Maxim Gorky

THE LOWER DEPTHS

Premiere on the 3 March 2007, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Main stage Ljuba Tadić.

Dramaturge

Mikhail Ivanov Kostilyov

ABOUT PERFORMANCE

ŽELJKA UDOVIČIĆ, dramaturge: ‘For the very reason of having failed to find hope of a better future through  deus ex machina means. He himself wittily comments on such a relationship with social circumstances and the times he found himself in by taking on the pen name of GORKY, which really means exactly that, gorki, bitter. Relentlessly justifying the choice of his own pen name, he attempts, and successfully so, at being genuinely bitter in dissecting whatever had lead us to this play – the bitterness of existence more so than anything’.

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ABOUT AUTHOR

Maxim Gorky (1868 – 1936) Russian novelist, dramatist and short-story writer. He was born into poverty, self-educated, and his works deal with the plight of the poor and society’s outcasts in Czarist Russia. His best-known works are The Mother (1906-1907), a story of awakening political consciousness, the autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1913), Among People (1915) and My Universities (1923), and his great play The Lower Depths (1902). His works were later used as templates by many practitioners of socialist realism, a doctrine he helped formulate in the 1930s. The best of his former colleagues were killed by the Soviet regime in the 1930s.

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ABOUT DIRECTOR

Paolo Magelli was born in Prato, in the centre of Tuscany. His development as an artist was influenced by his teacher Giorgio Strehler, whom he assisted. In the beginning of the seventies, together with Roberto Begnini, Pamela Viloresi, Marciello Bartoli he founded "Teatro studio del Teatro Metastasio", in which they studied cultures of regions they were less familiar with. He directed in almost all regions of former Yugoslavia, as well as in Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and South America. He lives between Dresden and Zagreb, in which he settled at the end of 1985.

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REVIEWS OF THE LOWER DEPTHS

A Timeless Portrait of Misery And Despair
Director Paolo Magelli and dramaturge Zeljka Udovicic reduced the play The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky to the very essence of its characters. The production, with no intervals, lasts for less than two hours, which is a radical reduction of the original, but not to its detriment. On the contrary, in splendid performances of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre ensemble, in which all the actors carried the weight of the show on equal terms, the futility and loser nature of struggling ‘in lower depths’ reached its expression to the full… Magelli set the characters in the play between two poles, where exaltation counterpoints hopelessness and letting go. Through such an alteration, a series of some very interesting director’s solutions were offered that made the flow of action extremely vibrant: with no redundant explanations and events, all the characters were bared to their very core, veiled, in turn, by a mist of being inescapably (pre)destined by time and place… A choice cast in which it is the five female characters who set the action in motion. Women, one could say, know what they want out of life, whilst men mostly surrender to it, drowning their hopes in alcohol.

Svetlana Hribar, Novi list, Rijeka

BITTER ALL THE WAY TO THE LOWER DEPTHS

Paolo Magelli turned the play ‘The Lower Depths’ into a crime scene chronicle for all of us, and so the central setting of the play – a derelict hotel for those in the lower depths of life – does not inspire perfunctory polite compassion for the poor, but rather, in Magelli version, creates an atmosphere of an existential drama every one of us should fear. Gorky – Magelli heroes are not some social scum whom we pity and look the other way; these are people who had once had education, money and dignity and then– as it is often the case nowadays – lost it all. Their sole problem is the one we often see in dull statistics of employment offices – they rushed to a life that mercilessly kept cutting them no slack at all… That’s why Bogdan Diklic is excellent, as he doesn’t play a former actor but an actor out of work, that’s why Nebojsa Glogovac is phenomenal as Vaska Pepel, because he knows he’s a street thug, true, but he also knows there is no honesty on the other side, that’s why Voja Brajovic could be one of us as he quotes the classics, that’s why Tamara Vuckovic, Nada Sargin, Dijana Marojevic, Sonja Kolacaric and Tanja Pjevac are more than convincing, playing women who just want slightly more out of life…

Bojan Munjin, Feral Tribune, Split

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