Laugh and Tears of the Old Split

With a lot of love and no frills at all - back to the “field”!
With much love and no frills at all, diligent pen of Ivan Kovačić embalmed from oblivion Split from the early 20th century at some thousand pages. In a series of prose sketches it left us an authentic witness of the era and the people who lived in a completely different reality from ours. Not because they were poor, uneducated and technological not so developed as we are today, but because they lived reality with principle.
Performing an adaptation of this generous prose in motives at the “Judah’s field” - as Tonči Petrasov Marović called fabulous Sustipan, a cemetery where the old Split was really and metaphorically buried - by a series of naturalistic vignettes gives life to this reality as a distant echo of bygone childhood, as painful memories and melancholy beauty. Through ritual "laughing and tears" of participants whose souls were interwoven into the air, earth, stone and sea of our city, we inevitably wonder under which principles we live today?
Laugh and tears of the Old Split is an opportunity for us to pause, remember and move forward with the awareness that the principles of these men were not mere vanity, but a way of survival and nurturing of cultural and urban identity, whose devastation we have been witnessing today.
Several recent projects by director Goran Golovko have been implemented by well-known actors of the Split National Theatre and it is the same this time, while the author's team will gather a similar circle of associates who will perform the expected subtle poetics, without mere nostalgic shape and tone. However, it is not only that. Specific Mediterranean time-space continuum has obviously been very thoughtfully dealt from different angles by Golovko, setting the entire spectrum of civilization important issues. Sometimes it works with panoramic humorous detachment as in Boccaccio’s The Decameron (2006, at the 52nd Split Summer Festival) or in De Filippo’s Grand magic (Croatian National Theater Split, 2008), and more often, looking at the rich colorful reality in the history with the appearance of the characters and themes by Marko Uvodić (2005 in City Youth Theater in Split, 2007. at the 53rd Split Summer Festival), or, as now, the unjustly neglected Ivan Kovačić.