A Festival Marked by Classical Drama

Between the 20th and 29th of September, Zagreb will be host to plays from several countries during the Sixth World Theater Festival. The Festival will kick off in a somewhat unorthodox way. Instead of a theater performance, the opening act will be a concert by the well known hip-hop group TBF from Split.

This year's program for the sixth consecutive World Theater Festival will be marked by classical works of drama literature. Between the 20th and 29th of September, the stages of Zagreb's Croatian National Theater, the Youth Theater, the Gavella Drama Theater and the Puppet Theater will host six plays from Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary and Romania. The festival will kick off on the 19th of September with a concert by the well known hip-hop group TBF from Split. The careers of the group’s members got off the ground after they appeared on the theater stage as the Odron amateur dramatic group and presented their play “Baš Beton i stupovi društva” (Baš Concrete and Pillars of Society) to an audience during the 45th Split Summer Festival.

The first play in the program of the Sixth World Theater Festival will be Ivanov, directed by Dimiter Gotscheff, a two-time winner of the director of the year award in the selection of the magazine Theater Heute, and performed by the Berlin Theater Voklsbuehne am Rosa-Lexemburg-Platz. The audiences will also see Hamlet, directed by Thomas Ostermeier which will have premiered at the Berlin Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platza a week before the opening of the Zagreb festival. The famous Jan Fabre will be revisiting Zagreb with his play “Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day”, coproduced by the World Theater Festival and Zagreb's Youth Theater. One of the most interesting guest appearances will be by a Dutch troupe without a director, The STAN (Stop Thinking About Names), who will perform their “2 Antigone” nominated for the Premio Europa 2009 award for New Theater Reality.