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Leda – The only comedy written by Miroslav Krleža back on the CNT stage after more than 20 years

Leda – The only comedy written by Miroslav Krleža back on the CNT stage after more than 20 yearsDrama — 10. May 2023.

After more than two decades Leda written by Miroslav Krleža will premiere on the CNT stage on May 26, 2023, directed by Franka Perković. 

The world fraud Oliver Urban (Jerko Marčić) currently an art critic, his friend Aurel (Igor Kovač), a successful painter, his wife Klara (Jadranka Đokić), a former opera singer, Melita (Iva Jerković) and her husband, snob Klanfar (Dušan Bućan) 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.

We who work in the theatre usually smile when laymen ask us "How can actors remember so much text?", because this is the least of our problems. Yet, when doing Krleža, this question is not funny; remembering huge amounts of texts, the adoption of the divine, but for our language proficiency unpredictably complex syntax, demands a slow and arduous work and thus, for me the working process on Leda is different from the work relating to other performances, even classics such as Shakespeare.
Naturally, the logorrhea of Krleža's character is not easily mastered, both in the formal and contextual sense without, as the author put it "inner psychological volume as the instrument and a good actor who plays that instrument, says the stage director Franka Perković adding how work on Leda mostly relates to the identification of the inner psychological volume which is definitely huge and to the attempt of the poetic being of the actor to adopt it and present it. I am lucky to be working with exceptional, talented and interested acting ensemble who strongly inspires me, and it is really difficult to say whether they lead me, or I lead them. This is one beautiful, exciting, and unpredictable journey, concluded Perković.

As the final part of the Glembay cycle in which the Glembay family is followed from the 18th century to the 1930s, Leda is a kind of a grotesque mirror of the ascent and total breakdown of a family. This last drama in the Glembay cycle follows the last Glembay, one of his evenings, between two couples and between the two world wars. The characters have been left alone in a wild carnival night, drunk, yearning for life and with only a few important decisions, at least for that evening. Each one of them is seeking love or little consolation, the surplus of life. In this unusual comedy much is said, yet behind the torrent of words these are only frightened individuals who are standing on the edge between night and day, dreams and reality, mask and face, the dead and the alive. After a night filled with sparks but without fire, the morning brings a hangover and only a slight postponement of every end, said the dramaturge of the performance Dino Pešut.

The set designer is Paola Lugarić, costumes are created by Doris Kristić, stage movement by Petra Hrašćanec, lighting designer is Elvis Butković, and Roko Crnić and Hrvoje Klemenčić are responsible for the music. The assistant stage director is Toma Serdarević, assistant set designer Aleksandra Vukićević and the assistant costume designer is Ana Trišler. The rest of the cast is: Tesa Litvan, Gloria Dubelj, Iva Šimić Šakoronja and Ivan Colarić.
Performances: May 27, 29, 31, and June 1 and 2, 2023.

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