Two canons in a single month: JDP between Oedipus and Don Juan

When Vojin Cetkovic, in the February premiere of Don Juan at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, walks onstage with a line about how he has grown tired of choosing, the audience laughs before the door even closes. The laughter is not about the jokes, of which there are relatively few in Moliere’s text, but about the recognition that we are watching an actor who has spent most of his career playing wastrels but never one who has declared waste a moral position. That production, which opened the season, closes this May with nine performances, while reruns of Oedipus in the direction of Igor Vuk Torbica run in parallel.

The JDP repertoire for May, which the house published in its regular monthly bulletin, contains twenty-six titles divided between the main Ljuba Tadic stage, the Bojan Stupica stage and guest performances at the Sava Centre and the Bora Stankovic Theatre. Aleksandar Popovski’s Don Juan arrives in the premiere version from February, the production runs two hours and forty minutes with an interval, and the box office reports tickets for the June performances are already almost sold out.

Aleksandar Popovski, the Macedonian director who has worked occasionally in Serbia since the early 2000s, brings to Don Juan a directorial poetics that marked the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb and the Ljubljana Drama through the previous decade. His approach to Moliere is rigorously contemporary: the set is reduced to metal constructions and a single moving platform, the costumes are modern, but the text retains Branko Tomic’s verse translation in full. Igor Vuk Torbica, who signs Oedipus, goes in the opposite direction; his production is Hellenic, with a chorus in traditional masks and a set design that directly quotes the iconography of Epidaurus.

Two classics, two answers to the same question

What makes these two premieres interesting side by side is that they answer the same question with different means. The question is why classics still work in Belgrade, why the hall remains full when school-syllabus titles appear on the repertoire. Popovski with Don Juan answers that classics work when the director’s authorial signature is recognised, reading the text as though it had been written yesterday. Torbica with Oedipus argues that classics work precisely because they have remained as they were, and that audiences come to see the myth performed in its canonical form, without updating.

Both answers are valid and both have their public, but what makes them interesting in the same month is the JDP artistic leadership’s decision to let them run in parallel without a programme note framing them as a dialogue. JDP’s director Boris Lijesevic, in an earlier interview for the weekly NIN, stated that this is not a thematic plan but a seasonal schedule that arose from technical reasons, the availability of the acting ensemble and the costume department. If so, the situation has produced a dramaturgical arc that many theatre dramaturges would happily design on purpose.

May is also the month in which JDP tours with Dejan Dukovski’s Powder Keg on the stage of the Bora Stankovic Theatre in Vranje, part of the decentralisation programme that has expanded this season to six cities in central and southern Serbia. The production is performed in a shortened version, which director Slobodan Unkovski explains as an adaptation to the technical capabilities of the host, although critics on the previous two tours noted that the cuts disrupt the narrative arc. The Vranje performance on 27 May will be the production’s first tour stop after the pause imposed by the winter repertoire.

A special place in the May repertoire is also held by the Centre for Humour, a National Theatre production that has just been selected for the official competition of Sterijino Pozorje. Although it is formally a production by a rival house, JDP has hosted it as a guest performance on 22 May on the Bojan Stupica stage, a gesture of professional collegiality that has been noticed in the Belgrade theatre milieu. The director of the National Theatre, Svetozar Cvetkovic, said at a public gathering after the show that this kind of exchange of guest performances is planned to extend to another three productions by the end of the season.

JDP’s May balance is therefore not just a list of titles but the house’s attempt to present itself as a space in which two theatrical approaches live side by side without collision. The season closes on 27 June with a performance of Oedipus in an open-air venue, and the summer brings the first production of the new season before the Belgrade Festival in September.