Our Boy

Hávar Sigurjónsson is a contemporary writer from the far-away Iceland, a remote and an exotic culture to us, but all the more interesting for that. As a house playwright and director for the National Theatre and a columnist for the most influential Icelandic daily newspaper, Sigurjónsson, like all good playwrights, does not address the local topics exclusively, but manages to speak in a universal dramatic voice, giving us all the more reason not to make distinctions between ''big'' and ''small'', or more or less ''important'' literatures. There are only texts, good or bad. And Our Boy is a wonderfully written play; clear, pungent and to the point. Short lines of potentially great strength and expressivity suggest that we're dealing with a ''fast play'' that doesn't tolerate anything superfluous, that it is primarily intended for the actors and their craft. Therefore, a small stage is its natural environment, because ''Daddy's boy'' can only tell us everything he wants from a close-up.

Franka Perković, the director, staged her most esteemed work – Adam and Eve and The Frog – on small scenes, spaces that are as one with the playhouse, but which are also, in a way, trying to escape it, aiming to ''blend with the real life'' as naturally as possible. Sigurjónsson's quartet seeks such a scene and such a director as if they want to say that fragmented families, the estrangement and sexual prejudice are not something that happens to someone else, but are very much alive here, in and among all of us. With Our Boy, Gavella Theatre wants to address the problems which undoubtedly relate to and are imbued in any 21st century person, no matter how much they refuse to admit it. A difficult task awaits the four actors of our ensemble and that is to be as ''real'' as possible in order for them to tell us an ordinary story, interwoven with the everyday life, in a(n) (un)theatrical way. If they succeed, the borders between the actors and the audience disappear and that is one of theatre's greatest powers.