“HUDDERSFIELD” By Ugljesha Shajtinac Directed by: Rene Medvedshek

Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM), Croatia Uglješa Šajtinac (Zrenjanin, 1971) is one of the most important contemporary Serbian playwrights and winner of a number of awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature and the Jovan Sterija Popović Award 2005 for his play Huddersfield, which gained cult status in its ten-year-long life on the stage of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, and was turned into a homonymous, multiply-awarded film. Huddersfield is a dark, funny and moving story about a generation of thirty-year-olds at the beginning of a new millenium, a generation which finds it hard to put the consequences of the war behind them, and sees no sing of a better future. The return of one of one of the characters from West Yorkshire to Zrenjanin (or Karlovac in Croatian adaptation) shows that this story could take place in every town of every transitional South European country who has embraced the so-called capitalism believing it is the beginning of heaven on earth, but met with wars, tycoons, crime, unemployment and stomach cramps. Thousands of young people are leaving those countries (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and many others), refusing to look behind, and those who stay live in constant disappointment and frustration. „You see, Huddersfield sounds sunny to me“, says one of the protagonists near the end of the play, and that simple statement reflects the brutal but incredibly porous world of this exceptional drama. The world which conveys openly and without reserve all the hardship of decisions one has never made, and the burning need not to give up. Huddersfield sets a dark, funny and very touching story about a generation in their thirties that at the end of the millennium finds it hard to leave behind the consequences of war and is unable to see any prospect for a better future. In such circumstances and at a time of a bargain sale of moral and material values, even the rainy Yorkshire suburb seems a promised land. Coming back from the promised land opens up a number of unanswered questions and traumas that many felt were long forgotten.   Dramaturg, addaptation: Tomislav Zajec Stage designer: Tanja Lacko Costume designer: Doris Kristić   Cast: Rac-Dado Ćosić Ivan- Mateo Videk Igor-Adrian Pezdirc Duks-Robert Budak Father- Damir Šaban Milica-Tina Orlandini Marko Ivanović- Filip Nola