Miroslav Krleža
LEDA
The world fraud Oliver Urban, an art critic, his friend Aurel, a successful painter, his wife Klara, a former opera singer Melita and her husband, snob Klanfar in a carnival night expose themselves to the most intimate details through their friendly, marital, extramarital and love relations. Love couples separate, marriages falter, former lovers meet again and so on indefinitely. Brilliantly written roles, excellent dialogues, intriguing situations and interwoven relationships that vary from a bourgeois drama to vaudeville are only a few elements of this Krleža's only comedy. However, Krleža, as a great writer, used this fluid structure in order to emphasise the superficiality, false values and questionable ideals of well-to-do citizens who are considered important representatives of the society. As the final part of the Glembay cycle in which the Glembay family is followed from 1918 to the 1930s, Leda is a kind of a grotesque mirror of the ascent and total breakdown of a family. Before our own eyes, all turmoil, intrigues, along crimes that depict that family, turn into an insane sequence of love, business and marital tangles that end in the street, in the company of ladies of the night. After more than two decades Leda will have its premiere on the stage of the CNT in Zagreb in stage direction of Franka Perković.
