Since its premiere in 1929, The Glembays by Miroslav Krleža has become one of the
most frequently performed Croatian plays. At the CNT in Zagreb alone, it has been
staged almost every decade, as if each generation had felt the need to recognise its own
Glembays anew.
The play forms part of Krleža’s Glembay cycle, comprising eleven prose works and
three plays published between 1926 and 1930. The dramas within the cycle are widely
regarded as the pinnacle of Krleža’s dramatic achievement.
Krleža conceived The Glembays as a literary portrait of a bourgeois civilisation in
decline, caught in its final agony. Beneath the glittering surface of privilege lies a society
of murderers, swindlers and moral ruin, one in which, as Krleža writes, ‘everything
smoulders like phosphorus’ while champagne is drunk atop a volcano. At its centre
stands Leone Glembay, one of the most important protagonists of Croatian dramatic
literature. Torn between the private and the political, personal freedom and social responsibility,
between his father and Baroness Castelli, between life and suicide, Leone
becomes the central figure through whom Krleža explores guilt, inheritance and revolt.
The middle and only surviving son of Ignjat Glembay and Irene Basilides-Danieli,
Leone is regarded within the family as an uncomfortable misfit: a painter of some
success, though never fully accepted on his own terms. After leaving Cambridge, he
spends eleven years wandering from Paris through Switzerland to Calcutta, retreating
into fashionable spa towns and living off the family fortune, before returning home for a
final confrontation. Within the family setting, over the course of just twenty-four hours,
Leone attempts to free himself from the Glembay spirit within and around him. He finds
himself caught in a series of emotional entanglements and on the brink of scandal on
the eve of his final reckoning with his father.
In The Glembays, Krleža portrays people, in his own words, with ‘all the murky,
egoistic, aggressive, libidinous or even perverse inclinations of human nature.’ In the span
of a single night, between life and death, we are once again invited to a final supper in the
Glembays’ home.
The Glembays by Miroslav Krleža will be directed by the acclaimed director Paolo
Magelli.