Tuesday, 6th May 2025, 7:30pm
Croatian House of Culture in Sušak
Petikat Zagreb, Croatia

Stanislav Habjan and friends: Kafka and son

Performers: Stanislav Habjan, Vibor Čerić, Antoan Perković, Jure Geci, Žarko Hajdarhodžić, Jan Vrzina, Mary May and Ljubica Gurdulić

Habjan’s Kafka and Son eludes traditional and recognizable theatrical classification. The play is a performance but also a concert, a recital and a personal confession in which the author, accompanied by his musician friends, talks about his relationship with Kafka, the literary genius of the early 20th century. As Habjan adopts Kafka as his literary father, so does the great writer get the son he never had, and their relationship builds through this intimate performance.

From the reviews:
As he adopts Kafka as his dad, Habjan truly becomes his literary child: an avid reader, the son Kafka never had, and a successor of the fantasy tradition that Borges started with Zeno’s paradox of the hare and the tortoise, continuing to Flaubert and reaching Kafka’s bestiary as the most profound truth about this world we inhabit. By the very fact that he gets a son in Habjan, who wants to praise him, sing about him, constantly learn from him and return to him as a starting point, Franz Kafka becomes a source of contemporary visual, musical and literary commentary. The writer from the past becomes the Kafka of our time, in which he is generously given strength (and the license even) for his art, something that was too often denied to him while he was alive.
Nataša Govedić, Novi list

(Photo: Zoe Šarlija)