Žanina Mirčevska
The Gorge (Ждрело)
Dramatic Theatre, Skopje, Macedonia
Crew
TRANSLATOR ŽANINA MIRČEVSKA
DIRECTOR ZOJA BUZALKOVSKA
STAGE DESIGNER LJUPČO JOVANOV
COSTUME DESIGNER LIRA GRABUL
COMPOSER OGNEN ANASTASOVSKI
Cast
RUBENS MURATOVSKI,
LILJANA VELJANOVA,
DIME ILIJEV,
TRAJANKA ILIEVA,
SONJA STAMBOLDZIOSKA,
FILIP TRAJKOVIĆ,
DIMITRIJA DOKSEVSKI
ALEKSANDAR STEFANOSKI
IVANA PAVLAKOVIĆ
About the performance
PREMIÈRE 8 OCTOBER 2014
THE PERFORMANCE IS 1 HOUR AND 20 MINUTES LONG.
"Everybody has his own hunger, sir. But people aren\' t just, sir. Hunger for money, they call it drive. Hunger for success, ambition.Hunger for sex, passion. Hunger for authority, power. And hunger for alcohol, alcoholism."
The play The Gorge is a tragicomedy about the general phenomenon of the consumerist capitalism, about greed. The main character is constantly hungry and nothing can sate him, in his hunger he goes so far as to devour his own name. The play is written as a fairytale allegory about pleasure and the problems brought on by unexpected wealth. Different clichés of traditionally Slovenian themes are playfully scattered throughout the text, from picking mushrooms to the motives of contemporary
consumerism.
The text was staged by SNG Drama Ljubljana in 2009, and in the year before it was nominated for the Grum Award at the Week of Slovenian Drama. Dramski teatar Skopje is one of the most prestigious Macedonian theatres. It’s been active since 1946, and its repertoire today consists of performances with a wide genre scope that resonate in the theatre space of former Yugoslavia and Europe.
"In this surrealist ‘fairy tale fantastic story’ about incessant hunger and the traversing between happiness and unhappiness, ŽaninaMirčevska, with a furiously inspirational language in unexpected and radical somersaults in the very texture of the play, builds and writes an internal drama (of the unhappily happy of human characters and other ‘animal’ species, marked with realistic masks). The modern, or better, unusually different text (meaning innovative and researching drama writing) in
addition to global metaphor for insatiableness (gluttony) and similar unethical and related categories doesn’t carry a dramatic structure, upon which the director Zoja Buzalkovka could build a drama performance with the expected tools of standard dramaturgy, but with the obvious artistic vision and aesthetic credo of the author creates a light, easily-read yet at the same time powerfully expressive performance where we can enjoy in the text and with it. " (Ljubomir Gruevski, plagij.at)