A Poor Player
A Misplaced Melancomedy with a Dash of Farce by Filip Krenus and Sean Aita
5th July at 9:30 p.m. / Marin Držić Theatre
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.
Ticket Sales:
Buy online at www.ulaznice.hr
Dubrovnik Tourist Board, Pile / Luža, Stradun
Box office at the venue one hour before the performance
Midsummer Scene 2021 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 delighted to be in the beautiful city of Dubrovnik once more, bringing A Poor Player back to the city as part of the Midsummer Scene Festival. Sean is an award-winning professional director, and playwright who trained originally as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. As Associate Director at the Royal Theatre Northampton, Sean won the Checkout Theatre award for his play Yallery Brown, co-produced with Forkbeard Fantasy which subsequently transferred to Greenwich Theatre. Sean was Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer of the celebrated regional touring theatre company Forest Forge, where his work was short-listed for the Stage Awards for Achievement in Regional Theatre. At Forest Forge he produced the company’s first ever international co-production with Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador. Sean is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy London, a board member of BH Live, one of the largest entertainment and leisure groups in the South West of England, and a member of Trinity College London’s drama examination panel. He has had an artistic association with Vienna’s English Theatre for the past thirty-five years, both as a writer and director, and recently directed a highly acclaimed production of Allan Knee’s dance musical Syncopation for the theatre’s main house.
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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