Performance

L’Envolée is a family drama, told from a twisted perspective, which is the direct result of the moral inconsistencies of our time. An every day family get-together, becomes, almost in Woodville fashion, a tragicomic drama that warps the roles of the father, the mother, the brother, the sister, the daughter, the son…

Each one of the characters succumbs to a prohibited adventure, discovering, in the endm the sordid secrets of a seemingly idyllic family. Through the degenerate ties of one family, L’Envolée thematises the deformity of the world, and uses cultural conflict to question the spirit of the neoliberalist civilisation.

Each one of the characters succumbs to a prohibited adventure, discovering, in the end, the sordid secrets of the seemingly idyllic family.Through the degenerate ties of one family, L’Envolée thematises the The story of the play takes place in one day, during which three generations of characters experience something of an upward flight. The play's set designer, Rudy Sabounghi, sets the stage as a calamitous landscape that actually resembles a child’s playpen –a kind of untidiness, purposely created so that one can slide, walk, run and fall. The play is based on a text by Gilles Granouillet (1963), one of the most interesting authors of the middle generation, and also the most theatrically inspirational. The starting point of all his plays is the family, albeit sometimes a traumatised family. His style is characterised by directness, a speed with which lines follow each other, strength and metaphore - less expressed through formal innovations and more through a brutal liveliness. For this quality he is often compared to Buñuel, and his texts to Almodovar's grotesque fantasies full of unrestreined humor.

Director

Director Jean-Claude Berutti was a student of the renowned Strasbourg National Theatre acting school, and made his first steps in direction alongside the likes of Jean-Pierre Vincent and Patrice Chereau. Very early on in his career, his interest as a director started to develop equally in the field of opera and theatre drama. He has directed plays at the TNS, Comedie Francaise, Belgian National Theatre, Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels, and has also directed in famous operas such as La Monnaie (in Brussels), Lyon, Nancy and others. In 1997 he became the manager of the Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang, and in 2002, he joined François Rancillac in running the renowned theatre La Comédie de Saint-Etienne. He has directed plays by Goldoni, De Gard, Chekhov, Ostrovsky, Moliere, Handke, Tabori, Srbljanović, Beaumarcheais, Marivaux etc. He is also the President of the European Theatre Convention (ETC), which was established in 1988 and which brings together 41 theatres from 25 countries across Europe, with the aim of supporting and promoting contemporary dramatic writing and joint projects between European theatres. Today, the ETC deals with a broad range of activities, all of which are aimed at instigating contemporary theatre expression and theatric mobility. This cooperation between the Zagreb Youth Theatre, La Comédie de Saint-Étienne and Théâtre de la Place-Liége began as an experiment, which was partly the decision of Jean-Claude Berutti, who wanted to stage the same piece, a drama by contemporary playwright Gilles Granouillet, in different cultures. 

Theatre

Though the Zagreb Youth Theatre has, in nearly sixty years of its existence, undergone diverse artistic and organisational changes, and changed its name and location, it has always remained a theatrical focal point that brought together younger generations, as well as audiences inclined to more daring explorations on stage, to a theatre that is ready to overcome set boundaries. Plays such as The Jungle Book, Magic and Loss, Odysseus and Son, Flags, Three Sisters, Hamper, Kam’s Death Writ and others have marked the past decades at the Theatre, which has been host to directors such as Vito Taufer, Janusz Kic, Paolo Magelli, Eduard Miller, Branko Brezovac etc. Today, the Zagreb Youth Theatre takes up the original approach of the author in all of its projects, at all levels of their realisation, and affords itself the opportunity to explore, shape and express the ideas at work in our actual social, civil and political reality. During the past season, the Zagreb Youth Theatre received 11 awards at national and international theatre festivals. In 2006, it launched the cycle “European Theatre”, which presented the most interesting plays by European and world theatres, such as those by the Metastasio Theatre from Prath, the Space Production Theatre from Sarajevo, the Slovenian National Theatre from Nova Gorica, and the Seinendan Theatre of Tokyo. In the same year, the Theatre also hosted the Festival of World Theatre.