THE PILLOWMAN. Director Ninoslav Đorđević

Katurian – Ninoslav Đorđević 
Michal - Srđan Aleksić 
Tupolski - Saša Torlaković 
Ariel - Branislav Jerković  
Laundress - Milijana Makević 
Girl - Anja Tatalović   

Sombor National Theatre is one of the most renowned theatres in Serbia. The combination of classical literature with new and avant-garde drama has allowed the theatre to engage the hearts of the public, to achieve greater heights and European acknowledgement. Over the last two decades Sombor National Theatre has been one of the most mobile theatres in the country and winner of many international awards.

The performance is like a windstorm: the audience is captured from the very beginning and sunk into the thick of the events. The action takes place in a police station. The wide strip of a blood is sweeping along the white tile through the entire stage. The laundress is picking in the white sheets and starts wiping the pool of blood with the white floorcloth. A naked man with the bag, put on his head, stands in the middle of the stage. He is ashamed, tired and exhausted.

This man is a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state. His name is Katurian. He is interrogated by two policemen. The reason of interrogation – the dreadful content of his stories and weird coincidence between the plots of these stories and multiple murdering of children, occurred in the city. His mentally handicapped brother is locked in the next cell and tortured by policemen. The writer is blackmailed by this fact and the police tries to beat a false confession out of him. Scarifying everything, Katurian tries to safe not his own life, but his stories.

Katurian’s stories have references to the fairy tales, written by the Brothers Grimm, who collected German folk, describing both the cruelty of parents towards their children (sometimes unjustified and sometimes for good) and relationships between brothers. The production is based on the contrast between the real life and invented stories, which doubt the common conventions.

The performance of Sombor National theatre is able to shock, to shake the audience. The production is filled with horrifying images; it plays with conscious in order to push the audience to their own.

Performed in Serbian with Russian subtitles