Post festum of the International Small Scenes Festival Rijeka 2010

Choice from the press clipping

When the audience falls head over heels

The 17th International Small Scenes Festival which has just taken place in Rijeka was a first-rate theatrical revue in combination with a relaxed Mediterranean ambiance, provocative European theatrical handwriting and clusters of audience waiting for their actors. The festival was founded during the worst war-times by Rijeka's actor Nenad �egvić, when he felt, in his own words, tired of bloodless performances on stage and nationalistic hysteria in real life.

From the very beginning, he chose good theaters, from Lithuania to Macedonia...
Surrounded by overwhelming madness, Rijeka proved to be a god-given city which didn't count the festival participants' blood corpuscles...

The performances shown at the festival in Rijeka were never just well-packed shows or a relaxed escape from reality. The festival has always examined the actual social phenomena and the directors showed their eruptive energy and shocking signature: from Arpad Schilling to Pipo Delbono, from Alvis Hermanis to Oliver Frljić. These are the reasons this theatrical gathering around small scenes in Rijeka has grown into a first-class destination of European status.

The topic of this year's festival was trauma, which in other words means that the programme was respectable in spite of the all-present crisis and lack of money. From intimate breakdowns to social earthquakes, every single performance at the Festival dealt with the consequences of an era which has lost contact with itself�

The cerise sur le gateau of this-year's festival was Macbeth by a Georgian theater, and surely, one of the five best performances I've seen lately. When we think of Shakespeare, what comes to one's mind is a heavy drama in archaic rimes. On the contrary: in Georgian performance, all of that was "blown into the air". Few benches on the stage as the seesaws of power and death, ingenious play of light showing that "Life's but a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing", and actors as grinning cabaret masters of a dance macabre, so much resembling today's life and politics. Politically, this Macbeth might as well been created in Georgia, where "no ruler is good enough", as says the director David Doiashvili, while aesthetically, this performance brought us back to the theater as the arena of endless magic swallowing us entirely.

The applause was long. To put it shortly: we fell head over heels!
The Small Scenes Festival in Rijeka has justified its name and its poetics: we watch small performances that are like little boxes, charged with energy �.. from classical pieces to post-drama theater. Theatrically, this festival is about actors who play one meter from the audience; socially, during this festival the stage becomes an examination place for the most painful topics ravaging the modern man.
Bojan Munjin, Novosti

Absolute superiority of the Georgian Macbeth

The central topic of this-year's festival was trauma as a mark of our times. Among ten performances, absolutely dominant was the only performance out of the region � the Georgian Macbeth� The 17th Festival will be remembered by a number of high-quality acting creations, which is probably the highest value of this festival.
Kim Cuculić, Novi list

Macbeth: Spectacle about the cruelty of the power

During the Festival in Rijeka, by thrilling the audience with an outstanding Macbeth performed by V. Abashidze Music & Drama State Theatre from Tbilisi, the young Georgian director David Doiashvili has entirely justified the epithet of a young arising directing star.

Doiashvili transformed this disjointed Macbeth into a spectacle full of scenic metaphors, visual opulence which played with the dark as an important element of the world, excellent symbolic solutions seasoned by lyric scenes which differed from purely aesthetic to characterizing ones�
This spectacular Macbeth, full of directing, scenic and acting splendor, rich in visual and sound effects, as well as amazing intertwining of realistic and magical, was a loud critique of power as essentially evil and bloody, both on its hands and under its skin.
Igor Tretinjak, www.tportal.hr

Georgian Macbeth as a love story

The performance of Macbeth by V. Abashidze Music & Drama State Theatre from Tbilisi, directed and staged by David Doiashvili was the undisputed peak of the Festival.

The Georgian artist reads Shakespeare's dark and bloody tragedy as a love story, and stages it as a spectacular mis en sc�ne of a life ruled by mystic powers embodied by three witches. Like a demiurge, he moves the theatrical machine centered on numerous visual and sound scenic attractions which, together with excellent actors, convey to the audience a strong and impressive experience� Regardless of the questionable over-coding of meanings in regard to the characters, the Georgian performance is an example of a highly aesthetics theatrical event, in all its segments performed to perfection. The name of the director David Doiashvili should be remembered as one of the young directors who will surely climb to the very top of the European theatrical scene.
Darko Ga�parović, Vijenac