Sterijino Pozorje with no foreign guests: eight domestic plays in the running

On the Pera Dobrinovic stage of the Serbian National Theatre, tomorrow at eight in the evening sharp, the first spotlight will come on and Svetozar Rapajic, a long-standing directorial authority and a former selector of the same festival, will deliver the few sentences that open the seventy-first Sterijino Pozorje. The opening ritual will feel like every other year, but what follows the ceremony, nine days of a competitive programme, marks the first visible structural cut in the festival’s long history.

This year’s selector, the actor Svetislav Bule Goncic, has chosen eight plays, all from the Serbian-language area. The international Krugovi sidebar, which after 2010 gave the festival a parallel programme of productions from Slovenia, Hungary, North Macedonia and the wider region, has not come together this year. The festival’s management explains the decision as a focus on national drama, the declared mission of Pozorje since its founding in 1956, but in practice it also marks a quiet capitulation to a budget that has now stood at nominal parity with previous seasons for three years running.

Goncic has assembled his choice from productions in six cities and three countries. Belgrade is represented by Atelje 212’s My Theatre, the National Theatre’s Centre for Humour and Zvezdara teatar’s The Professional. From Novi Sad comes the Serbian National Theatre’s Lady Nola, from Sombor Why Is He Laughing, from Banja Luka Tracks by the National Theatre of Republika Srpska, while Mrs Minister is a co-production by the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor, an intriguing case of a domestic dramatic classic performed in Slovenian with Serbian subtitles.

What the selection says about the domestic scene

The triple presence of comedic texts, two adaptations of the Nusic canon and one contemporary title in the same generic mould, suggests the selector reads the audience as exhausted and assumes the festival hall in Novi Sad will more readily accept laughter than confrontation. That is neither good nor bad in itself, but it is worth noting that, of the eight plays, none takes off from a theatre text written after 2020. Pozorje, which prides itself as a space for affirming contemporary drama, this year temporarily hands that mission over to its competition for an unpublished dramatic text, the results of which are announced in parallel with the prize-giving.

A five-member jury will decide on the Sterija awards for production, contemporary text, direction, set design, costume design, stage music and four acting prizes, as well as a special prize and the audience award. The Miodrag Kujundzic award for theatre criticism and the Jovan Hristic award for theatrology will be presented at a joint ceremony on 3 June on the Jovan Djordjevic stage, with a gala concert in honour of the laureates following, part of the programme returning after the pause imposed last season.

What makes this year’s Pozorje particularly interesting to observe is precisely that silence around Krugovi. In previous cycles, the sidebar brought Belgrade premieres of Hungarian and Slovenian productions that audiences otherwise had no chance to see, functioning as a rare window into regional theatre output. Its absence, justified by the turn to domestic work, raises the question of whether Pozorje is restoring its founding mission or simply admitting it has no budget for visiting troupes. In an interview for the festival’s seasonal address, director Mirjana Karanovic announced that Krugovi is planned for the next season, which remains verifiable only once the 2027 budget is adopted by the Vojvodina Provincial Assembly.

Goncic’s selection is also actor-focused. Dusko Kovacevic’s The Professional in the direction of Stevan Bodroza, with Aleksandar Bercek in the title role, already figures as a pre-festival favourite in the acting categories, while the Serbian National Theatre’s Lady Nola, a piece signed by director Tanja Mandic Rigonat, is a contender for set and costume design prizes. The strongest regional critical interest, however, is going to Mrs Minister from Maribor, where director Yulia Roschina shifts Nusic’s Zivka from a Belgrade bourgeois sitting room to a Slovenian province in the early Brozian period, a directorial poetics that deliberately courts discomfort.

The Sterijino Pozorje that opens tomorrow will therefore be a festival that looks entirely inwards: what are we doing with domestic drama today when we have nothing to compare it with. The gala concert is on 3 June at 8 p.m., until then every following working day in the programme book.