James Joyce
Exiles

Translated by
Vladimir Petrić and Dimitrije Stanojević and Đorđe Krivokapić

Adapted by Bojan Đorđev and Nikola Skočajić

Premiere at Bojan Stupica Theatre on Thursday, April 7 2011

Production Manager

ABOUT THE PLAY

I think Exiles were in a way a therapeutic work for him. Through the downfall of Richard in Exiles Joyce matures, his literary alter-ego Steven Dedalus from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses – a pretentious, slightly Hamletesque character obsessed with authenticity and sincerity – very much like Richard – makes way for Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, a man in love with life in all its imperfections. But, in order for that to happen, Richard/Steven/Joyce had, earnestly and with no irony, to make a complete chaos in interpersonal relations in Exiles, to try out what it means to live ‘sincerely’ and ‘freely’. In order to reach an emotion in himself that ultimately, after the devastation of people around him, fails to please him.

Bojan Đorđev

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ABOUT THE WRITER

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

BOJAN DJORDJEV

Born in 1977 in Belgrade. Graduated from the Department of Theatre and Radio Directing of Faculty of Dramatic Arts in 2001. Received his MA Degree from University of Belgrade, Department of Theory of Arts and the Media in 2007, with the thesis Literalness and Theatricality – Mutations of Body/Figure in Performing Arts in 1970s, 80s and 90s. Co-author, director and performer in numerous theatre and performance projects in Belgrade and abroad (Vienna, Lyon, Gent, Stuttgart and Kasel). For two years in a row, in 2004 and 2005, with the productions of Psychosis and Death of Author and No Name: Snowhite, he took part in the official selection of BITEF Festival. Since 2002, he collaborates with visual artist Sinisa Ilic on a long-term project The Desert of Image. He is one of the co-founders and constant collaborators of TkH (Teorija koja Hoda, the Walking Theory) Platform and TkH Magazine for Theory of Performing Arts (since 2000). Artist in Residence: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart 2004 and 2005/6 and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris 2010, within the TkH project of How to do Things by Theory.
Selected productions (in the last five years): Elfriede Jelinek, Ivana Sajko Jackie Kennedy/Medea, Bitef Theatre 2009; Jean Cocteau, Philip Glass Les Enfants Terribles (the opera), Little Theatre Dusko Radović in 2009; Ivana Sajko Woman-Bomb, BDP 2009; Ivana Sajko Europe+Rio Bar, CZKD, Magacin in Kraljevića Marka Street, 2007; R. Walser Ana Vujanović No Name: Snowhite, Little Theatre Dusko Radović, 2005; Kapetanović/Đorđević/Walshe Operrrra is Feminine Gender, Jevremovac Botanical Garden, BELEF 2005 and others.
More about the projects on http://bojandjordjev.wordpress.com

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REVIEWS

This melodrama, conceived as a television confession about intimate issues, talks with a lot of irony that one can still turn one’s back to the culture of mass-bedrooms. (...)
The young actors of the YDT, Goran Jevtić, Sena Đorović, Nikola Vujović and Nataša Marković, highly cultivated pronounce that Joyce's text, getting into the roles of the four lovers expressing the melodrama by leaving an kind of unspoken meaning between the lines, where the audience can create a publicly open and noisy context of our intimate lives. (...) Perhaps the Belgrade Exiles in the critique of today's mass media, as well as the (civil) theatre, could be even more radical. But the value of this show is above all that it occurred precisely at the centre of such a world. (...) So ironically, the play’s title the Exiles, tells us that the mass bedroom culture, enthusiastically embraced by many, can still be ignored by the backs turned. 
                                                                                    Bojan Munjin, Novosti - Croatian weekly



Goran Jevtić plays the writer Richard Rauen married to Berta (Sena Đorović), in whom Richard’s friend Robert (Nikola Vujović) has been obsessively in love with for many years, while Robert's sister, Beatrice (Nataša Marković) was earlier in a relationship with Richard that ended by her selection of another man. There is an entangled network of complex, painful, destructive love relationships that tear apart the characters that carry these feelings, but they also help them mature, and feel the fullness in life’s peaks.
In this regard, the Exiles are a fertile ground for the consideration of psychological and philosophical implications of love. The play opens for a discussion of the magical, romantic appeal of love, its duality and the illusory, and the simultaneously creative and destructive potential that it carries within it.

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