At once witty, analytical, and precise in dissecting the absurdities of Croatian reality, Ivančić’s columns provide potent theatrical material for exploring a stage–musical form in the style of Split’s Brecht. By combining social and theatrical engagement, director Kokan Mladenović creates a play that is equally inventive in theater, socially reflective, and humorous.
Robi K, Viktor Ivančić’s creation and the most famous nine-year-old in our region, tries to understand the world and himself within it, in circumstances that are utterly incomprehensible even to mature and formed adults—let alone to someone just stepping into life.
His age makes him an ideal litmus test for reading all the deviations of society. And society is: the school (a system directly linked to the state apparatus, steering new generations where the state wants them to go); the family (on whose head the system has collapsed, and which, in its dysfunctional functionality, does everything to make Robi realize he lives in an incomprehensible time); Dida from Šolta, who lives by a different value system inherited from another era, offering Robi an alternative path toward the past—but not toward the future.
Society is also the street, Robi’s crew—equally confused by the world they must step into, and handicapped by the absurdity that nothing is what it is, nor as it presents itself. Society is also love—not the grand discovery of early puberty, but something with its own rules, ethnic, social, and other principles that make it far more complicated than it should be.
Robi K, then, lives his anxious childhood in a constant knot of feeling guilty for something—a knot that follows him into his dreams. There it multiplies to unimaginable proportions, before returning to reality—more absurd than Monty Python sketches.
Robi will do everything to prove he is loyal, worthy, and a “real boy in the right place.” But in trying, he falls from one absurd situation into another, exposing the meaninglessness, absurdity, and hypocrisy that shape his world. Let us be his companions on that journey—we, the aged nine-year-olds who once imagined the world as better and fairer than the one we are forced to live in now.
Kokan Mladenović, director