Tena Štivicic: FRAGILE!

"Mila dreams of becoming a star in a musical show. But, for the beginning she is no more than a star in an obscure club in Northern London. Marko dreams of becoming a comedian. At present he’s a waiter. Gayle will become a famous painter in the future. But at the time being she’s working with refugees. Tjasha has travelled throughout Europe as a victim of trafficking. All she’s ever dreamed of was to come to London and find the person who had once, long ago, said “forever yours”. Erik was a war correspondent. On a battlefield in Bosnia he was hit by an explosion and approached the other world. Today, he finds his only sense in life in indulgence. All of those characters have come to London looking for something they believe they can find nowhere else. In the meantime, while waiting for the moment when their dreamed-of life will begin, their stories interact in Michi’s club. It is there that they discover qualities they were not aware of – maturity; it is there that they grow up. They begin to understand that the time they were waiting for life to begin has actually become the crucial time of their lives." And it is precisely in that "petrified" time zone that the play Fragile finds them. Originally written in English by the Croatian playwright Tena Štivicic, the play was premiered in Ljubljana under the demanding technical and acting requirements of SMG house director and head of the independent group Betontanc, Matjaž Pograjc. Pograjc’s shows are regularly invited to prestigious theatre festivals all over the world (they have been performed in some forty countries on all of the five continents), while Fragile! has started its scenic life with a number of acquired awards, one of which is that for Best Show on Borštink’s Encounters, the most famous and important theatre festival in Slovenia.

The show Fragile!, in a theatrically creative and almost painfully suggestive manner, offers a successful blend of a dramatic plot created by Tena Štivicic, and complex technological machinery through which her ideas are presented on stage. The use of videos, puppets, and scale models does not serve its own purpose, but effectively supports and stresses authentic acting as well as the fragmented structure of the text, transforming it into specific and original theatre language. That is the foundation on which this show grows, a show that mocks and satirises the TV medium and points to a perception of a world based on Big Brother voyeurism. Simultaneously, it precisely analyses the mental pain and suffering of people from former Yugoslavia who have been deprived of a homeland, of means of existence, and of their identities. Those people are both guinea pigs and experimenters in an enigmatic global project, victims and criminals in a world that has lost its sense of being, actors and directors in a great entertaining show which testifies how the adversity and suffering of ones can turn into fun and amusement for others.
The Jury of "Borštnik’s Encounters"