Ant Street is a lively and enthralling drama that captures the audience imagination from start to finish. This International production is brought to The Civic by the Oliver Micevski’s theater company based in Denmark. In advance of the play which runs 8th & 9th of May in the studio here in The Civic, we had a chat with the company founder and director of the play : Oliver Micevski.
Can you tell us about your theatre company?
After my BA studies in theatre directing in Skopje and MA in Ibsen studies in Oslo, I ended up in Budapest in 2012. There was a gap regarding English language there, after the closure of Merlin theatre, which was specialized in English language repertoire, so with a group of local actors we found Theatre on the roof. As the only professional English language theatre company in Budapest at that moment, in few years, we established ourselves pretty successfully, as our minimalistic and quintessential artistic language became our trademark and the audience loved it. We produced modern reinvented versions of the classics “Glass menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, “Vernissage” by Vaclav Havel, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov. Since 2015 we focused on contemporary drama and we worked on plays by David Mamet, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Konstantin Kostenko. Soon after our Budapest success, we started to spread our work in Berlin, Prague, Bratislava and recently in Cannes on the French Riviera. In the meantime, we rebranded our theatre company and for a while already we are known as Oliver Micevski’s Theatre Company. Since last year, we are based in Denmark, which as a country offers great logistic structure for making theatre and art, overall.
Ant street is an internationally acclaimed play, what is it all about?
“Ant street” is a play by the contemporary German author, Roland Schimmelpfennig, probably the best living author in Europe at the moment. Our last play “Winter solstice” which premiered in Cannes last year is written by Schimmelpfennig too. After the wonderful and exciting journey which I had with “Winter solstice”, “Ant street” is sort of continuation of the journey in the mysterious, well-crafted world of the author, full with riddles and hidden meanings, occasionally funny and occasionally painful as well.The play is about a family, probably based in Cuba, about their big dreams and big falls. A mysterious package arrives one day on their address, full with bunch of random seemingly unimportant objects, a pen, a wig, a calendar, a jar, a spoon. But all these “gifts from the Universe” have supernatural powers too (or not) and soon the daughter can fly with the help of the wig, the mother can travel in time, the grandmother can taste different flavors with a simple spoon… But the fulfilling of all the wishes is not a good thing by default and slowly slowly all the members of the family change their personalities, they become selfish, rude, self-absorbed… and they fall. And the fall is painful. “Ant street” focuses on, how the fulfilling of our wishes change us and warns, that we must be careful what we wish for.
As a production company from Denmark is it exciting to play to an Irish audience?
We have never played in Ireland before and of course, we are very excited performing at The Civic. Furthermore, there are pretty valuable performances on the repertoire at The Civic, and it’s our honor to be stage our play there. Finally, Ireland is very important for Europe in theatre context. We all know very well the works of Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr… not to mention Beckett, Wilde etc… So, the Irish audience is very well equipped and we hope that they will enjoy our strange “Ant street” as well.
Where to next for Ant Street?
We play in Budapest in March, Cannes in April, Copenhagen in May. More performances in Budapest and Cannes are coming after. Working on a fixing dates for guest performances in UK (London and Edinburgh) and USA (Chicago and New York) in the autumn.
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ANT STREET
8 & 9 May
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