Belgrade Drama Theatre has announced its 2023 main stage season, including new work by Žiga Divjak and Borislav Liješević.
Belgrade Drama Theatre has announced further productions in its 2023 main stage season.
As previously announced, the season will start with a production of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, directed by Ivica Buljan, which will open in February.
In April, Nikola Ljuca will direct Miloš Biković, Jelisaveta Orašanin and Tamara Krcunović in French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Lie, a companion piece to his previous play The Truth.
Borislav Liješević, director of the acclaimed production of Bernhard Schlink’s cult novel The Reader and the current hit production of War and Peace at the National Theatre of Belgrade, will direct an adaptation of Goethe’s Pre-faust starring Serbian stage and screen legend Svetozar Cvetković. This previously announced production was due to open in 2022, but will finally open on 23rd June.
In September, the main stage will play host to an adaptation of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, directed by Spanish director Alia Luca, with a cast including Nada Macanković, Ljubinka Klarić and Amar Ćorović, one of the stars of Our Son.
This will be followed by Slovenian director Sebastijan Horvat’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lying Life of Adults, featuring a cast of over 20 actresses. Horvat recently helmed the ambitious Cement tetralogy, a series of four performances based on Heiner Muller’s play, staged at theatres in Zagreb, Ljubljana and at Belgrade Drama Theatre. Read more about this project in our interview with Horvat.
Žiga Divjak:
The 2023 season will conclude with two December premieres, including a new production by the rising star of Slovenian theatre, Žiga Divjak, whose past productions include Fever and The Game and whose recent show Crises premiered at BITEF in September. His new performance, Future, is inspired by the climate catastrophe novel The Ministry of the Future, by American sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson. A major co-production between Belgrade Drama and Local Theatre Ljubljana, it is due to premiere on 15th December.
The year will end with Jaroslav Hasek’s Švejk, directed by Veljko Mićunović, which is scheduled to open on the main stage on 28th December.
For tickets and more information, visit BDP.rs
Further reading: interview with Žiga Divjak: “We have to completely change or value system”
Further reading: interview with Sebastijan Horvat: “All former Yugoslav countries suffer from a form of dementia”
Natasha Tripney is a writer, editor and critic based in London and Belgrade. She is the international editor for The Stage, the newspaper of the UK theatre industry. In 2011, she co-founded Exeunt, an online theatre magazine, which she edited until 2016. She is a contributor to the Guardian, Evening Standard, the BBC, Tortoise and Kosovo 2.0
