Stevan Koprivica WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

Concept and Direction: Branislav Mićunović
Dramaturgy: Dragana Tripković
Set Design: Marko Petrović Njegoš
Costume Design: Lina Leković
Assistant Director: Branka Knežević
Cast: Dubravka Drakić, Dušan Kovačević, Simo Trebješanin, Ivana Mrvaljević, Jelena Nenezić Rakočević, Miloš Pejović, Omar Bajramspahić, Ivona Čović Jaćimović, and Vahidin Prelić.

Photo: Duško Miljanić

Duration: 70 minutes

“Without Portfolio” is a painful comedy that explores people who are above or below a certain societal line. While initially drawing inspiration from Nušić’s “The Minister’s Wife,” through the lens of sudden acquisition of power, personal ambitions, and needs, the play speaks very clearly about all of us, here and now, about who we are and who we shouldn’t become.

I had the intention to write another comedy. Initially, there was a desire to draw on Branislav Nušić, just as he drew on Gogol. To create an experiment – what would happen to his minister’s wife in our time, in our surroundings. The reality of the time we live in, this unprecedented collection of oxymorons, convinced me /adding the director’s Branislav Mićunović’s arguments here/ that it would be futile and inappropriate to transpose Nušić into our circumstances. We would reduce ourselves to yet another recycling. The initial motive exists, everything else is a product of personal interpretation of the current herbarium, where hallucinatory plants are pressed, and their derivatives are injected into ourselves daily. From a sad comedy, “Without Portfolio” has turned into a horror comedy, whose characters are not monsters and zombies, but rather “similar to us,” as Aristotle would say. Or is it indeed about monsters here?
Stevan Koprivica