Ship of Love

The ship of love from the title of the play with the same name is actually a ferry Kriemhild cruising between Lubeck and St. Petersburg. As the authors say, the travelers are „pigs from the East“ and „shit from the West“, i.e. the sex guest workers from Eastern European (former communist) countries looking for profit and a better life and the middle-class Europeans in search of pleasure, fun, and oblivion.

The latent conflict between these two worlds, based on the economic power and liberal capitalism philosophy, and intertwined with pornography and politics, humor, violence, and personal unfulfilled ambitions, gets overshadowed by the unfortunate fate of an individual. This is a story about a spiritual, moral, material, an ideological and psychological collapse of the world, told through the story of the breakup of a man.

A Note from the Director

Nebojša Romčević’s play Ship of Love was both a challenge and a pleasure for me. The text is complicated in its own way. At first glance, it seems superficial and simple, but actually, it opens up essential inner problems of a man and a society.
Both the drama and the production are concerned with the spirit and the state of the current time. They are about the collective madness being mainly the consequence of social pressure all leading to a global breakdown. The breakdown of the human soul and society as a whole.

I have used the movie script and the basic drama text and made adaptation to round up the general story and develop all characters and relationships. The title of the production is Ship of Love, but essentially, there is not a “gram” of love. This irony pictures the world of today.
Everything will cease to exist if I stop dreaming. These characters lack the dream, love, and life in a true sense of the word. They are alienated; they live the life imposed and by the rules imposed on them. They live in a machine of the system which grinds them and makes them all look the same.
In essence, the play deals with big problems of ordinary people who feel lost in a big world. The ship as a metaphor of the world offers glamour, glow, happiness and love, everything that we lack. In fact, the image we desperately believe in is false.

The first cue in the play: We are like Noah’s Ark, the wild beasts God has created for his own shame or entertainment is actually the definition of this text and the play. The ship as a departure from reality, as salvation and as an escape in search of what we lack desperately, no matter how fake it may be.
This play is our deep and sincere scream, an attempt to show where this kind of life leads us to. I think and deeply believe that we have succeeded in doing so. I wish this play a long life for it deserves it.

Angelcho Ilievski, director.

About the Director

Angelcho Ilievski, a young Macedonian director, graduated in Theatre Directing from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje, in the class of Professor Slobodan Unkovski and associate professor Zlatko Slavenski. He is a theatre director-in-residence at the National Theatre in Bitola.

The previous theatre productions are as follows: “The Sower of Children” (written by him), “The Lesson” by Eugene Ionesco, “The Seducer” (written by him), “Steps” by Samuel Beckett, “The Ghost Sonata” by August Strindberg, “The Censor” by Anthony Neilson, “Family Stories” by Biljana Srbljanović, “Sonnets“ by William Shakespeare (all plays were performed in Macedonia), “Motherfu..er, who started it first (Mamu mu ko je prvi počeo)” by Dejan Dukovski in Osijek Croatia and “Where did Harms Disappear“ by Mila Mašović Nikolić at the National Theatre in Niš. He was assistant director in the play “Lost Germans” by Dejan Dukovski directed by Slobodan Unkovski and “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov directed by Ivan Popovski. He is the author of three drama texts: “The Sower of Children”, “The Seducer” and “Where Is Your Place Joey” (drama for children), as well as two poetry books “On the Way to the Sun” and “Memories”.

He participated in many workshops in Macedonia and abroad. His production “The Sower of Children” won the award for the best performance at two festivals, and Ilievski won the award for the best director. The actors from his plays won awards and recognition at several festivals in Macedonia and abroad.