National Theatre Sombor

Mate Matišić

Moji tužni monstrumi (My Sad Monsters)

Direction and text adaptation: Ivan Vanja Alač

Stage design: Andreja Rondović

Costume design: Biljana Grgur

Music: Dragana Jovanović

Stage speech: Vlasta Ramljak

Cast: Saša Torlaković, Nikola Knežević, Adriana Salahović, Jugoslav Krajnov, Ivana V. Jovanović, Biljana Keskenović, Nemanja Bakić, Srđan Aleksić, Pero Stojančević, Ana Rudakijević, Anica Petrović

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion”-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Although completely aware of what he created, unlike the painter Basil in Wilde’s novel, Mate Matišić was not afraid to put in front of us a self-portrait of his soul. Similarly as in Ljudi od voska (Men of Wax) whilst talking about other people, he was actually exposing himself all the time. Therefore, in this play we are to put before us  on stage a large mirror and that through the lens of the story of Croatian society. If we take a closer look at what is in front of us, we will gather that our only privilege as opposed to Zagreb is that this particular time the writer didn’t make an example of us. The motifs taken as an inspiration for the play are the  various instances of people not being able to  distinguish between fiction and reality, war veterans caught up in the past, abuse of the industry  to which we belong- journalists without ethics and morals… It can be said that all these are products of one society’s inability to free itself from the prefix “post-war”.

Even upon the first encounter with the play, it becomes perfectly clear that My Sad Monsters (which Miljenko Jergović named “Mate Matišić’s Anatomy Lesson) was created as the author’s response to the Croatian public’s reaction to his drama Men of Wax. It can also be inferred that the piece refers in many ways to the original trilogy. Regardless of all that, the already mentioned drama is a functioning whole that stands on its own two feet, providing an equally rich layering of meaning to those viewers who may not be familiar with the previous trilogy or the author’s life.

As the title itself suggests,  My Sad Monsters is by no means a straight-line, chronological continuation of Men of Wax. This piece of writing is, in fact, highly gradational and that in its: boldness of expression, toying with genres, blurring the boundaries between reality and a dream, as well as fiction and facts, illusion and truth. This is all due to the fact that  in the realm of Matišić’s dramatic work all these are synonymous with one another. Following his example, we felt obliged to be even bolder on stage than we had been the last time.