Tivat Festival Awards Top Prize to Dirty Hands, Bikovic

The 21st Mediterranean Theatre Festival Purgatorije closed in Tivat on August 31, and the jury’s decision on the top prize left no room for doubt: Dirty Hands, staged by the Tivat Cultural Center, was named best production, a verdict the Belgrade Drama Theatre reported was unanimous. The same held for both acting awards drawn from the same cast, an outcome rare for a festival of this size, and one that usually means a single production simply outperformed the field on every measure that counts.

Dirty Hands is a political drama in which a young man is sent to assassinate a government official, moves into his house under a false name, and instead of carrying out the order spends days talking with him, until the line between trust and betrayal blurs. The text is as old as postwar Europe, but the reason festivals keep pulling it off the shelf is simple: the role of the official, named Oderer here, will not let an actor settle for playing a mere villain. It demands a man who wins over the audience before he wins over his own killer.

Directing, adaptation, and the staging concept are credited to Jug Radivojevic, whom the jury awarded the “Jagos Markovic” prize for best direction, also unanimously. The cast, alongside the leads, included Lazar Djurdjevic, Masa Labudovic, Dusan Kovacevic, Jelica Vukcevic, Pavle Bogojevic, and Igor Damnjanovic. The production premiered in Tivat on July 1, and that same night opened this year’s edition of Purgatorije, so the play effectively served as the festival’s unofficial host from its first evening to its last.

What turns this round of awards into a story of its own is how much one production took from a single title. Milos Bikovic won best actor for playing Oderer, again by unanimous decision, while Lara Dragovic was honored for playing Jessica in the same production, as well as for playing the young actress in Bollywood at the Podgorica City Theatre. That means her award actually recognizes two different roles from the same season, a rarity even at festivals far larger than this one on the Boka. When a single company sweeps best production, best direction, and both lead acting awards at the same festival, that is no longer a matter of luck with the jury. It is proof that the entire team, from casting to set design, was pulling in the same direction.

The rest of the award list shows that Purgatorije still manages to draw the region’s best onto one stage in Tivat, even though the top prize stayed with the host company. Milan Maric received the award for acting bravura for his role in Richard II at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, a text that on its own demands an actor capable of carrying a monologue with no help from anyone else on stage. Director Stasa Koprivica received the special award for visual and technical innovation for her staging of King Ubu at the Belgrade Drama Theatre, a production already known, even before this award, for treating its set design as an equal performer rather than a backdrop. The jury was made up of Zeljka Turcinovic, a Croatian dramaturge who served as president, actress Ljiljana Blagojevic, and Montenegrin director Dusanka Belada Boskovic, a lineup that on its own says the festival has kept its regional character even after 21 years, rather than narrowing into a domestic showcase with the occasional guest.

A reader can easily take the festival’s name, Purgatorije, as a theological pun, purgatory as a place one passes through on the way to something better. This year that pun got a literal reading too: a play about a killer who does not clean his hands but dirties them further by talking with his victim before pulling the trigger emerged from the purgatory of festival competition with more awards than a single title could well carry. The festival does not plan that kind of punchline in advance, but rarely do a name and a winner line up this precisely.