ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Dejan Mijač: This play is not so much about death as it is about what remains after death, about what is more lasting than the death itself, resembling the hereafter. The most important aspect of the production is linked to the theme of love. The production is supposed to speak of the first impulse of love, of motherly love, of a mother’s love for her child and that of a child for its mother. Here too, as in Locusts, there is a child, a disabled child at that, making it even more a child seeking attention, affection, a special treatment, a child who is sensitive and wounded if the attention is lacking. It is a child abandoned by its mother, a child condemned to a father who doesn’t understand it. Barbelo is about a point one can rely on, found in motherly love.
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Reviews
ARE WE HUMANS OR BASTARDS?
Director Dejan Mijač and set designer Juraj Fabry has squeezed out the nature and the exterior out of Biljana Srbljanović’s drama. There are no parks, no benches, no walls, and no graveyards. Wherever you look, there are graves of our dears and beloved, our unloved and un mourned!... The stage is entirely cleared of everything human, almost shadowless, telling and suggesting the power of the wasteland, resentment, loneliness, but in the same time it is heavy and demanding to the actor, who can only lean on to himself, his power of imagination and expression... Barbelo is the most radical play by Biljana Srbljanović. If she has written her previous plays with a critical mind, this play she writes with heart, offering, without a reserve, her honesties and state of shock by human beastliness and desertion of humanity... The vagabond by Nebojša Glogovac with the dog Žujka is the brightest star in the play of Biljana Srbljanović and Dejan Mijač...
An important piece, a good play.
Muharem Pervić, Politika, 6 December 2007
MOSAIC OF LIFE
What is that which really stays with us and after us when we get rid of our imaginary pompousness? If we think about it righteously, only love... Without a trace of sentiment, but full of compassion, brutally all-seeing and honestly, without reserves, Biljana Srbljanović collects small pictures of emotional relations with an accent on those that happen between parents and children, decomposing all of that we take for granted, and building there where it is unexpected... Where does Biljana Srbljanovićs text stop and Mijač's directorship begins is not easy to comprehend, and is not even needed. The same unsentimental, but pleasant nakedness is also on the stage, a subtle esthetical highness, in the décor – Juraj Fabri, in the costume - Angelina Atlagić. The fact that „barbello“ is in the title, translated both as the first thought, and as the uterus of the world, I would say that by Mijač it is the very human soul, through which both living and dead are passing or staying „united’ in a sfumatto which erases the borders between them. Jelena Đokić in the main role, with a deep and légere posture holds all the pain of a heroine who does not stop in front of any question nor does she hide behind easy answers. Ana Sofrenović and Mirjana Karanović as dead mothers, Jasmina Avramović also as a mother, but alive, Nebojša Glogovac and Goran Šušljik, Nikola Rakočević, Nikola Djuričko and Toni Laurenčić, with their superb roles rounded accomplished this play into an extraordinary theatrical act.
Aleksandra Glovacki, Večernje novosti, 5 December 2007
STARTING WITH LIFE
As always until now, the staging of a piece of Biljana Srbljanović does evoke massive and, of course, deserved attention. In the process of theatrical “bringing to life” of her latest story about a woman, her dog, husband, mother, an over weighted boy, a doctor... a respectable group of artist are involved, led by the director Dejan Mijač. If we also take the specific weight of the scene of the YDT into consideration, it is clear that the play Barbelo... however it is, that most important which the Serbian drama theatre is able to create in this moment.
Željko Jovanović Blic, 6 December 2007
A DOG’S LIFE
Keeping in mind the character of the piece, in which the verbal dominates the scenic, Mijač requests the actors to transform every, even the smallest, expression of the dramatis personae into an important emotional confession, which shows how the initial impulse in a man to get to know the important things about himself slowly begins to numb out, strengthening the longing to step out of life in which he is thrown, to return into the peace of the mothers womb. And they, especially the female part of the ensemble, Ana Sofrenović, Jasmina Avramović, Jelena Đokić and Mirjana Karanović, are playing the roles of Milica, Mila, Milena and the dog-woman, but also one extraordinary actor, Nebojša Glogovac, in the role of one of the Vagabonds on a churchyard’s micro cosmos, bring that about. In the same time, Dejan Mijač uses circular repetition to show life as a night mare in which people are and are not alive or dead.
Vladimir Stamenković NIN, 13. December 2007
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