DIRECTOR’S NOTE

Nebojša Romčević’s play Love Boat was both a challenge and a pleasure for me. The text is complex in its own way; at first glance, it may seem superficial and simple, but in fact it opens up fundamental inner problems of the individual and society.

Both the play and the production deal with the spirit and state of our time. They speak of a collective madness that is very much a consequence of social pressure, all of which leads to a global collapse—the collapse of the human soul and of society as a whole.

I used the film screenplay and the original dramatic text and adapted them in order to create a cohesive overall story and develop all the characters and their relationships. The title of the production is Love Boat, yet in essence there is not a “gram” of love in it, and this irony is a reflection of the world today.

“If I stop dreaming, everything will cease to exist.” These characters lack dreams, they lack love, they lack life in the true sense of the word. They are alienated, living imposed lives, according to imposed rules, trapped in the machinery of a system that grinds them down and makes them uniform.

Essentially, the production deals with great problems through the lives of ordinary people who become lost in a vast world. The ship, as a metaphor for the world, offers glamour, splendor, happiness, love—all the things we lack. Yet in reality, it is all a false image that we desperately believe in.

The first line in the play—“We are like Noah’s Ark, wild beasts created by God for His own shame or amusement”—is, in fact, the definition of this text and this production. The ship as an escape from reality, the ship as salvation, the ship as a flight in search of what we desperately lack, no matter how false it may be.

This production is our deep and sincere cry, an attempt to show where this way of life is taking us. I think, and deeply believe, that we have succeeded.

I wish this production a long life, because it deserves it.

Angelcho Ilievski, Director