12th International Small Scenes Theatre Festival Rijeka

This year's Festival in Rijeka opens a lively dialogue with Steiner's theses. It does so through the selected shows that question a variety of tragic experiences and numerous models of scenic presentation. We shall see contemporary reinterpretations and adaptations of classical literary works and motifs, arranged so as to form the broadest possible historical and cultural arch - from "Electra" and "Antigone", to "Hamlet", to Chekhov's "Seagull" and "Blow, Wind!", the play of the greatest Romanian classic author, Rainis. All those performances, with the exception of "The Seagull", are characterised by a dramaturgical reorganisation of a classical textual model, as well as by a ritual/ceremonial performative structure, while for at least two of the shows invited ("Electra" and "Blow, Wind!") could be viewed in an ethno-anthropological key as well. Even with Steiner, Chekhov is a milestone; "an explorer of inner space, of the realms of social and psychic turmoil occurring midway between the poles of the tragic and the comic", on territory "best fit for the dry and hidden effect of contemporary anguish". As numerous European critics agree, in one of the most fascinating scenic interpretations of "The Seagull", Arpad Schilling takes his audiences to the very essence of such "contemporary anguish, to the epicentre of vacuity in which Steiner does not find "the mythology necessary for the internal landscape to be modelled for the sake of achieving tragic articulation"...