Performance

This year, the MESS will host the premiere of I Don’t Like Mondays, a production of Sarajevo's Chamber Theatre 55. This performance is based on a play by writer Zlatko Topčić, for which he was awarded at an anonymous competition, “Let's talk about borders”, organised by the Austrian PEN Centre organisation. The creative team of the production, supported by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is led by Austrian director Christian Papke, and includes other crew members from this country – the costume designer, set designer, light engineer, dramaturge, composer and others. This play gives viewers the chance to see snippets from the lives of three generations of a Serb and a Bosnian family, in three different eras: today, at the beginning of the First World War, and during the most recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By being presented such reflections of history, the audience is given the opportunity to redefine its own identity, as well as to redefine the complex identity of contemporary society in Southeast Europe. After wars and crises, is forgetting our own history, leaving the region and emigrating, our only alternative? In this context, I Don’t Like Mondays can be read as a metaphor of a future that is filled chock-full with unfulfilled promises.  

Director

Christian Papke was born in Switzerland, in a German family, but grew up in Brazil. He studied theatre, literature, social and economic science and philosophy in Vienna, Paris, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Hamburg, working his way through university by directing a dance group. He also taught at the University of Vienna as a teaching assistant, defending his doctoral thesis in 2001. He began his career in direction with Dorfman’s Death and Innocence, which has been followed by musical performance, radio dramas and theatre plays. In 2002, he established a small, socially engaged organisation, through which he has organised over 30 social events in the span of a single year. Three years later, Papke started the intercultural initiative “Let’s talk about borders”, and within it, an International Drama Competition for South-Eastern Europe. This opened the doors to his further work at the Austrian Ministry of European and International Affairs. Papke is also the youngest member of the Austrian PEN Centre. 

Theatre

The CHAMBER THEATRE 55 opened its doors on 7 March 1955. The profile of the Theatre was defined by its founder Jurislav Korjenić (1914 – 1974), who set the theatre, in search of new theatre aspirations in Europe at the time, as a novelty in the region of the former Yugoslavia, and an example that was followed by several theatre around the former Yugoslavia.  

Having opened its doors to strong experimentation in theatre, and staging the works of Beckett, Jarry, Genet, Ionesco, Schwarz, Chekhov and an entire constellation of authors whose contemporary theatre poetics were the result of an “absurd feeling of life”, the Chamber Theatre 55 has had a decisive influence on a whole generation of artists who recognized its “ring-like stage” - with its insurmountable swing-gate and surrounding audience - as opposed to the frontal stage, as an opportunity to act more intimately, naturally and sincerely.

In all these years, the Chamber Theatre 55 has remained faithful to its avant-garde mission and constant quest to stage recent dramatic works by foreign authors and premiere productions of the works of local Bosnian authors.