Mikhail Zelinsky's translation adapted by: Vasily Senin
Adaptation translated by: Fikret Cacan
Director: Vasily Senin
Dramatization: Dubravko Mihanović
Set Design: Vasily Senin
Costume Design: Marita Ćopo
Music: Frano Durović
Lighting Design: Zdravko Stolnik
Speech and Vocal Consultant: Đurđa Škavić
Cast:
Turandot: Ivana Roščić
Altoum: Sven Medvešek
Adelma: Ivana Bolanča
Zelima: Antonija Stanišić
Skirina: Jelena Miholjević
Barah: Ranko Zidarić
Kalaf: Hrvoje Klobučar
Timur: Nenad Cvetko
Zara: Ana Kvrgić
Pantalone: Filip Šovagović
Brigella: Đorđe Kukuljica
Truffaldina: Barbara Nola
Stage Manager: Ina Krklec
Prompter: Snježana Majdak
The Italian writer Carlo Gozzi, born in 1720 in Venice, is a relatively unknown author in Croatia. A poet, prose writer and playwright of noble descent, Gozzi favoured the traditional Italian commedia dell' arte and vigorously opposed the drama inovators of the period such as Carlo Goldoni and Pietro Chiari. Turandot too was written for commedia dell' arte and although it evokes the famous Puccini opera, it was actually Schiller's version that provided the basis on which one of the greatest composers of all time made his last, unfinished work. The plot of Schiller's and Puccini's Turandot is very similar to Gozzi's, but there are also considerable differences, namely: where the German romanticist uses his epic swing to idealize moral values, Gozzi allows himself to be sarcastic and playfully ''easy'', which probably draws him closer to the spirit of time today.
The ''tragicomic fairy-tale'' about the love of the cold and cruel Chinese princess Turandot and the Tatar prince Kalaf won't give the young Russian director Vasily Senin a chance to create a colourful ethnological picture-book, but it will serve as a framework where destinies of people affected by post-war circumstances and time in transition will collide. Because then, even the miraculous fairy-tales can turn into worst nightmares and love can become litmus-paper for discovering traumas rooted in all of us. At that point the commedia dell' arte genre, already much more present in theatrological textbooks than on the stage, invites the performers and the audience to an exciting theatrical event where the dramatic spontaneity gets dissolved in comedy, what is assigned moulds into improvization and that which is seemingly formal becomes unrestrained.
''People today run away from themselves towards the ''universe of entertainment'', where everything is full of masks, much more than in commedia dell' arte, because it is too painful for us to live with our own faces'', says the director of Turandot announcing a performance in whose fairy-tale character we will see ourselves and which will, despite its wish to entertain us and take us on an imaginative theatrical journey to far away lands, speak of the everyday life in which we live in.
