by Miroslav Krleža
Ivica Buljan
Rusanka Lyapova, Siika Racheva
Aleksandar Denić
Ana Savić Gecan
Mitja Vrhovnik-Smrekar
Micha Horvath
Metka Golets
Deyan Donkov, Teodora Duhovnikova, Ana Papadopulu, Plamen Dimov, Darin Angelov, Veselin Mezekliev, Alexander Kunev, Konstantin Stanchev, Alexander Tonev, Alexander Karasanski
“Miroslav Krleža’s Messrs. Glembay (1929), written by the greatest Croatian writer and one of the seminal European modernists of the 20th century, stands as a unique fusion of psychological drama, social critique, and linguistic baroque. The play's events unfold over a single night, between 1 AM and 5 AM within the home of the banker Ignjat Glembay, where the family is gathered to mark Glembay Ltd.’s anniversary. In the tradition of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, Krleža dismantles the bourgeois family not merely as a private constellation of conflicts but as a historical and economic formation, a stage upon which capitalism, patriarchy, and moral collapse are dramatized.
The Glembay family, bankers and merchants whose fortune is built upon exploitation, fraud, and death, embodies what Walter Benjamin termed the “catastrophic continuity of history”. The Glembays are not merely a Croatian family in Zagreb at the beginning of the 20th century, they are an allegory of European bourgeois decadence, a testament to Adorno’s insight that culture and barbarism are inseparably entwined, that refinement and brutality grow from the same root.
For contemporary audiences, the play resonates with undiminished urgency: in a world defined by financial speculation, systemic inequality, and the corrosion of values, Krleža’s vision speaks with prophetic clarity. Leone, the prodigal son, artist, and rebel, serves as the family’s tragic conscience, exposing the crimes hidden beneath its veneer of respectability. His confrontation with his father Ignjat and his young stepmother, Baroness Castelli, culminates in an explosion of truth that shatteres the fragile façade and enacts what contemporary criticism would call the “impossible reconciliation” of ethics and profit.
The drama’s aesthetic power lies in its language, in which philosophical reflection collides with grotesque exaggeration, lyrical melancholy with furious invective, forging a text that is at once intimate and monumental. In The Glembays, theatre becomes a space of historical memory and social critique, a mirror that reflects back to us, with merciless precision, the image of our own age of crises.
Each revival has transcended a mere theatrical event: it has been a collective ritual in which society recognizes its own fractures and illusions. The play has attained cult status in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, a canonical work that has defined generations of actors and directors, producing iconic roles such as Leone, Baroness Castelli, Beatrice and Ignjat Glembay.”
Ivica Buljan, director
The play Messrs. Glembay was first staged in Bulgaria in 1947 on the Main Stage of Ivan Vazov National Theatre. The leading roles were entrusted to some of the era’s most legendary actors: Georgi Stamatov, Petya Gerganova, Ruzha Delcheva, Konstantin Kisimov, Andrey Charprazov, Ivan Dimitrov, Nikola Ikonomov and Boris Mihaylov. The production was helmed by the famous Serbian director Raša Plaović.
Almost eighty years later, this new production is directed by one of the best-known contemporary Croatian directors Ivica Buljan, who confesses to be “one of the most passionate followers of Krleža’s work”. Driven by his “continuously searching for new ways to confront the contemporary world with Krleža’s inexhaustible energy, vision, and rage”, Buljan has staged his dramas in Croatia, Slovenia, Norway, Lithuania, Ivory Coast, and Montenegro.
Ivica Buljan (b. 29 March 1965) is a distinguished theater director, playwright, theater critic, and educator whose work is widely recognized in Croatia and around the globe. He holds degrees in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb and attended the Académie Expérimentale des Théâtres in Paris. He began directing in 1995, with The Name on the Tip of the Tongue by Pascal Quignard in Ljubljana. His directorial portfolio includes works by William Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Seneca, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heiner Müller, Jean Genet, Robert Walser, Elfriede Jelinek, Hervé Guibert, Peter Handke, Édouard Louis, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Eugene O'Neill, and Mattias Andersson, as well as adaptations of novels by Danilo Kiš, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Roberto Bolaño, Jens Bjørneboe, Haruki Murakami, and Karl Ove Knausgård.
He served as Director of Drama at the Croatian National Theatre in Split (1998–2001) and at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (2014–2022). He is co-founder of Mini teater in Ljubljana and the World Theatre Festival in Zagreb. He has taught at National theatre academies in Rennes and Saint-Étienne.
In 2018, his production of The Balcony, at Residenztheater Munich, was named Europe’s best production by The New York Times. He is a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. Buljan is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Borštnik Award and the Prešeren Foundation Award, Slovenia’s highest recognition for artistic achievement.
Miroslav Krleža (7 July 1893 – 29 December 1981) is widely considered the most important Croatian author of the 20th century. He bequeathed a rich legacy of remarkable texts across diverse genres—poetry, drama, short stories, novellas, and an intimate diary—with his collected works spanning between 50 and 80 volumes. He is also the author of numerous essays dedicated to issues of art, history, politics, philosophy, and military strategy. His writing style fuses poeticism with sarcasm, and a central theme throughout his œuvre is the hypocrisy and conformism of high society in Austro-Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbia.
His interest in the theatre dates back to his early youth and remained a lifelong companion. His initial plays—Kraljevo, Christopher Columbus, and Michelangelo (written 1918–1919)—were strongly influenced by Expressionism and Symbolism. In them, Krleža endeavored to combine theatrical experimentation (in sound, lighting, and stage movement) with the proclamation of left-wing radical ideas, and to reconcile the heroic-romantic depiction of historical figures with grotesque-carnivalesque mass scenes. Kraljevo is regarded as the first Expressionist drama in Europe.
In the second stage of his work, the so-called “War Cycle,” Krleža retained some of his Expressionist techniques but subordinated them to a more realistic portrayal of the social and national upheavals associated with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the emergence of new nation-states (Galicia, 1922; Golgotha, 1922; Vučjak, 1923). In his subsequent three plays—In Agony, Messrs. Glembay, and Leda, created between 1928 and 1932 and forming the renowned “Glembay Cycle”—Krleža eschewed his characteristic theatrical innovation and turned toward an earlier dramaturgical model. These works represent a powerful achievement of psychological naturalism, tracing the disintegration of a fictional aristocratic Zagreb lineage, and the bourgeois family that arose as its continuation, all set against a backdrop of potent, at times even declarative, social critique.
Maria Strashilova
Pavlina Doublekova
Elena Kostova, Olga Nedyalkova
Nikolay Dimitrov NAD
Yanina Petrova
Petko Marodyev
Premiere: 6th and 14th of December 2025
