The play "Tonight, we improvise" is held under the auspices of the general partner of the 49th MESS Festival BH Telecom    

Director

A controversial figure to some, an intellectual to others, and a cosmopolitan to the rest, Paolo Magelli is still universally accepted as one of the most intriguing directors in Europe today.

He was born in Prato, in the heart of Tuscany, and is very proud of his roots. He studied direction in Florence, and also, by mistake, also studied Slavic languages and literature. In the late 1960s, he founded the Teatro Studio at the Metastasio Theatre in Prato. Some of the members of Teatro Studio were Roberto Benigni, Pamela Viloresi, Marcello Bartoli and many other renowned actors of today. For years, he also staged outstanding plays in Belgrade and Zagreb, but could not make a living of it, and so insured himself financially by directing productions in Germany, Switzerland, France, Slovenia, Belgium, Hungary, Izrael, Palestine and Mexico. His directions of Danton’s Death, Phoenician Women, Nation, Electra, Le Grande Magia, Vjera, ufanje i ljubav (Faith, Hope and Love), Ludi dani (Crazy Days), The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya,  A Month in the Country, Crime on Goat Island, Birds etc. are today considered anthological.

Performance

The production “Tonight, We Improvise” is the first time that Italian drama has been honoured with the direction of a great European director, Paolo Magelli. An aesthete, an analyst of our contemporary reality, but above all, a great connoisseur of human impulses and weaknesses, Magelli has decided to confront one of the most complex pieces of Italian theatre of the first half of the 20^th century, Luigi Pirandello’s “Tonight, We Improvise”. This masterpiece will give Magelli the opportunity to speak out not only about art and the necessity to consciously resist all the triviality and abhorrence of the world, but also, with a hint of automatic irony, to establish the identity of the director as a tyranin, working with an ensemble that has escaped far beyond his control.

In this drama, “real acting identities” and “fictitious identities of the characters being played” intertwine. In staging the play, Pirandello placed the action in the box, the orchestra section, the space in front of and behind the curtains i.e. in those parts of the theatre that are not the usual venue of the action of a play – a novelty that would only be used systematically in later postmodern theatre. The play itself has two main plotlines. In the first, we follow events happening in the theatre, audience and on stage, where the actors, who were supposed to improvise a show that evening, complain. The second plot is a drama fully acted out, set in a little conservative town in Sicily, which follows the lives of the La Croce family.

Theatre

The Ivan pl. Zajc Croatian National Theatre of Rijeka boasts a long and prolific history. In 1885, the Helmer- Fellner building in Rijeka was bequeathed to citizens of the city under the name Teatro Comunale. The first plays produced at Theatre were Guiseppe Verdi's Aida and Amilcar Ponchielli's La Gioconda. In 1913, the Theatre is renamed the Teatro Comunale Guiseppe Verdi, and has, since its inception, and with the exception of the years of World War I, staged and hosted both opera and dramatic performances. Between 1913 and 1943, this Rijeka theatre was impacted by tumultuous political events and changes. This was the time of the “teatro stagione”, a time when guest opera performances were most popular, with fewer dramatic texts on stage, while there had never been a performance in Croatian at the Theatre as such. But all that changed in 1945, when the future Department of Croatian Drama was established with a merger between the “Nikola Car” and “Otokar Keršovani” theatre groups. Furthermore, Italian theatre company „Filodrammatica fiumana“ became the basis for the Theatre's Dramma Italiano / Italian Drama Department, while the musicians of the Rijeka Symphony Orchestra became the first orchestra of the Theatre's Department of Symphonic Opera and Ballet. Thus, with the continuous and undying effort of all the members of the artistic department, technicians and administrative workers, a full permanent national theatre in Rijeka was in the making, based on the model of other larger cities in Croatia with already developed theatre circles, which, alongside a permanent national theatre operating in Zagreb, also made room for other city theatres in the first half of the 20th century (in Split, Osijek, Varaždin, Karlovac and other cities). Ever since then, the Ivan pl. Zajc Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka has taken an active role on Croatia's theatre scene.