William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
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.
The story, woven out of three basic threads: the courtly plot (where the leading roles, beside Theseus and Hippolyta, are played by two pairs of lovers), the world of ''rude mechanicals'' (with their performance of a crude play of the tragic love between Pyramus and Thisbe) and the fairy world (with Oberon, Titania, Puck and the other fairies and elves), will involve a big part of our theatre's ensemble, first and foremost asking our actors to ''play'' and let themselves be drawn into an unrestrained dialogue with Shakespeare's unique characters.
Wittily coloured vitality of ''the mechanicals'', ethereal othersidedness of the fairy world and the classicism of the Athens scenes seem an ideal proving ground for the eclecticism of Alexander Popovski, who has so far, beside in Macedonia, worked on numerous European stages and this is not the first time he's directing in Zagreb (Dejan Dukovski's Cabaret Balkan in Kerempuh Satirical Theatre a few years ago). ... the miraculous A Midsummer Night's Dream should remind us of ''...what fools these mortals be!''
