Cinco and Marinko or Taken by the Beautiful Death

It is hard to judge whether is more useless to present to the Croatian theater lovers actors Danko Ljuština and Vedran Mlikota or director and composer Mate Matišić. Cinco and Marinko is not an unknown play either. It was performed for the frst time in “Kerempuh” Satiric Theater in Zagreb in 1992, and rewarded as the best drama script at The Days of Satire. If we tried to retell the story it would go something like this: “Two Croats, political immigrants and foreign workers, share a rented room in Germany. Political immigrant has not been communicating with his wife for two decades afraid of the secret police. His roommate decides to realize a plan where he proclaims himself
dead in order for his wife to obtain German pension which, later, he would spend alive. He buys a cofn and decides to travel home in it. Of course, all sorts of black humor ups and downs occur during his journey and in his homeland.” There is no point in retelling these ups and downs. Because, as Zvonimir Mrkonjić said “Matišić’s characters are actually heroes of nowhere: between the homeland where they live in spirit and only rarely in body and abroad where they live only in body but never actually reach it in spirit.” That nowhere or waste land is a space typical for Matišić’s grotesque while Vedran Mlikota and Danko Ljuština are the best and the most inspiring interpreters.