Original Title: Hrvatski dramatičari u svom kazalištu
The studies, essays and reviews thematically linked with Croatian drama and theatre brought together in this book have the significance of a theatre chronicle. This theatre chronicle is more than a notation from which the future will be able to uncover the theatrical image of past times; it helps us today better to understand our own theatre and its relation with its own playwright. Some of the texts carry a polemic note, sometimes they rectify injustices or fill a gap in Croatian theatrology, sometimes guiding but always interesting, written in the language of a skilful stylist.
In the two essays about Krleža (with a proposal for periodisation of Krleža’s work and a depiction of the stance of the Croatian theatre towards Krleža), Senker writes about two creators of the folk theatre in the period between the wars (Kalman Mesarić and Geno Senečić), two leading names in more recent classics (Marijan Matković and Ranko Marinković), and two plays by Antun Šoljan (Diocletian’s Palace and The Bard). The section on the clash between barbarism and civilisation on the Croatian stage contains an essay about Culture in the Border Region (about three ways of conceiving borders with examples from the Croatian theatre) and an essay on Brešan’s system with his dramatic personages. The book also contains ten theatre critiques of plays performed to texts by Croatian dramatists in the period from 1976 until the beginning of the 1990s (from Kušan’s The Naive One to Gundulić’s Osman).