The stage “Dolni Saraj” last night was home to the audience of “Ohrid Summer” and the acting ensemble of the Comedy Theater from Skopje who performed the theater play “The Dinner Game” written by Francis Weber and directed by Irena Sterijovska.
Taking into account the growing division of society on the basis of rich and poor, socially accepted and socially inadequate, this story reveals other nuances between the extremes in which it can be seen that happiness is an abstract concept whose predictability and control sooner or later becomes myth.
According to the director Sterijovska, this is a story that comments on the high French society, which, oversaturated with everything it can afford, creates situations in which it can ridicule the weaker and less successful. Namely, the topic that is being processed is the meaning of what makes a person happy and the perspective from which it is experienced.
– The play deals with the breathlessness of the French high society and their form of entertainment. In relation to the present, as the class differences are getting bigger, especially in this country, we are dealing with the dethronement of that high class. “She can afford and give everything, moral values are already shifting in a significant way and we are commenting on how a seemingly innocent game can come back like a boomerang and how it can change people’s lives,” said Sterijovska.
It is interesting for both the actors and the director, but most of all for the audience is that “The Dinner Game” is that the audience is on the stage where the actors play.
-This is a classic vaudeville by text, but the way it is set is very interesting because we decided to deal with the reconstruction of that fourth wall-wall between the action and the audience. Since the action takes place in a three-room apartment, we decided to put the apartment on stage and the audience on the outer walls so as to get a voyeuristic impression of the audience that in some way works in relation to what is a period of research for me, and that is positioning in the physical sense of the audience in relation to the action and to see if it can make the whole theatrical experience a greater experience, adds Sterijovska.
Valentin Kostadinovski – Tino, Atanas Atanasovski, Ilija Ilioski, Toni Denkovski, Ema Davceva, Blagica Trpkovska, Jakov Spasov and Stole Micov played in the theater play “The Dinner Game”.
Valentin Kostadinovski-Tino played the role of Pierre Broshan, one of the main protagonists to whom many things happen at home. He is a man who is looking for fools to make fun of them, but he himself becomes a fool at home.
– The play is seen from four different sides, which would mean that if you watch it four times you will have a different staff and it will be experienced differently. This is an intimate show where the audience sits two meters away from us and the acting itself is like a movie for us actors, it is more inward, introverted. Some strange hyperrealism is played and that makes it special, different and more fun than the others. The spectator should feel that he is inside the apartment, that he is attending that dinner of fools, says Kostadinovski.
The young actor Ilija Ilioski played the role of the unfulfilled writer, Samo Leblan.
– The message of the play is to be careful what we do. Every good returns with a good and vice versa. The process of preparing the play was a creative, interesting and very inspiring one, explains Ilioski.
The play “The Dinner Game” is on the repertoire of the NI Theater Comedy – Skopje, and as the actors say, is well received by the audience.
