Theatre
Igra oko smrti
Not translated into English
Marijan Matković · 1955
Synopsis
Ten plays around the same subject: the war that is coming, the one being fought, the one people come back from. A schoolboy whom his father does not understand, a dignitary who dies in his bed, a nameless woman, two people shut in a room in Zagreb in the autumn of 1941 while the city falls apart outside.
Context
The cycle appeared in 1955 in Zagreb, four hundred and thirty-five pages long, and brings together ten texts: two dramas and eight one-act plays, whose common subject is existence threatened by death, in peace as in war. The plays had been written between 1934 and 1947, some at the very moment of the events they depict, and all were completed in 1954; during the war he had lost the manuscripts of four dramas and of an unfinished novel. The one that bears the name of the flower of the dead, and makes it a resistance fighter's password, is set in Zagreb in 1941: he was writing it that year, about that year. The first of the group, performed as early as 1935 on the main stage in Zagreb, had revealed an author of twenty. The drama that closes the cycle became in 1957 the first Croatian play adapted for television.
Who it is for
Ten plays that can be read separately, with no difficulty of language. No French edition exists. It is better to know what Zagreb was between 1941 and 1945.
Prizes and reception
The cycle that made its author one of the Croatian dramatists of his century, and several of whose plays were taken up by Yugoslav television.
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