The Dragon

When Lancelot comes to the land of the dragon, he enters directly into the heart of the problem, to the house where beautiful Elsa, the dragon’s betrothed, lives. The tax that the dragon demands of the country every year comes in the shape of a young virgin. Lancelot wants to save the girl and the country from the dragon’s insatiability, but his heroic nature stumbles upon a not so fairy-tale like obstacle. Elsa and her father are complacent and have accepted fate: they consider sacrifice an essential price to keep peace in the country. The hero soon sees that his task is not to simply behead the three-headed dragon, but to talk sense into the blinded population.
The Dragon by the Russian writer and playwright Evgeny Shvarts (1896–1958) is a political satire packed as a fairy tale about all sorts of totalitarianisms and the apathy and blindness of the people living in them; when written it was, in the first place, a subversive narrative of the circumstances in the post-war Soviet Union. The conflict between good and evil is placed between the heroic Lancelot, the saviour and revolutionary, and the dragon, the bloodthirsty tyrant. The exciting tale, which was made into the film To Kill a Dragon in 1988, imparts a sharp socially critical note and points at the bureaucratised government that uses the tyrant as mask for its own abuse of power. The text, specifically adapted for this staging, will be directed by the successful film and theatre director from Sarajevo Dino Mustafić, who already worked in SNG Nova Gorica when he prepared the production of Playing the Victim by the Presnyakov brothers.