Archived: Huddersfield

Huddersfield Director: Rene Medvešek

Performances: 30.10. and 31.10. at 8 p.m.

Uglješa Šajtinac (Zrenjanin, 1971) is one of the most important contemporary Serbian playwrights, winner of a number of awards, including the European Prize for Literature, as well as the Sterija Award for drama Huddersfield in 2005. The mentioned drama was also a template for a play by the Yugoslav Drama Theater, which gained cult status in its ten-year performance, as well as a multi-award-winning film of the same name.

Shajtinac skillfully manages a dark, moving and witty story about a generation of 30-year-olds who are behind the consequences of the war, and who see no future ahead of them. As a guest of the recently held ZKM panel discussion "Reading Theater", Šajtinac simply summed up Huddersfield's work: loves. If Igor hadn't come from Huddersfield after ten years, they wouldn't have met, and he is a lure for them to crawl out of their holes and show their true face of the lost generation and the faces of men who are otherwise more pathetic than women ".

The return of one of Šajtinč's characters to his hometown from West Yorkshire to Zrenjanin, in the Croatian adaptation to Karlovac, shows that this story could be set in any city in the southern European countries in transition, which by switching to the so-called capitalism believed that heaven on earth was beginning, and they welcomed wars, tycoons, crime, unemployment, and stomach cramps. From such countries, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and others, today thousands of young people go to an unknown place every day, not wanting to look back, and those who remain live a life of constant disappointments and dissatisfaction.

"You see, Huddersfield sounds sunny to me" – in that simple sentence, uttered by one of its protagonists at the end of the play Huddersfield as a replica, the whole, brutal but incredibly porous, world of this exceptional piece is set. One who, without any hesitation, honestly and to the end communicates all the difficulties of being present in the space of life decisions that have never been made, but also at the same time the strong need to not give up.

Huddersfield brings a dark, witty and very moving story about a generation of thirty-year-olds who, at the turn of the new millennium, have a hard time leaving behind the consequences of the war, and see no sign of a better future. In such circumstances and at a time of complete sell-off of moral and material values, even the rainy Yorkshire suburb seems to be a promised land. It is from that country that one of the heroes of this play returns, and with his return he opens never-resolved issues and traumas from a time that everyone thought was long forgotten.