IS THERE ANYTHING MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE THEATRE?

Monkey Business

Night falls above a beautiful jungle cliff with a majestic view. As we all know, at night each cow is pitch black. But how about lions, giraffes, spiders and snakes? The play Simona the Monkey Simona answers this question. It’s a play about one particular night and its color. The play was brought to the Subotica festival all the way from Spain, produced by La Sonrisa del Lagarto theatre (The Smile of a Lizard). I was quite curious as to why this theatre was named after a famous soap-opera from the ‘90s, but obviously their interest in animals and their positive attributes prevailed.

Combining the techniques of shadow theatre, projections and live-action performance, Simona the Monkey is a very dynamic show in which scenes played upon the screen are voiced by an actress "hiding" on the stage.

In certain segments, she addressed the audience directly thus bringing various story elements to life in an inviting way for the viewers to participate. In an otherwise beautifully designed set-up (shadow puppetry, live performing mostly via actress’ voice-acting and movement), one problem - and a huge one at that – remained: those not fluent in Spanish could not understand or follow the plot. There were no subtitles or real-time translation, so the entire show’s effect on the audience was quite unfavorable.

Do not wander off-track

Little Red Riding Hood, a play from Banja Luka, has a prologue. Ljudmila Fedorova, the director, came up with a concept of a bakery shop for the soul in which the finest pastries are prepared through recounting tales. Indeed, despite all its metaphors, Little Red Riding Hood by the Children's Theatre of Republika Srpska is a play full of soul and humor whose puppetry, voice-acting, singing, stage design and acting – all in equal measure – display a very skillful theatrical production, much to the satisfaction of its audience of all ages.

Firstly, we have a character of a mischievous little girl who is carving her own path in life and, secondly, we have a character of a mischievous grandmother whose cheerful spirit cannot be derailed even as the big bad wolf enters the fray. It must have something to do with the "medicine" Little Red Riding Hood’s mother put in the basket along with the baked rolls - a bottle of alcohol – with a real strong effect (just kidding). The adaptation undertakes a lot of liberties, but does not transform the fairy-tale into something relevant for present day. The wolf remained a wolf – there is no curing his hunger. The belly full of stones and the well set-pieces were omitted from the play as was the character of a hunter, for example, who was replaced by loggers - not as exploiters of the forest, but as saviors.

However, Sara Lustig and Virovitica Theatre from Croatia have completely reshaped the very same famous fairy tale in A Sugar-Made Fairy Tale. It turns out very convenient when two different takes on the same story can be reviewed side-by-side during the same festival. Taking an even more radical approach to adaptation, Sara Lustig tried to establish a new paradigm of good and evil (through the characters of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf) while also taking the story’s eldest female character in a completely unique and unexpected route - portraying her as an old grumpy wallflower.

Story-wise, how justified that decision was remains questionable because some of the play’s twists happened way too soon, making the rest of the show kind of predictable. Howerver, it is absolutely certain that the actors - especially Monika Duvnjak and Silvio Švast - managed to vividly and dynamically bring to life the desired results, with their voices and puppetry techniques.

The discourse of the fairy tale has definitely been shifted towards an everyday level, although at the Festival’s Research Forum for Theatre Art it was said that not all such treatments are justified. Even though popular psychology has found its way into the theatre ("you reap what you sow"), in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, it was worth seeing how the tropes of hunger and pre-determined roles were depicted in a manner somewhat deeper than usual.

My home is there...

The audience attending the performance of Vera Rozanova’s play Don't Wait for Me… (produced by Compagnie La neige sur les cils from France) witnessed a truly wondrous fairy tale, later declared by the jury for the best play of the entire festival. After the performance, giving credit to all the collaborators who helped her in producing this extremely meditative audio-visual piece of work, the author revealed to the audience that her previous stay in Subotica had a strong personal significance. It further stimulated her imagination to discuss where we remain as our homes gaze through the windows of the night – which is the play’s quite poetic premise.

Vera Rozanova presented the play’s plot - a vision of life of a boy who meets another boy on a dream-like journey - by animating puppets, managing the stage design that transformed from house into clouds, from clouds into the basements and attics of our psyche. All the while, she managed to deliver the dialogue in Serbian - in addition to the play’s original French language. Thanks to her evocative voice and good timing for short translations-summaries, it did not break the magic spell of theater at all.

I'm not sure how much the topic of home and the quest for a sense of belonging is comprehensible to the play’s intended audience of age 6 plus, but I'm sure that their lives became richer by coming in contact with a work this beautiful and deep. Such notion could be sensed in the room and was almost palpable. Igor Burić