Opening night of the awarded drama Always be Like a Dragon written by Espi TomičićDrama — 19. September 2025.
On Friday, September 26, 2025, the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb will premiere Always Be Like a Dragon, a drama by the award-winning author Espi Tomičić, directed by Olja Lozica, in the LADO Ensemble Hall in Zagreb. This deeply intimate and politically engaged drama plays with genres, temporal layers and theatrical form, merging the documentary and the poetic, the real and the imaginary, the personal and the collective. The work brings a layered story about identity, trauma, class insecurity and growing up.
The action unfolds on multiple levels, through introspective monologues, internal dialogues and conversations with a therapist, but also through voices from the past and present that comment, direct and provoke memory. At the center of these memories is an abandoned city apartment into which Matea, with her mother and siblings, enters illegally seeking shelter from poverty and homelessness. Through a war game led by the older brother Alan, the children create their own world, but through the cracks of this imaginary shelter, truths about the body, identity, loss, pain and fear come to light.
The roles are played by the actors of the Drama ensemble of the CNT in Zagreb: Vlasta Ramljak, Olga Pakalović, Dora Lipovčan, Lana Barić, Luka Dragić, Dušan Bućan, Filip Vidović, Marin Stević, and guest actor Ivan Grlić. The performances are scheduled for September 27, 29 and 30, 2025.
You can buy tickets HERE.
Always Be Like a Dragon is not just a theatre performance – it is also a therapeutic process, a collective act of imagination, a space for healing and sharing. The performance questions what it means to carry trauma, but also how theatre can be a place of its revelation and mutual understanding.
