Tatjana Mandić Rigonat, a director who is an actors’ favourite and for whose productions tickets are always sold out, has finished the season triumphantly, with the premiere of the play The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole at the Boško Buha Theatre. Last week, she received the Ljubomir Muci Draškić Award at Atelje 212 – an award named after the great director and handed out by actors to their colleagues. The famed director speaks with Kurir about the phenomenon of the play Our Class and new challenges, and she touches on the state the society is in in the wake of the tragedy at the Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School.
Do you like premieres, and how do you feel after the first performance of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole ?
“How do I feel? A mix of happiness and sadness. I’m always sad when rehearsals are over, when the end comes of a great work. Each production cast and crew are like a family in which you live for two or three months, which is how long the rehearsals take. And the cast and crew of Adrian Mole were warm, friendly, and witty. We enjoyed the rehearsals. And I’m happy to see how the audience responded. For me, the true premiere took place at the open dress rehearsal, when the play was seen by children. I was anxious because I didn’t know how they would react. I sat in the audience, surrounded by children, and followed their reactions. I like to say that the play is for audiences aged 9-99, and it would be ideal if parents saw it together with their children and then talk with them about what they have seen.”
At the Buha Theatre you directed The Cabinet Minister's Wife, which is a cult production. Was it easy finding a new play?
“I did The Cabinet Minister’s Wife back in 2013, and this October, on Nušić’s birthday, we will be marking 10 years of performing the play. We’re close to having 200 performances. After The Minister’s Wife, I did The Sleeping Beauty by Milena Depolo at Buha. Adrian Mole is my third collaboration with their ensemble. I really like the ensemble at Buha, and I want them to get back on stage as soon as possible and for the theatre to finally get reconstructed. I had unforgettable times directing The Cabinet Minister’s Wife. I’ll never forget when we performed it in Sarajevo, at the National Theatre, or at the festival in Rijeka. There were two performances on the same day because of the huge audience interest. The performances were 30 minutes apart. We used a blow-drier to dry off the costumes that were soaked in sweat… It was five hours of a headlong game.
“The premiere of The Cabinet Minister’s Wife was accompanied by sensationalism because of the male casting – Živka was played by Goran Jevtić, and all the other parts were played by men, except for the boy called Raka, who was played by Katarina Marković. It was because of The Minister’s Wife that scalpers showed up in front of the theatre. The life of that production is truly exciting. Nušić is one of our classics and contemporaries – a fellow traveller. The great topic of Nušić’s work is power. The vice of power, the madness it brings. And this madness is sexless. It is both male and female – a state of mind, a state of losing one’s mind, a great hunger – craving for more and more. The Cabinet Minister’s Wife is a work as well-known as a folk song, and it has been interpreted by exceptional actresses. I had thought that a male actor had never played the part before me. The wonderful Vlasta Velisavljević contested my originality when he said, ‘I have already played in in a male cast!’ ‘When, where?’ I asked him. ‘On the Barren Island’ he said.
"The Minister’s Wife is a political vaudeville, and Adrian Mole is a rock’n’roll production concerned with the important topic of growing up. The UK writer Sue Townsend wrote eight novels about Adrian Mole. They are cult books about growing up for many generations, just like for me it was Oliver Twist, Heidi, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Little Women… When The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole was published in 1982, I started university as a student of directing. It was as far back as five years ago when I started to talk to the Buha management about doing this production. I think it’s important to shed light on the internal world of a thirteen-year-old, on those sensitive years. There aren’t too many productions around that address that age, but they can be watched by both younger and older audiences. Sue Townsend writes very realistically, wittily, and with social awareness. Adrian is no boy from a fairy tale. He is growing up during the Thatcher era, in a class society. He wants to become an intellectual and a poet. He read as many as 170 books in a year… When he is feeling unhappy, he seeks solace in great literature. The 1980s were the years without cell phones or social media, but children, teenagers, have problems that are the same as they were then.”
In your production, you don’t shy away from painful topics such as divorce and school violence.
“Adrian’s father gets laid off and so loses his job, his parents are going through a marital crisis, Adrian falls in love for the first time with a girl called Pandora, and an older boy is stealing his lunch money. Bad and good things are the stuff of life, and it is interesting to see how Adrian faces them. The novel is written in the form of a diary, so from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old, in a confessional tone. Sue Townsend created the character of Adrian based on one of her sons, in combination with her own life experiences.”
Last week you received the Ljubomir Muci Drašković Award. What did knowing the famous director mean to you?
- Ljubomir Muci Draškić opened the door of Atelje 212 for me. I graduated at Atelje 212 directing Strindberg’s Miss Julie. I arrived at Atelje 212, submitted my direction explication, and was invited two weeks later to a conversation that lasted briefly, a bare 15 minutes. When he told me that he liked my explication and that I was going to do the show, I thought he was joking. He was the first theatre manager who had shown any interest in me. Muci offered a chance to young actors and directors. The award is important to me because it is handed out by actors, a jury of great artists. The significance of an award is measured not only by its name , but also by the jury that bestows it. Our Class is an exceptional drama, with great artistic power. I worked on it with fantastic young actors in an unforgettable atmosphere of absolute commitment. And it truly evokes powerful emotions, both in the audience and on the stage.”
Both shows are concerned with violence and the education system. Did it cross your mind that the Ribnikar Elementary case could happen to us?
“No, I didn’t think that a tragedy would occur at Ribnikar Elementary. Could anyone…? But I felt the need to reflect on the time that I live in through the play Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek. The play that he has written is not solely concerned with the Polish and Jewish nations. The war in Ukraine, the world today, our past, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the violence that we live in, the new forms of totalitarianism, ur-Fascism – all of this contributed to me directing Our Class. It’s a play performed since it was written in 2008. All across the world. From London to Tokyo.
“Our Class is set in the period between 1925 and the 21st century. The play’s subtitle is ‘History in 14 lessons.’ We follow the fate of the Jews and Poles, class friends from starting school and then through the decades of historical changes. We witness evil creeping into their lives, and how it develops to reach a point of a horrific crime. The play poses the question of why such a crime happened, what had been the contributing factors in developing hatred that resulted in the pogrom, into extinction. What was the role of the church, the family, the ideology, as well as why the truth of the crime is being kept under wraps and persecuted in peace, why there is speculation about the number of victims, and is peace really peace if there is no truth for both the living and the dead. The play was inspired by a true event: in 1941, Poles burned their Jewish neighbours in a stable in the town of Jedwabne. Our Class is one of the most important plays ever written. At the deepest level, it is a play about good and evil, about humanity and inhumanity, about love and hate, about a possible healing through the truth.
“I’m not a director who carries their directions in a suitcase like a traveling salesperson. Each direction is a personal confession on a topic that moves me deeply and an attempt at a dialogue with the world that I live in on important subjects, the subjects that I see as significant, whether intuitively or rationally.”
You have a successful career, your productions have received awards, and yet you have never directed at the Belgrade Drama Theatre, the Terazije Theatre, or in Novi Sad. 20 years ago you directed a play at the Yugoslavian Drama Theatre. Why is this the case?
“You should ask that question to the managers who have headed or still head the theatres, not me. The artistic value of the productions isn’t necessarily what opens the door of a theatre to an artist, unfortunately. In my collection of poems, Tell Me Who I Am, there are a few poems on the topic of theatre. They describe some conditions and situations in which I’ve been. Since 2009 I’ve had my home – The National Theatre in Belgrade – thanks to Predrag Ejdus, who was the manager then, so I no longer have the horrible feeling of uncertainty which I used to have after every premiere – regardless of the quality of the production, I don’t know if I will ever direct again. The audience think that I work a lot, but that’s not true. My productions have a long life on the repertory. Demons have been performed at the National Theatre since 2011, as well as Ivanov – since 2016; then there are Balkan Spy, Nora: A Doll's House, and Our Class. At Atelje 212, there are May Your Mother Give Birth To You. At Buha, there is The Minister’s Wife and now Adrian Mole. That’s eight running shows. It’s a reason to be happy. In the fall I will be working on Who Killed My Father, based on the novel by Édouard Louis, and revive Venice in Furs. And after that – I don’t know.”
Kurir.rs, Ljubomir Radanov