything under its control, including art and creation. It is clear that this very situation encourages and awakens the worst in people, and at the same time, reminds us that relationships are often more complex than the division into protagonists and antagonists, main and secondary characters.

Society now reigns, they say in the play, and they list various plagues - with full right, and there is also noise instead of dialogue, hyperproduction instead of content, speed instead of meaning, screens instead of closeness... As the sentence: "Better a terrible end than endless horror" raises the question of whether horror and evil have an end at all or just change form and habitat.

And while we laugh for two hours, sincerely, harmlessly or uncomfortably, painfully and tragically, the question remains as to what we are actually laughing at. Laughter here is not only a relief, but also a mirror. The play simultaneously entertains us and encourages us to think, but also reveals us. Both the text and the direction and the acting, that is, the complete product, a humorous, bitter and healing space in which laughter comes spontaneously, but does not completely relieve us. And while we toast to success, somewhere in the background the fight for the next place under the spotlight is already beginning.