| VLATKO PERKOVIĆ |
- A Modern Passion Play (A Drama)-
THEME: A ritual play as compensation for the impossibility in real life of attaining existential fullness
NUMBER OF CHARACTERS: 2 (1 male, 1 female)
NUMBER OF ACTS: 1
PLACE: A setting for the play (assuming "an enclosed space")
TIME: Anytime
WRITTEN IN: 1966
SUMMARY:
Two young university research assistants at the Chair for Literature, facing
the great peril of bearing witness to their relationship to those "who poison life" and "bear false witness", while intensively longing for their own "purity", resort to ritual identification with biblical characters. In their "enclosed space", searching for cathartic purification, they gradually
"transform" into the Saviour and Mary-Magdalene-the-Penitent. They use the texts from morality plays, the Bible, and Shakespeare's Hamlet in their quest.
The play was premiered at the Croatian National Theatre in Split in 1966. It has also played in Prague - at the Divadlo Divizna theatre - when it was translated into the Czech language.
- A Drama -
THEME: Family dissension: in counterpoint to the Homeland War
NUMBER OF CHARACTERS: 7 (2 male, 5 female)
NUMBER OF ACTS: 3
PLACE: The living room in the flat of Trpimir and Dobrila Vidović
TIME: 1992, on the arrival day of a convoy carrying women and children from Sarajevo
WRITTEN IN: 1997
SUMMARY:
During the war in Bosnia, after being captive for three days in Ilidža, a suburb of Sarajevo, the convoy carrying the women and children arrives in the Croatian university city. Suzana, Dobrila's sister, is a passenger on the convoy with her seven-month-old baby. Her husband had been killed one month ago by a Serbian sniper. However, Trpimir's mother strongly objects to the efforts made by Trpimir and Dobrila to accommodate
her sister. She does not want to give up her room in Trpimir's flat to a refugee, even though she owns the flat upstairs. The reasons for the mother's attacks on Trpimir, who has been wounded in the Homeland War, are counterpointed during the play with the war atmosphere
and the reasons for aggression against Croatia. However, as the
play evolves it become obvious that Mama Santica's unfortunate nature is being used by her son-in-law Jojo and her daughter Tuga to help them to achieve their own greedy aims. And this almost pathological team-up culminates in intrigue, with the aid of a blackmailed and bribed witness to the father's will, about the invalidity of the will. So when the wisdom shown by Dobrila and Trpimir manages at least partly to neutralise certain illegal intent, then Jojo's and Tuga's real natures
, aggressive and warped, can no longer be concealed. They attack the wounded Trpimir to satisfy all their long-suppressed aggressive instincts,
to compensate for their inferiority in the face of intellect and honesty, and when the final scene reaches its peak, Suzana, still traumatised
from her husband's violent death in a Sarajevo street, involves herself
in what is going on...
- A Realistic Drama -
THEME: The process of (possible) realisation of conditions for buying up a company with the company's own money; demonstration of general historical constants
in specific social circumstances; the opportunity for correcting old historical iujustices by new historical injustices
NUMBER OF CHARACTERS: 8 (5 male, 3 female)
NUMBER OF ACTS: 2
PLACE: The general manger"s office at a large construction company
TIME: The present
WRITTEN IN: 1995
SUMMARY:
The new general manager of a large construction company knows that, under the Socialist system, the firm had deposited a large amount of money, made in clearing exchange transactions, under a cipher at a foreign bank. During privatisation of the company under the new regime, he plans to get his hands on the controlling packet of the shares together with his friend, a guest worker in Germany who owns the Hausmont company in Stuttgart. Through a wellthought-out
strategy made up of various imputations and blackmail, he gets the names of the signatories and the cipher of the company's secret account with a bank on the island of Cyprus. He intends to buy up the company's shares with the company's hidden money. However, just when it seems that he will manage to pull off his scam, he himself is blackmailed.
Just before the play was due to be premiered at the Croatian National Theatre in Split, the author obtained an injunetion against the performance of the text based on Blackmail, claiming that the genre characteristics of the text had been altered, destroying its dramatic message and falsifying the essential content of the drama. The play is still waiting to be produced.
Blacknail won a prize in the Competition for the Best Drama Text at the 1995 Marecl's Days Festival in Split, and was published in Split in 1996. The play has been translated into English, Czech and German.
BIOGRAPHY:
Vlatko Perković - theatre director, theatre critic and playwright - completed drama school in Sarajevo, the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar, and studied theatre directing and drama in Prague. His doctoral thesis was entitled The Drama Text and the Semantics of the Contemporary Stage Act. Apart from articles on literature and the theatre published in the press and in periodicals, he has also written Dramaturgy and the Mark of the Theatre (Zagreb, 1984); The Manipulated Theatre (Split, 1993); and a separate edition, Dramaturgical Functions and the Pitfalls of the Open Theatre Space / Split Summer Festival - Dubrovnik Summer Festival (Split, 1996). The first version of his passion play An Enclosed Afternoon was performed in the Croatian National Theatre in Split, and in Prague (at the Divizna Theatre), and published in the Mogućnosti magazine (No. 2/1996). His plays Deus ex machina, Blackmail and An Enclosed Afternoon was published in the book Three Dramas (Split, 1997) that won the Split City Prize for 1997.
ADDRESS:
Dr. Vlatko Perković, Vukovarska 22/II, 21000 Split