Histrionic home

Histrion's summer voyages are far from a leisurely tourist pastime: a cement ship offers no comfort, carrying decor along hundreds of stairs (when needed) and navigating hundreds of unexpected traps (regularly) requires good nerves and real dedication. On top of that, the gang members do everything without a fee! Not only young and enthusiastic, because the members were Fabijan Šovagović, Franjo Majetić, Slavica Jukić and other already respected artists. They were probably stunned by the breath of acting freedom, the feeling that nothing was "divided, determined, imposed" on them, that togetherness was more valuable than money and recognition. Being on your own, the actor has become more important and necessary today than ever before. Even when the more grumpy spectator can find hundreds of reasons for objection and reproach in Histrion's plays, he cannot deny that he is stunned by the joy of the play and some anxious cheerfulness of participation that radiates from the play. What is almost impossible to feel in any performance of "regular" theater. Even when members of the Histrion Acting Company play in it, there is also "Kvaka 22": a homo duplex has been created.

Histrions live and work in the gap between the parent houses and their gang. Between non-freedom and freedom, between coercion and pleasure. They are unlikely to be happy if they had to make a living from working at Histrion. It is their precious "exhaust valve" and is good as long as it is. Different. Their viewers remember the bursts of universal laughter in the audience, the satirical stabs that are retold as part of street and cafe folklore, the joy of acting and accordingly, the joy that unites performers and spectators by nullifying an already non-existent ramp or proscenium. If it is not presumptuous to say, Histrion created a special "acting style" that allowed much more than the somehow standardized acting aesthetics. First of all, the actor was allowed to allow himself the exuberance of the character's caricature, by serving all available means of acting, jumping into extempore, gag for gag, so everything that was defended to him on a regular, dedicated stage. There was, of course, an exaggeration, an overuse of acting freedom (which is the rule of every coup, isn't it?). However, in such a transgression of the given, one can easily discern the inextinguishable and eternal desire of histrions and ioculators to enchant and poison the audience, to pamper and carry it, to show what can be done by the one to whom everything is allowed until the lights go out. That is why Histrion's performances communicated so easily and directly with all levels of the audience, eliminating "white noise" in advance.

Ideas and views were admittedly embedded in their plays, but embodied in a form at least two millennia old they spoke the universal proto-language of theater. In other words, the Histrions vividly demonstrated and proved the power of conventions and traditions in acting. It is no coincidence that the outlined pattern was best suited to dramatic texts written in harmony with the repressed and suffocated tradition of the Roman atelier, created in the infamous workshop of the trefoil Mujičić-Senker-Škrabe. Domagojada, Glumijada and Hist (e / o) rijada snub theatrical language, offering him ridicule, rudeness, farcicalness, challenge, caricature, jump and fall, kick in the ass, belching and howling. On the first step. They also allow ascent (satirical stings, debunking myths, strange touches of ideas, etc.), but it is not obligatory and is left to the will of the performer, affinities, ambitions. By staging the said texts, the troupe must have come closest to the "newly composed" folk theater and most fully realized their intentions, and even received the best reactions from the audience. After a long, long time, the marriage between the playwright (here are three heads!) And the cast has succeeded. Everything there from the Spanish “golden age” and the Elizabethans (with some exaggeration, please nicely!) Was no happier coincidence in the way the theater thought.

The whole decade leaked in the hourglass between the Valun night with Mušica and Bogtepitaj where last summer with Mrduša. The hysterons have sailed, and will probably continue to sail, led by the irreplaceable Zlatko Vitez, the only knight among histrions who persistently storms windmills knowing they are not giants.

Igor Mrduljaš