Franz Kafka In a Convict Colony

Saturday, 19.09.2020. 20:00. h

FORT FORNO THEATER & VIROVITICA THEATER & AUK OSIJEK
Director: Vjera Vidov
Starring: Nenad Pavlović, Silvijo Švast, Mihael Elijaš and Davor Tarbuk
Art collaborator: Nenad Pavlović
Dramatization and playwrights: Filip Jurjević and Nina Peručić
Set designer, puppet, poster and program designer: Krešimir Tomac
Costume designer: Sanda Štrković
Author of video projections and light designer: Leo Vukelić
Stage movement: Alen Celic
Music selection: author team
Producer: Jasminka Mesarić

Franz Kafka is a writer who is often classified as absurd, but he is much more than that, and this is best seen in the short story "In the Convict Colony". Kafka is a writer completely built, his own world so precise that our "real" world in which we live cannot but be reflected in it as in a mirror. In his writing, he points out the shortcomings, absurdities, dilemmas, degenerations and degradations in the real world, without losing the reins of the world of his own story, which are completely plastic. He is a writer in whom almost everything can be read as a symbol, but whose writing is not symbolic in the manner of a medieval allegorical mode of narration. It is consistent and durable and multi-layered. The story "In the Convict Colony" talks about two systems, the old and the new, from the eyes of a foreigner, a researcher, unencumbered by the context in which he comes, and to which the mentioned systems are related. The staging of this story opens up space for questioning and pronouncing the change of system. Namely, the old is not condemned as worse, just as the new is not simply portrayed as better - it opens up a space of doubt and potential understanding of the reasons “why” of both systems. People are also questioned, their lack of understanding of given systems and their actions or determination by context, which is made possible by a unique position
a researcher who comes from outside into the world of the story and by placing all the other characters opposite him. However, then his role is questioned, ie to what extent his conditionally liberal position is again determined by the context of the foreigner compared to people who were forced to live in the old system just as they are now forced to live in the new one. Of all Kafka's stories, this one most effectively questions society and the social order and the individual within it, not as in the Transfiguration,