INTENSIVE
AND IMPRESSIVE STRUCTURE
The scenes are quick and short, the dialogues are fiery and concise,
shifts take place in an extraordinary succession of sequences, and from all that Magelli
managed to build an impressive structure that hits the spectators with its
intensity,shifting of situations and strange amalgamation of events, glued on each other
with masterly juxtaposition of mise-en-scene, as well as with dynamic and quick, maddened
movements round the scene. Such a game doesn’t allow anyone to flash with his own
individual parade, but one would very much notice, if someone has fallen short.
The acting is precise and quick, the changing of moods and situations is abrupt,
and the unity of the game is the greatest reason why the play is followed without wincing
for almost two hours.
Dalibor Foretć, The Novi list, 21.12.1998
MIRROR FOR RECOGNITION
With short and direct sentences that don’t wish to hide anything
and with fragments of dramatic happenings Šovagović offers the audience a view of a
personal and historical reality of the time that has changed us, and the director of the
play Paolo Magelli boldly lines on the stage the borders of the theatre that is no longer
satisfied with the flights into illusions of an imaginary spectacle.......
‘Cigla’ (‘Grand’) places a mirror for recognition in front of the audience,
not offering any answers, but asking questions, so that we could take a stand towards what
is happening to us.
Close to film dramaturgy, Šovagović’s play inclines with its structure towards
a broken expression in concentrated sequences, whose rhythm with its speed suggests the
rhythm of our chaotic everyday life. It depicts the travelling of seven characters,
accidental losers and alienated protagonists of their own fate during war years, not
trying to incline towards a stereotype point of view and rhetorical interpretations of
reality.
Dubravka Vrgoč, The Vjesnik, 07.12.98
DIRTY POLITICAL STREAM
Filip Šovagović’s ‘Cigla’(‘Grand) possesses a presumption
of dramatic force in its persistent accumulation of motifs, which connect the individual
with the general. All Šovagović’s heroes have a solid base for duration similar to
fate in the world that is explicitly morbid and evil. They are at the same time funny and
tragic, enfeebled and unrealized in life circumstances whose victims they are, and that is
not some entangled story, but a succession of causality leading to unhapiness or fatal
emptiness.
Anatolij Kudrjavcev, The Slobodna Dalmacija, 07.12. 98
THE OPEN GROTESQUE
‘Cigla’( ‘Grand’) is not only a social and naturalistic play
filled with misery and war, but also the open grotesque, becoming towards the very end of
the performance also a tragedy of one unhappy and unbalanced family. Šovagović’s text
is sincere and not at all superficial, and we can freely say that it is one of the best
plays written on that subject in Croatia. Director Magelli knew how to use that
opportunity, so that during two hours the audience was literally rooted to their seats.
Slaven Relja, The Jutarnji list, 08.12
|
 
 
Jurica Pavičić
HAI-HO,
HAI-HO, HAI-HO.......
If
‘Cigla’(Grand) by Filip Šovagović was to be defined with only one sentence, perhaps
the best description would be that ‘Cigla’ is a ‘Snow-White and seven dwarfs’
adapted for stage by Beckett.
There is, however, a great difference between Disney’s seven miners with a beauty
under the same roof and the beauty in the same Croatian one-room apartment. Disney's
setting is the setting of work: what we remember from the story of seven dwarfs is the
march hai-ho and the dwarfs who robustly come back from work, armed with hoes, shovels and
lamps. Šovagović’s world is the world in which there is no work, meaning no bread.
Beds dominate the scenes in ‘Cigla’: beds as a dramatic sign of an overcrowded
residential unit, but also a sign of lying around , to what the characters are forced.
It is not accidental that Raymond Carver, the writer who for the most part influenced
the Croatian culture of the nineties, built his own fiction round the motif of fear of
unemployment. Work for Carver is not dignified it is a frentic clutching to the rock.
Unemployment for Carver is not a social fact, but a metaphysical horror:
unemployed are those who can not pay their bills, mortgage on their house and who can
not have their refrigerator repaired. ‘I actually lived among such people, the people
who feared what would happen if their refrigerator broke down’ wrote the great
short-story writer.
‘Cigla’ speaks about the people who have already experienced what Carver’s
characters are afraid of. Exactly because of that, ‘Cigla’ is no longer only a social
and naturalistic play, but also a text soaked with what comes after: the grotesque and the
theatre of the absurd.
The people from ‘Cigla’ can’t make anything real, everything happens to
them without their influence. Everything includes both love and war. That surely is
not a comfortable presumption for a dramatic text, but it is a primordial feeling and the
state of things for a great majority of Croatian people, who don’t believe that the fate
really is in their hands.
Exactly because of that, ‘Cigla’ is a generational play. It speaks bluntly, even
crudely about what is sometimes called the war generation. It is the generation born
between 1962 and 1972, who in no way took part or induced the avalanche of terror that was
to bury Croatia in the nineties. When the crap finally did happen, they were, on the other
hand, called to clean it up, which they did. As a sign of gratitude they got a complete
exclusion from public life. Their mentality was anathematized, their system of values
calumniated, and they were offered employment agencies, emigration or bending down before
the authority. Those from ’41 have found theirs. Those from ’68 theirs. Those from
’71 theirs. However, this war generation has lost everything; they were only left with
the feeling of moral superiority, which like old postcards fades and the internal
solidarity that is being undermined by money and time. And vegetating: Cigla’s
vegetating.
‘Cigla’ is because of that somehow also a social allegory. The war will happen to
the main character in the same way as it happened to the hero of ' A short trip’ by
Ratko Cvetnić. It came into his life without question and went out without a greeting.
Cigla will, in the end, when everything is over, in his home and among his brothers be
more lonely than ever before. |
