JAŠA KOCELI

5BOYS

Simona Semenič

Premiere 13.09.2019

Weöres Sándor Színház

Szombathely, Hungary

95 min

Seemingly innocent children play through a variety of games that showcase their innermost prejudice, and revealing the violent oppression our society lives in.

​Going rogue has never held greater meaning than in the play 5boys, as we witness to what at first seems like innocent child's play of five youngsters, yet it slowly but surely escalates into a perpetuation of violence, intolerance and hate. The boys, who are ironically named after the beheaded Christian martyrs, play through a wide range of situations and characters, from battles between famous superhero characters, to harrowing family abuse and brutal killings based on prejudice and discrimination. 5boys thus unapologetically points at certain deeply internalized truths that haunt us even as mere children, and continue to do so as we grow into the very things we so eagerly, with a childish innocence, fought against.

Few thoughts during rehearsals by the director:

I think that childhood is often like total theatre. The imagination can be stronger than reality, the game more important than family, our friends our favorite home. That especially comes on the surface during children’s games. We all played them. Who can forget the bursts of joy and violence or the creation of non-existent story lines. The use of the forbidden words from our parents and the never ending competition. The freedom. The enclosed reality. The time stretched into infinity.

Five boys represent mini society. There are angels and devils inside them. No one is easy to grasp, they’re quite elusive. Everything can be expected from everyone. The kids can be evil in one moment and perfectly innocent in the next one. They carry in themselves the potential to change the world and at the same time they already live their predestined fates. But the future is far away, it’s the present that is so intense it hurts.

This text decisively condemns all intolerances and fascisms in the contemporary society but does that without moralizing. The meanings of the words are open to interpretation. We can play with them and see that even the most horrible things we experience in our lives can be transformed into a game. That’s one of the mightiest things theatre can offer.

It’s all about boys playing games. About creating imaginary world where everything is possible - if only temporary. In this creative process we are floating in the imagination of our childhoods. Our dreams and memories are becoming the performance itself. There’s an inner child in every human being. And guess what - they are all actors.

Jaša Koceli

Szombathely, 8th May 2019