‘Rosamunde’ is the third drama of the cycle Drama of Princesses, besides Snow White, The Sleeping Beauty, Jackie and the Rock. The cycle is subtitled ‘Death and the Maiden’ after a Schubert’s piece of the same name. Elfriede Jelinek explores female archetypes. She depicts the male view onto every phase of female existence as an engine of death. In her search ofthe truth, Show White gets killed by the Hunter; The Sleeping Beauty is woken from her dream by the Prince, giving her a submissive role; Rosamunde is forced to acknowledge that the status of a wife is incompatible with writing, and that every creative activity of a woman is doomed to failure. Jackie is a hostage of the deaths of her dear ones and the prisoner of the media image of herself. Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath despair at the impossibility to set things in motion and are captives of the space predetermined for them. The Princesses of Elfriede Jelinek are contemporary parodistic counterparts of Shakespeare’s princes. They are myths in deconstruction, anti-princesses who cannot fight the fate they are predestined for. Jelinek’s humour is devastating in the grotesqueness with which her heroines unveil male discourses, by distorting, twisted quotes, puns and plays with words.
Rosamunde was a Cyprian princess from the Renaissance period, but also a character in a lost opera by Schubert. Critics call her Jelinek’s double. She is trapped between a disquieting crisis of a female writer and a tempestuous and ambivalent relationship with her partner Fulvio. Rosamunde wonders if the character of a ‘writer’ determines her own body. Just like Jackie develops a discussion on the theory of fashion with Roland Barthes, Rosamunde is an answer to American philosopher Judith Butler’s critique of the Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theory of the construction of the body through discourse. The writer Rosamunde attempts to escape the symbolical order, thus undermining the bases of the creative categories of identity such as desire, sex and sexual identity.
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The Bulić Hotel Theatre is an artistic organisation which explores new approaches in the theatre. For years active in Croatia, it stands out by producing distinctive authorial projects. They have staged dramas after the texts by subversive authors such as Genet, Savitskaya, Mishima, Kopi, Artaud. The Bulić Hotel has grown into a recognisable place of contemporary theatrical exploration. Since the very start, the Bulić Hotel Theatre founded the programme of their productions on the highly energetic performance, whether it originates from the personal power of the performers who are, for the first time, dedicated seriously to the theatre, or the dramatic artist of first-class performing abilities, such as Ana Karić, Nina Violić, Ivana Jozić.
The productions of the Bulić Hotel Theatre have been selected for and awarded at a number of international and Croatian festivals (Avignon Festival; The 10th International Festival in Casablanca; Festival Teatro de Oriente, Barcelona, Venezuela, 2003; Trnfest, Ljubljana, 2004; International Festival for Experimental Theatre, Cairo, Egypt, 2004; Borštnikovo srečenje, Maribor, 2004; Mala fronta novоg plesa i performanca, Festival sodobnih gledališčih umentosti – EXODOS, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2005; Festival de Teatro de La Habana, Cuba, 2005; SEAS Festival Udine, Italy; Skampa Festival, Albania, 2005; Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, 2006; The 8th International Blacksea Theatre Festival, Trabzon, Turkey, 2007; Festival MOT, Macedonia, La MaMa, New York...)