Text : Radovan Ivšić

Conception and performance : Clément Peretjatko

Duration : 15 minutes

The short play Vane was written for the vocabulary of shadow theater (1943) and is situated in an “absolute gap” with the Ustashi regime, then reigning in Croatia. Indeed, we cannot imagine a vision more alien to fascist ideology.

Vane, the eponymous character in this play, is a little boy who quite naturally obeys his imagination and, as a result, just as naturally disobeys the dream-breaking family order. Because Vané understands in his naivety that life - real life - begins by deserting the marked paths and that the simple freedom of being is first conquered with the invisible weapon of the imagination, always able to bring out the wonderful here and now.

Appears here in its most bare form one of the major themes of Radovan Ivšić, convinced that the quest for the marvelous merges with that of freedom and that one like the other can have no end. Vane, a short play written in 1943 for a shadow theatre, was performed with actors in Dubrovnik in 1980, but it had never been play with shadows.