The theme of growing up and teenage crisis is dramatically potent, important and increasingly present in the theater. Social anomalies are usually shown through the fate of young people. It is written about violence among young people (Class enemy Nigel Williams), about complications due to the awakening of sexuality (Tanja Šljivar, Like all single girls), about dysfunctional families (Dear Dad Minja Bogavac)… Jeu playwright Mile Mašović Nikolić and director Milica Kralj (The evening scene of the "Boško Buha" Theater) does not belong to this sequence because the theme of the play is not extremes, but the growing up of an ordinary Belgrade teenage girl surrounded by members of a caring and benevolent older generation. A performance talks about how difficult it is to set life's priorities and how life's problems should never leave the game behind. The character of the teenage girl Malena (Ljiljana Slović) is not the main active character, but rather the characters, or rather, types of adults. We look at their life situations and how they make decisions about teenagers. In the adult world, Malena is a somewhat spoiled and ill-mannered rebel prone to melancholy. She is worried about the fate of the planet and is overwhelmed by a general uneasiness and bewilderment about life. She would like to change the world, but she does not know exactly what she would change in her own life. When everything is "arranged" like this, it is clear that the character of the teenage girl is given from the perspective of adults. This is not surprising, since the director and writer are already part of the middle generation and speak to teenagers from their own point of view. That's good because they focused on what they know - what adults want to teach young people who don't want to listen to them.
Little is very important to adults, they try to pass on their knowledge to her, explain different life situations and "play out" examples from life. And the examples are various: the process of choosing a partner/partner/spouse, the relationship between adult children and aging parents, the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, female and male friendships, divorce, moving abroad, protests and activism... All these topics in real life can have a dark and scary side, but the writer and director avoided it or turned it into a joke. Adult "examples" act like liberal professors who talk about difficult topics, strictly guard against provocations and "slippery situations" and try to entertain the rebellious and uninterested student and get them interested in the "material" through play.
The game is what is the essence of both the director's and the actor's approach in this play. Actors Vladan Milić, Vučić Perović, Uroš Jovčić and actresses Milica Janketić, Katarina Marković, Teodora Ristovki play really well on stage and convey the joy of the game to the audience. They play with stage conventions - the play begins as a piece of rehearsal, and ends with the question of what is behind the (theatre) curtain. They also showed a rich variety of different comedic (sub)genres that they master: comedy of situations, comedy of nature, comedy of character, theater of comic absurdity, gag comedy, comedy of improvisation... For me personally, the best scene was the scene in which it is shown how the grandparents survived the parades of different guys that the daughter and future Malena's mother (Milica Janketić) brought to the family lunch with soup. The scene begins as a realistic scene of a citizen's lunch and acquaintance, and then the scenes are shortened, the action speeds up, different, increasingly strange characters are replaced, so that according to the gradation system, instead of a young man, a girl comes. Civil-bred parents are killing themselves trying to act as if everything is fine with them, although, obviously, it is not. That parade of guys and parents' party eventually turns into a wild complicated soup-eating machine - a brilliant acting etude!
The gaiety and playfulness of the play and the "easy transition" over difficult topics is a requirement of the subgenre to which this play belongs. Namely, the play Jeu it's about teenagers, but it's basically a play intended for the whole family and for everyone's taste, so there's no danger of it causing unpleasant polemics. After the show Jeu, and before that Mine and yours By Boris Liješević, the evening scene of the "Boško Buha" Theater is profiled as a type of theater that we could call a "family theater" - a theater for (almost) all generations - from teenagers to pensioners, with the possibility of several generations of the same family coming together to the show and then spending a pleasant evening talking about what they saw. It should be noted that the two plays, in addition to having different authors, also have different approaches to the theater: Mine and yours is verbatim - the text of the play was created on the basis of personal materials of the actors, and Jeu is closer to the dramatic theater. What is close to the two plays and what defines them as "theater for the family" is the desire for different generations to get closer to each other while watching the play, and not to separate and divide over different viewings of some important issue. The theater that nurtures the youngest theater audience (brought to the theater by adults) thus becomes a place where former children can continue to come, those who were brought to the same theater by their parents, and even "bring" with them mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, uncle, aunt, neighbor... All those with whom they would like to talk about growing up.
