Mladen Lero was the enchanting Adrian Mole in the play "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole", which was performed by the "Boško Buha" Theatre on the second night of the Novi Sad Theater Festival. The play is directed by Tanja Mandić Rigonat.
This young actor is a graduate of the Belgrade Academy of Arts, from the class of professors Milan Nešković and Tihomir Stanić (Stanić was later replaced by Nikola Rakočević). The audience noticed him not only in the theatre, but also in the series "Unclean Blood: Sin of the Ancestors" and "My Father's Murderers".
After they performed the play, the entire team was occupied by the children of the Youth Theatre Drama Studio, who were firing up a bunch of different questions. The most intriguing ones were about the kiss seen on stage: what was it like, was it difficult, expected or unexpected, how much exercise... Among the questions were: how do you learn the text, are actors sad when they get a role they don't like, is the job of an actor difficult, what advice would you give to future actors, what do they do behind the scenes during the play, do they joke or closely follow the performance... It seemed that the enjoyment of asking questions and giving answers, which was accompanied by bursts of laughter, was mutual.
After the children, it was time to ask some other questions... What kind of diaries are written today - are they secret or public, how are cultural differences in growing up situations understood today, which word should be looked up again in the dictionary, because it has disappeared from our life and behavior and in the end, what does the future bring for young people?
Are diaries written today, secret or public on social networks? What are they for?
It's a good habit to keep a journal. That way we can have some retrospective of the things we went through. Because when we go through certain things, at some point they seem huge, insurmountable and unsolvable. While they are happening, we think we will reconsider them, but then we forget about it because new experiences come along. That's why journaling is a pretty good thing for human development. I've never been regular at it, it takes a bit of discipline. Sometimes it seemed to me that it was very important to write it, and then I got into some moods in which I rejected the idea of writing a diary, because it seemed less important to me. I was less willing, I had no motivation - and I should have.
The play mentions the cultural divisions that once determinedly separated one group of people from others, based on what music they listened to, how they dressed, behaved, after and how they lived and what values they supported... The world today is shattered into many different segments that nothing is strong enough to be the common denominator of a group... How does it all seem to you?
I would say that it did not shatter, but that globalization made everything the same. Things no longer have anything to be measured against. There used to be less content and information, so people grouped themselves in such ways, and now it's just all culture - pop culture, if that's culture.
In fact, entertainment is often misrepresented to us as culture...
Well... Spectacle... Hedges says it well (Chris Hedges, author of the book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle") - the triumph of spectacle and the end of literacy.
Given the kind of world we live in and what we have forgotten how to do - to be cooperative, empathetic, sensitive to the other, what word should we look up in the dictionary to try and snap out of the downhill trend? You talk about one in the play...
Love is the key, but people are alienated from each other. All those things you mentioned are the result of alienation. We have the illusion that communication is available to everyone, in all parts of the world and that it connects people to each other, and it seems to me that this has resulted in alienation and that this assumption of closeness we can create through social networks or the Internet has not led to better communication between people, but exclusively did the opposite.
What is the situation in Belgrade with performances for teenagers? Here, in Novi Sad, there are almost none. Why doesn't anyone think about those generations?
I think the scene for young people, as we usually call it here, and I have a little experience with such plays, as I play "The Boy with the Suitcase" in "Radović", where we are now doing "The Shining Star on the Ceiling"; I think the theatre policy makers overlook that scene. They mostly focus on the plays they can sell best and then the population you are talking about is not interesting to them, there are very few of them.
At the end of the play, after a series of funny situations and laughter, which was heard in the audience, the actors shouted a sentence that almost made some in the audience cry... What is the future for young people? What is the future in a country where children kill children...
It is ungrateful to talk about that. I think that anyone who has a conscience and approaches things a little more seriously and deeply has the reluctance to talk about it. I wouldn't dare to talk about it either. And as for the future of young people, I would relieve it a little... Because... I don't think that in some other times the future for young people was better, or at least it didn't seem better to those young people. Those problems, both Adrian's in the 1980s and in our times, are quite universal. The technological boom has certainly pushed the boundaries in society, but I think young people are always in trouble.
Snežana Miletić