Michelangelo Buonarroti, a play by the Croatian playwright Miroslav Krleza, will premiere July 27 in a production by the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) Ivan pl Zajc from Rijeka, and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.

The play, directed by the Slovenian director Sebastijan Horvat, will premiere July 27 on the Croatian island of Lokrum, near Dubrovnik.

Miroslav Krleza, often proclaimed the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century, first published Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1919. The one-act expressionist play deals with Buonarroti painting God’s wrath in the Sistine Chapel. Torn between his desire to realise his great ideas, and the miserable poverty of his day-to-day existence, the painter goes from faith to heresy and back, from prayer, to rejection, and finally, to acceptance of his fate. He hallucinates images of taverns, dances, the inquisition and burnings at the stake. The play centres around the relationship between art and money, and the challenges of a genius whose ideals leave him hopelessly isolated from the world around him.

This is one of the most important projects the Rijeka HNK has had lately, and the first co-production with the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, said the theatre’s artistic director, Marin Blazevic.

The Dubrovnik Summer Festival is an annual theatre festival that began in the 50s. It combines the city’s renaissance and baroque architecture with the living spirit of drama, drawing upon the long literary and cultural tradition of the city as one of Croatia’s intellectual centres.

The Croatian theatre company, along with Giuseppe Nicodemo of the HNK’s Italian company, are taking part in the production, as well as the guest actors Rakan Rushaidat (playing the main character) and Jerko Marcic.