Premiered at the Split Summer Festival in 2010, the play Laughter and Tears of the Old Split has become one of the most beloved theatrical performances in recent years. It exudes the spirit of bygone times while addressing universal, civilizationally significant questions. The heroes of intimate chronicles depicting everyday life in Split return to the stage at Sustipan this year.

With great affection and without embellishment, Ivan Kovačić's diligent pen rescued Split from the oblivion of the early 20th century, spanning thousands of pages. Through a series of prose sketches, he gave us an authentic testimony of a time and people living in a vastly different reality. Not because they were poor, uneducated, or technologically less advanced than we are today, but because they lived by principles. The play Tears and Laughter of the Old Split offers an opportunity to pause, remember, and move forward with the awareness that the principles of those people were not mere emptiness but a way of survival and nurturing a cultural and urban identity, which we now witness crumbling.