The Loser

BY THE DIRECTOR

After several hours of excruciating work, I give myself a minute’s pause, I stop for a second, in silence, and imagine that I am on stage, and everything makes sense again.

We start learning to play a musical instrument at the age of four or five. We practice playing scales and arpeggios on a daily basis, we break down chords, practice violent jumps, practice playing with our right hand separately from the left, then they add pedals, first one and then the other, we take down three voice dictations, we improvise four voice fugues with counterpoint, learn how to resolve harmony problems with figured bass, practice for hours on end, day in day out, have no free time after school. We go to two schools, in fact.

We practice and prepare for competitions, get up at 6 o’clock every morning to practice, we win awards, we are happy, we go home earlier in order to practice some more, all our friends are also musicians, we talk about music practice techniques, we try to fit in so we practice a little less, we miss competition deadlines because we did not practice enough, we punish ourselves for not giving it our all, we suddenly go back to practising with no regard for the adaptation process, our tendons become sore so we apply horse balm but cannot practice, we attend open classes at the school, we listen to schoolmates who are better than us, we don’t think they are any better really and that it is all terribly unfair that they are up on the stage and we are down below in the auditorium, we get back into shape, we practice again, apply to competitions, we monitor candidate lists, we think only three people out of a total of two hundred could turn out to be decent competition, we practice till we drop, we buy fancy clothes for the competition, we play before an audience, we conquer the world slowly, we win the second prize, we’re not good enough after all, we realise that we will never be good enough and we want to be first, it’s either us or no one else, we realise that being first is not closely related to the effort we are putting in, we meet the first one and we can’t believe how it all came about and yet we admit to ourselves that they are better than we are, we hit the stage again, our tears wet the piano keys, we can’t face the stage any more, we shut ourselves in the bathroom, our left hand is cramping, we’re paralysed with fear, we hate all those who can face an audience without batting an eyelid, we envy all those who’ve put in more hours of practice than we have and who may turn in a better performance at the concert, we envy all those who are better than we are, we refuse to believe someone could be better than us, that there is someone who is better than our own self, me, me, me, me and the “me” becomes more important than the music itself, we do not like the person we’re becoming, we blame it on the music, we try to imagine our life without music, but that’s not possible, we try to imagine our future in music but that too is impossible, we imagine ourselves conquering the world and cannot say goodbye to the freedom we feel on stage, we ask music if it has chosen us of all people and it tells us early on that it did not make that choice, but we fight on because we do not know how to give in, we do not know what will come to pass after the concert, the last of all concerts and why we are there at all, how did we manage to get that far if we were supposed to have given up long ago, if we are nothing but a hindrance to music, we cease playing and it doesn’t hurt any more, we lose because there is no justice on Earth and we’ve stopped fighting anyway.

And why do we do it?  The years of breaking down chords are a thing of the past. For decades we dedicated ourselves to music and to breaking down chords, other people’s success paralyses us so we become unable to fight, other people’s success encourages us, other people’s success is no more than a point of interest and we see it as a piece of good news, in case this is our friend we are talking about, but it doesn’t weigh heavily on us, and yet we invest years of our lives for just one moment of eternity on stage, as we listen to our own heartbeat and the blood coursing through our body, fully aware of our own transience as we walk onto the stage and reach out for that one single moment of eternity.

THE DIRECTOR

NATAŠA RADULOVIĆ

Graduated and obtained her MA in theatre and radio direction from the Faculty of Dramatic Art in Belgrade, under the mentorship of Professor Egon Savin. Before studying theatre, Radulović attended the Mokranjac secondary music school where she studied the violin in the vocal-instrumental section of the strings department.

Her professional work began through cooperation with the Kolyada Theatre from Yekaterinburg and the international Kolyada-Plays theatre festival in 2015. Her direction of the A Tale About the Dead Tsarina for her third-year theatre direction exam was extremely well received so her cooperation with the Kolyada Theatre continued, accompanied by guest performances of a number of her productions around Russia. She was the initiator and artistic director of the First Belgrade Festival of Modern Russian Drama in Belgrade (April 2016).

Her graduation production of Invisible Children and her master’s production of Keys to Lerah both opened at the Belgrade Drama Theatre. Radulović has directed productions at the National Theatre in Sombor, at the Šabac Theatre, the Bora Stanković Theatre in Vranje, the Vuk Theatre, City Theatre Čačak, a production of Little Black Dress for the House of Jevrem Grujić museum, but also for a number of alternative venues (Look Back in Anger, A Tale About the Dead Tsarina). Her productions have been included in the repertoire of the Toša Jovanović National Theatre in Zrenjanin (A Tale About the Dead Tsarina) and the production of Unwritten Letters had regular guest performances on the stage of the National Theatre in Belgrade. She has worked closely with world renowned authors such as Nikolay Kolyada, Kseniya Dragunskaya, Masha Kontorovich. Her productions have been included in some of the great theatre festivals both in Serbia and abroad, including the Sterijino Pozorje theatre festival (Wolf Hunt, Šabac Theatre) and the Kolyada-Plays festival (A Tale About the Dead Tsarina, Keys to Lerah).

In December 2022, together with her refugee colleagues from Russia, she organised a festival of anti-war drama Echo of Lubimovka as one of a dozen outposts of this important European festival. For the festival she directed a rehearsed reading of Kebab by Pavel Pryashko.  Radulović has translated several plays from Russian and in 2020 she became a full-time student at the Russian language department of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. As co-editor, she has published a number of articles in the Bulletin of the BITEF theatre festival (2011-2020) and in 2018 she appeared on the BIZLife’s 30 Under 30 list. Her productions have had guest performances at Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Gelendzhik, Hannover, Paris… This is her first time to direct a production at Yugoslav Drama Theatre.

REVIEWS

In order to broach the topic of art, they decided to stage the most important novel of 20^th century about the problems of art and artist. (…) This is a production by young artists with high ambitions and great artistic drive. Vreme, 8^th June 2023

Vinčić’s portrayal of Glenn Gould is more than clear-cut, with arguments for top notch success, albeit a tad excessively so, leaving not a shred of secret for the spectator to discover. Oljačić breathes life into full bloodied Noah, well aware of his own limitations while Joakim Tasić provides enough material about Wertheimer to illustrate an entire psychotherapy session. All three actors, together with Lenka Petrović, manage to achieve what many would have thought was “mission impossible”, an act of bringing together that which could never be joined together, helping Nataša Radulović, against all odds, to create a production that reaches peaks of emotion while leaving the spectators both puzzled and wonderstruck. Which is what theatre is all about, really.

Večernje Novosti, 11^th June 2023