About the Event

"The entire literary opus of Miroslav Krleža, especially that between the two wars, has always functioned as an exciting blend of good literature, encyclopedic academicism, and leftist political engagement. Somewhere on the edge of this main stream filled with social dramas, political upheavals, and the wanderings of intellectuals, from 'Glembajevs' and 'Galicia' to 'Ballad' and 'Flag', lies the play 'In Agony', written in 1928 and supplemented thirty years later. The original play, admittedly, radiated the colors of its restless time, but was very often experienced on stage as a melodrama with a tragic ending. Therefore, in the interpretations of the characters of this bitter sentimental story in South Slavic theaters, giants of that acting scene have alternated, from Vika Podgorska and Dubravko Dujšin, through Marija Crnobori and Steve Žigon, to Vanja Draha, Ena Begović, and many others. And the brilliant performance of this play in Zagreb a year ago (Nela Kocsis, Ozren Grabarić, and Darko Stazić) was focused on the tragic love of Laura Lenbach, who could not cope with the alcoholism of her bankrupt husband and the infidelity of her unprincipled lover.

After this acclaimed and award-winning performance, we watched a new staging of Krleža's drama, filled with a different poetics and unusual directorial handwriting, in independent production these days in Belgrade. The performance does not begin in the usual way, with a quarrel of the Lenbach couple, at a moment when the Austro-Hungarian monarchy no longer exists and when members of the aristocracy suddenly had to earn a living in various ways and adapt to new conditions. In the Belgrade performance, the entire first act is absent; the dethroned Lenbach has already committed suicide, and Laura, still stained with her husband's blood, tries to somehow escape from this life nightmare with lawyer Križovec, a man she truly loves until the end.

What is essential for the performance is that director Ana Đorđević did not see this piece as 'the epic story of one love' but as a drama 'at the dawn of the modern age as we know it today'. The duplicity, cynicism, and corruption of lawyer Križovec, who can buy everything with money and influence, even his own ministerial chair, while trampling the love of a woman underfoot, is a pattern of the social process of 'modernization' that began after the First World War and whose mature phase we are witnessing right now. Today's subordination of people to capital and insincere relationships in public and private life is merely the most extreme reflection of what was conceived precisely then, and this was the motivational trigger for this performance.

Or, as director Đorđević says:

"Through the intense conflict between a man and a woman, in the performance we follow the process of gradual understanding of the lies in which modern man lives and the process of demystification of the principles by which society as a whole functions."

When she realizes all the lies of her intimate and existential situation, Laura does not kill herself pathetically and melodramatically, as Krleža envisioned, but shoots Križovec with two precise bullets, in order to free herself at a deeper level from the shackles that have destroyed her life.

The two protagonists – Marija Vicković as Laura and Radovan Vujović as Križovec – with the wholehearted help of Dijana Diklić, a collaborator for specific Krleža speech, convincingly played that relationship, balancing on the edge between intimate drama and the grim image of the coming time. Krleža's didascalies – descriptions of actions and moods of the characters, which were discreetly spoken by the third protagonist, Branko Cvejić, the narrator/inspector in this performance, also served this indirectly.

In conclusion, such a performance of the piece 'In Agony' did not wish to pull us into a love drama from a former bourgeois salon, but to pull us out to the position of witnesses of a time, to whose final phase we are currently witnessing."

AWARDS

• Award for Best Young Actor – Radovan Vujović – for the role of Ivan Križovec. Krleža's complex language, as well as the ambition, duplicity, and cynicism of his doctor Ivan Križovec, materialize in Radovan Vujović's performance. Vujović began his acting performance modestly and controlled, only to undergo a transformation by the end of the performance into a wild, perverted, out-of-control lawyer, who tries to preserve his own privileges at all costs.