Director: Ana Tomović
Dramaturge: Milena Depolo
Costume designer: Momirka Bailović
Music selection and arrangements: Branko Marković

Casting:
Hamlet: Miloš Đorđević
The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father and Polonius: Феђа Стојановић
Gertrude: Marija Opsenica
Ophelia: Dubravka Kovjanić
Claudius: Damjan Kecojević

Musicians:
Bass: Branko Marković
Keyboards: Veljko Vujčić
Trumpet: Miloš Milosavljević
Tenor saxophone: Igor MArković
Drums: Novak Mijović
DJ: MKDSL

"Tobeatornottobeat" (Trtmrtživotilismrt) is a performance in which Hamlet’s moral dilemma has been transformed into the main existential dilemma of a middle-aged man in a recognizable family situation in Serbia. This horror story from the black chronicle is told in the form of a slapstick comedy, in which everything is possible.

A Serbian prince well along in his best years, eternal student living on the family budget, is absorbed in a complicated existential dilemma – to stay or to leave, to leave or to commit suicide, to kill or to massacre one by one, or both. Ripped apart between the rich tourist offers and how to resolve the complicated family relations, he tries to figure out what to do with his own life, in his cramped up apartment, next to the "ghost" of his father who is dumbly staring at the TV set.

The motto of our prince is a paraphrase of the title of an album of the well-known Belgrade group Darkwood Dub: "Life starts at forty".

A Word from the Author:

"Slapstick comedy as a theatre genre has been occupying me for a long time because it seems to me that it is offering large freedom in scenic expression owing to the fact that it is not based on words, as we are used to, but on the body language, communication with the audience and specific music as a necessary element for forming the action on the scene. Also, it does not deal only with logics and the probable and possible, but it carries a dose of irrationality and feeling that "everything is possible". Reflecting deeper on the content I got the idea to address deconstruction of a myth - Hamlet - and to see what this myth looks like when placed in the framework of a slapstick comedy with the problem resulting from our reality, the problem of getting independent and separated from the nuclear family, which in our country is somehow delayed and aggravated by its nature."

Ana Tomovic

Born in 1979, in Belgrade. She attended the Philology Grammar School. She graduated from the Belgrade Faculty of Drama Arts, Department of Theatre and Radio Directing, in the class of Prof. Egon Savin and his assistant Dušan Petrović.

She directed the performances: Creeps by Lic Hibner in the Belgrade Drama Theatre (2004); Golden Angle (an omnibus project Belgrade Stories 4) by Ljubinka Stojanović in the Students’ Cultural Centre (2000); Duck by Stella Feehily in the Kraljevo Thetre (2005); halFlajf by Filip Vujošević in Atelier 212 (2005); Casanova’s Return by Arthur Schnitzler (dramatization of the novel) in the Serbian National Theatre (2007); O Go My Man by Stella Feehily in the National Theatre of Sombor (2007). She took part in the Joakimfest and in the Tenth Yugoslav Festival in Užice, in 2005, with the play Duck; in the Sterija Festival in 2006 with the play halFlajf. She is the winner of the Joakimfest 2005 award for the best directing, for the play Duck.

From 1998 to 2005 she was a member of the editorial office and an editor of the BITEF Bulletin. She was awarded the Goethe Institute scholarship for study visit to the International Forum of Young Theatre Creators in Berlin, in May 2006, in the scope of the theatre festival Theatertreffen. She is also dealing with the theatrical pedagogy.