Miro Gavran and Affirmative Absurd in His Play "The Doll"

Abstract

The article is devoted to the Croatian contemporary playwright Miro Gavran who is an unusual phenomenon in contemporary European theatre. With more than 50 plays that have been staged all over the world, he is the only living playwright that has a festival outside of his country dedicated solely to his oeuvre – the GavranFest that has been held (so far) in Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, and Serbia. The article aims to attempt to elaborate on the secret of his success at the background of the reign of directors’ and post-modern theatre. It is claimed that Miro Gavran writes sort to ‘old-fashioned’ plays, full of positive and warm emotions, with recognizable characters and stories charged with the tension of a crime narrative – plays that tend to affirm basic life values and sometimes even provoke a classical catharsis. All this theses are proved on analysis of The Doll, a comedy about a robot who replaces a woman, one of the best examples of Gavran’s work challenging the issues of post-human civilization.