The Emperor of Loss

Zagreb Youth Theatre – ZKM (Zagreb, Croatia), Antwerpen Troubleyn/VZW (Antwerpen, Belgium)

Running time 1 hour and 35 minutes. No interval.
The performance is in Croatian with Slovenian subtitles.
Première: 10 December 2012, Zagreb Youth Theatre (Zagreb, Croatia)

Translators Helen Sinkovič, Radmila Zdjelar
Director, set designer, costume designer, lighting designer Jan Fabre
Dramaturg and assistant director Coraline Lamaison
Costume designer Doris Kristić
Assistant costume designer Marta Žegura
Juggling coach Domagoj Šoić

Performed by
Frano Mašković

Through multiplied images placed in metaphysical frames of the world, Fabre’s hero – as an imaginary clown or a real actor – struggles with the inability to surpass the obstacles that separate him either from himself or from the spectator – his own alter ego, which dwells somewhere on a dangerous brink where reality merges with literature. Striving to achieve his ideal, he transforms skilfully and with ease in front of the spectators into a multitude of characters. In this struggle, he always stumbles upon the same mistakes, as an artist doomed to repeat, as a man captured in an eternal trap of filling the gaps in life, speech, discourses … And as he has come to find pleasure in these breakdowns, he has actually found his true power in weakness, in the beauty of fall; this is what makes him the emperor of loss. The dramatic monologue The Emperor of Loss grows out of post-dramatic theatre, out of self-questioning. In this kind of theatre no one is safe, not even the spectator.