THE CHAMBER THEATRE 55 from Sarajevo was founded on March 7th, 1955. Although the theatre does not have an exceptionally long history, it is “undoubtedly richer, more attractive and significant that the decade long routine and cold schematism of other theatres and their careless existence”, as a renowned critic has noted once. Through a constant questioning and challenging, as well as through fervent search for different, more direct and more open stage expression.
There have certainly been some wanderings but even they were not useless. It is also after those “errors” that the Chamber Theatre ‘55 succeeded to return to its own self, to its roots, with ever more imagination and quality of its production. It has never betrayed the profile defined at the very outset by its visionary founder Jurislav Korenić (1914-1974) – the profile that was the novelty in this part of the world that was in sync with the tendencies of the then theatre of Europe.
That is the time when a new form of dramaturgy was emerging in the art of theatre: “theatre of absurdity” and “anti-drama” or “new drama”. Opening its gate wide for the experimental in theater; for the plays by Beckett, Jarry, Genet, Ionesco, Schwartz, Chekhov... and the whole new pleiades of author whose poetics in modern theatre arose from the” feeling of absurdity of life”.
The CHAMBER THEATRE 55 had a decisive influence n a whole generation of drama artists who have recognized this “ring-like stage”, surrounded by audience, unlike the frontal type of stage, with its insurmountable swing-gate, as the opportunity of a more intimate and more sincere acting and for the establishment of His Majesty the Actor as the key factor in theatre, since it was only at the small stage that actors could act on their audience in more direct and natural manner, resisting the pathos, clichés and false intonation.
All these years, the Chamber Theatre ‘55 remained loyal to its avant-garde mission and constant search for the most recent foreign authors (e.g., Brecht, Shaw, Witkiewitz, Pinter, Alby, Schisgal, Weis, Beckett, Pirandello, Vitracq, Zindell, Camus, Goldoni, Durenmat, Lorca, Gombrowitz, Ruzewitz, Arbuzov, Fo, Bulgakov, Chekov, Dumas, Fassbinder, Ibsen, Strindberg, Dostoevsky, Pristley, Kohout, Shakespeare, Miller, Wise, Kretz, Williams, Feuydeau, Buchner, Glovatzky, Sartre, Genet, Ionesco, Havel...), as well as the original plays written by Bosnian-Herzegovinian playwrights (such as Žalica, Topčić, Kovač, Plakalo, Ibrišimović, Fetahagić, ovanović, Karahasan, Fogl, Mustajbašić, Horozović, etc.), where particular value should be attached to the fact that numerous authors have been staged at the Chamber Theatre ‘55 when they were still unknown to a wider audience; yet another proof of the theatre’s repertory investigative and avant-garde orientation.
Since its founding, the CHAMBER THEATRE 55 has been shaping and re-affirming such the profile with its 258 premieres.
The status of one of the cult spots of the cultural scene of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Chamber Theatre ‘55 has definitely confirmed in the years of aggression on the country (1992 –1995), when in the besieged Sarajevo it was in the front-lines of what has been described with great admiration, both in the country and abroad, as the “cultural resistance against aggression” and has been recognized as the culturally superior response to the barbarism to which it has been exposed.
It has fulfilled its mission in those incredible and unheard of difficulties, literary under the shells and mortars and in candlelight. Almost every day, before numerous and faithful audience, the mission of theatrical play was accomplished and responded to by the viewers as it has never happen in the history of theatre. And never before, did theatre achieve a fuller meaning and more justified existence.
It will remain recorded in history that during the 1992-1995 war the CHAMBER THEATRE 55 had as many as 28 premieres within a repertory that did not succumb to any compromise and any ideological, national, religious, or political influence.
