The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh

Besides being one of the most beautifully written texts in the history of Croatian literature ''The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh'' are, in terms of the stage, an exceptionally vivid material: socially committed and playful, veracious to the point of being impertinent, humorous and colourful, prophetically wise... Krleža had specifically predicted a bewildering array of the things that trouble us here and now: from social injustice to the disintegration into the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor, from the loss of identity to the drowning in ''globality'', from the eternally present patterns of submission and opression to hypocrisy and the spinelessness of those who ought to be moral verticals... In the process, the ballads such as ''Ni med cvetjem ni pravice'' or ''Khevenhillera'' have over the years become a commonplace of our communication, merging the street with poetry and populist philosophy and humour with supreme art, close to everyone and yet so enchantingly diverse.

''It is clear from the start that all of the scattered characters who inhabit the Croatian Brabant, who are placed among the covers of the bard's epic, all these rebels, serfs, the hungry and the degraded, are our contemporaries today - the unemployed, that is the plebs who don't necessarily bleed in wars, but do so in the hopelessness and the depression of their own reality. The social and the political one.''
(Helena Braut, ''Vjesnik'')
''Franka Perković's Balads ought to be allowed to operate a bit closer and a tad more suptile, by the interaction of Dijana Vidušin and Ozren Grabarić, the craftsmanship of Sven Šestak, or finally by the inspired Franjo Dijak, who has perhaps found a functioning environment in Krleža's fictional, bastard language.'' (Igor Ružić, Radio 101)
''As they are uttering the text of The Balads on the empty stage, black and white documentary footage (made by Miroslav Sikavica) appears on the canvas behind them, subtly showing us all of those who are not usually seen from the glaring city lights. All of that is accompanied by the live musical performance of Mojmir Novaković. Unusual instruments are making noises that seem as if they're coming from the bowels of the earth. The fog, the mud and the blood, three key words of The Balads, are very much alive and scream painfully from the stage, though at no point do we see anything that would literally point to them. At its best the performance is as impressive as the authentic, powerful poetry.''
(Iva Gruić, ''Jutarnji list'')

''The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh, directed by Franka Perković, are so much superior to any recent stagings of the same text that they can already be proclaimed as anthologic. Franka Perković has succeeded in making the stage speak about the unbearable ''ordinariness'' and sanctity of human suffering, touching the audience deeply.'' (Nataša Govedić, ''Novi list'')