Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca is one of the most beautifully written texts in the whole of dramatic literature. The Spanish poet of the stage used an enchantingly imaginative and admirably focused plot to create a suggestive and fluid play, as modern as the fantasy and the story, freedom and cruelty, darkness and dream. The vibrancy and the bareness of the play's verses go hand in hand, offering the 21st century actors a chance to become total performers, to simultaneously act out a contemplative and theatrical play, to face both the past and the present and speak of illusion and reality.

Imbued with authentic sadness and a gentle, warming humour, this text, among other things, is a peace-offering and as such has a healing effect on those who are willing to surrender to it. Directed by Dario Harjaček, the director of such notable titles as ''Three Sisters'' and ''The Piano Teacher'', Alabama addresses the audience directly and inquiringly, willing to talk about the reality that hurts us and yet we continue to live it. It has been written about this text which won the ''Marin Držić'' award in 2008: ''Davor Špišić strives to put back together the fragments of a family, to reconcile the irreconcilable and bring back a glimpse of hope, which he eventually succeeds to do in the manner of a true craftsman.''

''Barbelo is where we come from and where many would like to return and hide, and each one of us should choose what that is'', stands written alongside the latest play by Biljana Srbljanović, the most frequently staged Serbian playwright in Europe. ''Barbelo - that is ''Barbello'' - is a notion used in the history of Christianity to signify the first emanation of God. ...His primeval source, primordial cause, primordial principle, a metaphisical space where everything was descended from, even we.'' Beyond such a ''metaphisical explanation'' - or perhaps below it - images are shown that tenderly and humorously, yet ironically and polemically, talk of love and death, distance and closeness...appearing significantly less political than we would expect from a new play by Srbljanović.

The theatre-goers in Croatia were acquainted with the work of Alexander Ogarev a few years ago when ''A. S. Pushkin'' theatre from Moscow perfomed the play ''The Clergyman's Children'', based on the text by Mate Matišić, at Marulić days in Split and afterwards in Zagreb Youth Theatre.

At ''The Days of Macedonian Theatre'' held in 2006 in Gavella, when Skopje Drama Theatre presented its three productions, the theatre-goers in Zagreb were able to see two plays directed by Alexander Popovski: Goran Stefanovski's Proud Flesh and Molière's Don Juan. Both had shown that behind them stood a director who didn't want to modestly ''transfer the text to the stage'', but approached it as a model he wished to play with and transpose it into visually impressive images on the set. We believe that Shakespeare's classic is a play that invokes precisely that kind of directorial approach, because the play's vividness is unquestionable and its imaginative interpreters are imperative.