October 19, 2020 – The Croatian Drama and Author’s Theater Festival, the 30th Marulic Days, will be held in Split from October 19 to 26, 2020. A total of 13 plays will take place, one of which will be performed in Zagreb.
The director of the Festival and the intendant of HNK Split, Srećko Šestan, thanked all the theaters, especially HNK Zagreb and the intendant Dubravka Vrgoč, who, as he said, met them and allowed them to perform “Three Sisters” on its home stage, on the Lada premises. This year’s jubilee edition of Marulic Days is dedicated to Rada Perković, the founder and first director of the festival, he emphasized.
“This year, we will stop the audience award because the audience in Split will not be able to see ‘Three Sisters.’ I hope that better moments and times will come so that the Split audience will see the play next season. Thanks also to all the other intendants of our theaters who come to Marulic Days. Our theater will respect all epidemiological recommendations, and the audience will be limited,” said Sestan.
The selector of this year’s festival, theater critic and playwright Gordana Ostović, said that out of 48 registered plays from Croatia, BiH, Serbia, and Hungary, she chose 13. Twelve are coming to Split, and only one, “Three Sisters,” will be performed at the Zagreb HNK.
“These are all performances that really answer contemporary questions of society; they most often talk about the family as a microcosm of society where society breaks down. These are the most common topics like thinking about going abroad in search of a better life, about how to save a business from decay,” said Ostović.
She noted that the plays are very diverse, from witty to a little more tragic, but they all have very nice and humane messages.
As a different play in this year’s selection of Marulic Days, she singled out “Domaše” of the Split City Puppet Theater, which sees the world from a different perspective. It is a play by Ana Marija Veselčić about growing up in a home where children see completely different problems. She also pointed out Mostar’s “Identitluk,” a play that talks about narrow-minded understandings of identity and a tragedy that shows who a man really is.
The dramaturg and producer of the 30th Marulic, Days Jasen Boko, added that the festival closes on October 26 with a play out of competition, a student play by the Zagreb Academy under the mentorship of Krešimir Dolenčić based on John Steinbeck’s famous text “Of Mice and Men.” At the closing of Marulic Days, he added, the audience will watch young actors out of the competition, who will probably dominate the stage and take awards in ten years.
Despite the situation, the festival will also have several accompanying programs.
“Traditionally, the first text that won the award for the best dramatic unperformed text for 2019 is read. It is Dino Pešut’s ‘Granatiranje,’ which will be read by Split actors and students. We will also have a presentation about 30 years of Marulic Days, a presentation of the anthology Theater in Split and Split in Theater, and Nikola Batušić’s book History of Croatian Theater,” announced Boko.
The festival was scheduled to take place at the end of April but was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic and instead will take place from October 19 to 26. The festival’s grand opening will be on October 20, when the Marin Držić Award for dramatic text will be presented.
Source: Culturenet.hr, More info HERE
To read more about lifestyle in Croatia, follow TCN’s dedicated page.
