A Misplaced Melancomedy with a Dash of Farce by Filip Krenus and Sean Aita
Dubbed as a melancomedy with a dash of farce, this play is inspired by English travelling players who brought their craft to Northern and Central Europe in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Apart from the political and religious obstacles, these performers needed to bridge the most difficult of barriers: language. They are not known to have travelled to the south of Europe and, stretching chance and truth, this play proposes what would have happened if an English actor quite literally jumped ship and, instead to the Baltic, travelled to the Adriatic and chanced upon Dubrovnik, claimed to be the inspiration for Twelfth Night. Plagued by the plague and foreign custom – times have not changed, it seems – our actor must find a way to his audience just as he detoured from his European tour.
28th and 29th August, 1st and 2nd September 2021 at the Marin Držić Theatre
Production gallery
Creative team
Co-written by Filip Krenus and Sean Aita
Directed by Sean Aita
Performed by Filip Krenus
Produced by Darija Mikulandra Žanetić, Jelena Maržić and Filip Krenus
Video, Costume and Set Design: Zdenko Bašić
Composer and Choreographer: Philip Parr
Sound Designer: Žarko Dragojević
Stage Manager: Virginia Bolfek
Sound Technician: Milan Tomašić
Lighting Technician: Silvio Giron
Graphic and Web Design: Davor Pukljak
Photographer: Greg Goodale
Sean Aita is an award-winning English playwright and director. His plays have been toured extensively both in Britain and overseas. Sean was awarded the Check-Out Theatre Award for his original play for young audiences Yallery Brown, co-produced with Forkbeard Fantasy at the Greenwich Theatre London which was described in The Guardian newspaper as ‘so inventive it seems destined to be a classic’. He also won the IVCA Clarion Award, Europe’s most prestigious CSR and Humanitarian Communications Award for his play Bin It which toured in the UK for over ten years. He has had his writing produced professionally by the Royal Theatre Northampton (The Wrong Trousers, and a new translation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac); and Forest Forge Theatre Company (To the Marrow, Raising the Roof, The Smith Family Panto). He has had a very successful partnership with Vienna’s English Theatre, authoring over a dozen original plays and stage adaptations of classical texts for their touring department, the most recent (The Show Must Go On and On the Brink) will tour Austria and Northern Italy in the Autumn. His stage adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is currently in the repertoire of the English Theatre, Frankfurt.
Sean has just completed the book and lyrics for a new full-length musical called The Maiden and the Child, which has been workshopped by students at the Musical Theatre Academy (MTA) in London. He is a member of the Trinity College London Drama Panel and as a director has worked on professional theatre productions and immersive events across the UK, continental Europe and in Canada. He has also delivered lectures and performance-focused acting workshops in London, Mexico City, Vancouver, Dubrovnik and Los Angeles (at Cal Arts and the Los Angeles Film School). Sean was the director of Romeo and Juliet which performed at the Midsummer Scene Festival in the Summer of 2019 before the chaos of the COVID 19 pandemic struck Europe. He is delighted to be able to be involved with the festival once again.
Filip Krenus set up Honey-tongued Theatre Productions in 2012 and is one of the co-founders of Midsummer Scene Festival. He produced the first festival of Croatian contemporary drama in London, Short Shrift, and staged a musical Hedgehog’s Home in the same year. In 2015 Filip has set up LittleBIG Shakespeare series for young audiences. He translated into Croatian the works of Steven Berkoff, Clare Dowie and Langford Wilson and he translated into English the plays by Croatian playwrights Vlatka Vorkapić and Dino Pešut and the classics Marin Držić and Ranko Marinković.
For Rijeka 2020, European Capital of Culture, he co-produced Conundrum together with Crying in the Wilderness Productions, an associate company of Young Vic.
He is currently working on the first English translation of Novela od Stanca (A Fooled Fool) by Marin Držić and he is thrilled to collaborate on translating Moon Shadows by Zdenko Bašić. Zdenko’s exhibition at Midsummer Scene is also the first announcement of their work on reimagining Tales of Old by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić.
Filip trained at East 15 Acting School (BA Acting) and Drama Centre (MA in Classical European Acting). Theatre credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet (Midsummer Scene) and Twelfth Night (Midsummer Scene and Vienna’s English Theatre), School for Scandal (directed by Jessica Swale), The Winter’s Tale (LittleBIG Shakespeare), King Lear and Dido, Queen of Carthage (Greenwich Theatre), Bent (Landor/tabard), Orestes – Re-Examined (Southwark Playhouse), Peer Gynt (Riverside Studios), Hell Screen (Oval House), Richard III and Macbeth (Faction Theatre Company), The Rivals (Camden People’s Theatre), Jane Eyre (Brockley Jack).
Films include Transmania and he has recently appeared in I Hate Suzie (Bad Wolf / Sky Studios).
Midsummer Scene is a project of the Dubrovnik Tourist Board and the City of Dubrovnik,
and it is a joint production with Brilliant Events, Dubrovnik and Honey-tongued Theatre productions Ltd., London.
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