For the last nine years the world theatres’ repertoires are massively infected by the play “Roberto Zucco”, by the French author Bernar Marie Koltes. In the very first reading of the play, both the director Dritero Kasapi and the dramaturg Ognen Georgievski are infected with virus called Zucco. They react urgently and they turn the stage of Dramski Theatre into an electronic microscope just to find out – Who is Zucco? Who am I? Zucco can mean something sweet, but the problem of the name and the identity in Kasapi’s concept is brought through the archetypical picture which is created by the actor Refet Abazi. At the very begging, the director sets up the bate for Zucco as something invisible – he can be the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father. During the performance we found out that he is Hamlet himself, so that at the end there’s nothing left of him, but the image of the audience about him. The director sets the classical crime story about Zucco as a murderer of his father, his mother, the unknown Lady and her child, with the delicacy of a film shot on the stage; but he does that just after he leaves the thorns of his author’s story. Zucco’s problem is not just how to break the criteria and to go through the walls set up by the state, the family and the people so that he can become independent; it is how to get over the wall of one owns’ skin in order to know himself. The polished and tightened dramatic pictures and lines with which the audience communicates, are professionally distributed by the invisible arm of the dramaturg Ognen Georgievski. Krste S. Dzidrov is responsible for “setting up” the metal walls, and the transformation of the stage into a liquid dramatic space. The costumes of Blagoja Micevski enable the transformations and the “normal” worlds of the character with a filmic precision. Also, the dramatic tension and atmosphere are there because of the choice of ritual Japanese drum music, done by Violeta Simjanovska.
The basic pillar of the show is Refet Abazi – built through the character of Roberto Zucco. He, from scene to scene, bares the performance on his back, dictating the tempo and the rhythm, by infecting the partners with the need for an urgent resolution of his problem. IN every scene, he comes to his climax, after he has been reflected in his partners as in a mirror. Besides his tall figure from almost two meters, his Zucco still remains unreachable, invisible and unindetifyed. With him, Majda Tusar holds the key pillars of the performance. With freshness and easiness she colluminates to the character of the Mother, going through Madame (a prostitute), to the Lady, creating a live wall out of them, which with enormous craftsmanship enhances and reduces the development of the main character.
Dzvezda Angelovska, as the Girl, loved by Zucco makes an obviously different role from all the others done so far. She dug out new layers from within self and succeeded in dramatically crushing the segments of the sister, the little girl and the woman in her character. The tragicomical tone and the paranoid spirit of the performance was very driven by Biljana Dragicevic, with her precisely interwoven transformations of the Sister and the Brother, the Whore, and the Neighbour. Branko Gjorcev from the character of the Inspector and the Old Gentleman, made a figure and it’s shadow over the main character, thus anticipating the dramatic situations in which Zucco is about to enter. Saso Tasevski and Nikola Kumev caught the tragicomical nerve of the state machinery made out of Guards and Policemen, who function all of the time as a live wall and a dramatic trap for Zucco, in which, at the end, they themselves are being trapped in.
This performance attacks, above all, the nerve cells of the audience’s skin; than it spreads in their heads, as an epidemy of the thoughts and demolishes – over and over again – the knowledge of birth and death of human’s identity as a dust. The eternal life’s questions with which the performance infects us again are just enhancing the “scrape” of the answers which eat our skin every day – we are but a big dramatic pause, which tells nothing, but shows everything.
the art is inside
