The award-winning performance – "Uncle Vanja"

The appraisal committee comprised of: Neva Rošić, Tanja Lacko, Helena Braut, Mario Kovač and Lada martinac Kralj decided that the award for the best overall performance at this year's ''Gavella Evenings'' goes to the production of Uncle Vanja by the Croatian National Theatre in Split.

The staging of Uncle Vanja by the Croatian National Theatre in Split, directed by Mateja Koležnik, is a result of a daring and thoughtful reading, which has placed the subject of our inability to resist the selfishness of authority in a single, endless night. The production found its voice in the pulsating of the explosions and silences, of the physical and that which is half spoken, of the erotical and the poetic, of the funny and bitter; with these exchanges it created its own original world that unobtrusively communicates with the neuralgies of the man of today. The ensemble, from the widest generational span, with its coordinated style of play and its focus on the study of the expression of human suffering, enables us a meeting with the characters that spring from their actors' personalities and autonomous creations. Never false, open to the possibility of slipping into the grotesque, the actors have shown their peers, in the best possible way, the range of the unimposing director's ideas as well as their own talents.

The 22nd Gavella Evenings have shown us the finest theatrical productions of the past year. Thanks to this kind of festival, all of us, the audience and the theatre profession, were given the chance to familiarize ourselves with and bring around the tendencies, phenomena and the thoughts of the theatrical moment in our country. We believe that our decision to put this performance at the very top of domestic productions has some additional meaning if, at a time of general diffusion of theatrical motivations, it gives the answer to the question what has to be at stake in order for the theatre to get its most important reward – a well deserved applause.