DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Director Dušan Jovanović and the actors of the National Theatre in Niš have succeeded in creating a production that will not be seen only today; a production that will be talked about in the same way as the performances of Žanka Stokić or Ljubinka Bobić. And in this, they have succeeded completely. In Nušić’s comedy, the director has powerfully brought to life something new and unseen. The production does not suffer from tedious perfection, but it is powerful, exciting, dynamic, and charged with tragicomic energy.

The Cabinet Minister, in Dušan Jovanović’s stage interpretation, is a contemporary and highly absurd portrayal of the madness of the thirst for power, a richly comic critique of mentality, as well as a skillfully realized series of burlesque situations. The production has been refreshed with a number of new motifs in relation to Nušić’s original text, enriching both its thematic meaning and its comic qualities.

A production made to be talked about and commented on, destined for a long and beautiful theatrical life, it will be remembered as a performance that took Živka’s plight seriously—dramatically, even—while at the same time never stripping her rise and fall of a higher form of comedy: the kind of comedy that emerges from the profound inability to truly and permanently change anything.