Director’s Statement – the consumer’s basket and crib

The main characters of the play Upper Austria, written in 1972, are a working class young married couple whose consumers’ dreams and appetites come in contradiction with their wish for a child. Kroetz insists on the banal nature of everyday life which, since thirty years ago, has also become typical for our society despite the fact that the people here have, until recently, believed to be immune to the decayed features of capitalism. I speak in the past because all the big ideologies have vanished in the course of the past thirty years. Even Fromms dilemma “to have or to be” is not valid anymore for the reason that the life nowadays has merged the two differing categories creating thus a new notion – human-consumer. To have is to be, and to be is represented by the list of what you have. Our identity is being established by our choice and combination of the stuff we stack supermarket trolleys with.

Franz Xaver Kroetz, a German playwright, actor and director was born in Munich in 1946. He attended studies of acting in Munich and max Reinhardt seminar in Vienna but very soon his career as a writer became the dominant one. Kroetz is one of the most significant contemporary writers. He was particularly important for German playwriting due to the fact that his work bridged over the vacuum of the Nazi period as well as the long period of “de-nazification”. It could be said that Kroetz has continued German dramaturgy, i.e. social expressionism but his work differs from his East German role models by its being submerged into the everyday life of the people from the fringes of a highly developed but, at the same time, a deeply consumer society. He is a writer with a clear leftwing slant but accords with his time and denounces any ideological motives. He simply reveals the social fringe of a consumer society reaching thus towards the most modern German dramaturgy of the 21st century which portrays a lonely person sick of society.

Žanko Tomić was born in Skopje in 1970. In 1995, he graduated from Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, department for Serbian language and literature and in 1997 at Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade, department for Theatre and Radio directing. He worked as a theatre director and the director of Drama in Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad until 2002 when he started working at Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade. In the period between 1999 and 2000, he was a visiting lecturer at Brandeis University in Boston. He is a co founder of an independent theatre troupe, Torpedo. He is the founder of the festival of the contemporary Serbian playwriting, Innocence, Project Three. He was a member of the Bitef council as well as the artistic selector of the theatre programme of Belef festival. Majority of his directions took place under the roof of Serbian National Theatre: Ivan M. Lalić’s The Slave of Love, Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, Slawomir Mrožek’s On Foot, Tshekhov’s Seagull, Dušan Jovanović’s The Liberation of Skopje, Marija Stojanović’s Safe House, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. In Belgrade Drama Theatre, he directed Igor Marojević’s Twenty-four Walls, Rona Munro’s Iron, Dale Wasserman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In KPGT, he directed Dušan Jovanović’s Riddle Courage, Howard Barker’s The Europeans in National Theatre in Subotica, Aleksandar Popović’s Deadly Motorcycling, in the Youth Theatre in Novi Sad, Djordje Milosavljević’s Kontumac in Theatre Joakim Vujić in Kragujevac, as well as written and directed Overlapping in Torpedo theatre troupe. He is also the author of performance Knknpnkn staged at Belef in 2008. He has also directed Tennesee Williams’ Camino Real in Spingold Theatre Centre in Boston.