The award-winning performance – NEXT DOOR
After seeing 11 performances at the 21st ''Gavella Evenings'', the appraisal committee comprising of: Marija Kohn, Gordana Ostović, Tajana Gašparović, Zlatko Sviben and Hrvoje Ivanković narrowed down its selection of the best overall performance to three performances:
- ''The Frog'' by Dubravko Mihanović, directed by Franka Perković, performed by the &TD Theatre from Zagreb
- ''Next Door'' based on the short-story by Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, adapted and directed by Rene Medvešek and performed by Zagreb Youth Theatre from Zagreb
- ''Three Sisters'' by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Ivica Kunčević and performed by the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb
And the award for the best performance at the 21st ''Gavella Evenings'' festival goes to...
The performance which is for several reasons significant to the Croatian theatre. It is a performance that, in our performative environment, leaves a rarely present authorial mark and that has shown everything that can be accomplished when the entire ensemble is prepared for an exploratory theatrical play.
The performance which took a non-theatrical text and transformed it into fullblooded theatre that lucidly thematizes Croatian reality, wrapping it into authentically ludic theatre form, filled with gentle irony and critical stance towards many of the social phenomena of our everyday life.
The performance put together out of fragments which chaotically unite and blend into one another, whose finale reshapes our idea of the perfect accuracy of such a form, because everything we see are chaotic fluctuations of consciousness of a mentally ill patient suffering from PTSP and chronic depression. In that way the thruthfulness of the events we see on the stage becomes questionable, which makes the performance touch upon the philosophical questions about the sometimes blurred boundaries between truth and lie, reality and illusion. But, what remains unambiguous is the fatal influence of our society on a sensitive individual.
Because, no matter how much this performance deals with the Croatian everyday life, its centre remains the sensitive individual who serves as a mirror of the world. Until the last scene, which leads us not into how it is, but into how it should be. Through the intimate and, to the world invisible, relationship of a seemingly ordinary nurse and a seemingly completely autistic patient; what opens up in front of us is Pascal's 'infinite little', the infinite diversity of the inner world which is hidden everywhere around us. Because, even when he criticizes reality, the Little Prince of Croatian acting, Rene Medvešek doesn't forget the rare thing that is in posession of his creative spirit – the miraculous illumination that purifies the world.
To that end, the award for best performance goes to the production ''Next Door'' by Zagreb Youth Theatre, directed by Rene Medvešek.
