Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 52 No. 1, 2026.
Original scientific paper
The Idle Theatre by Davor Mojaš, within-a-novel
Lada Čale Feldman
Abstract
The article explores the intersection of prose, poetry, and theatre in the work of the
Dubrovnik journalist, writer, and director Davor Mojaš, the head of the Student Theatre
Lero and author of several hybrid literary works, in which these genres are regularly
combined and the boundaries between the written word and theatrical performance are
redefined. Among the author’s various literary expressions, which share this blending of
seemingly incongruous forms, genres, and ontologies, the novel Kazalište Isprazni (The
Idle Theatre, 2005) stands out as one of the few Croatian examples of a novelistic exploration of the theatrical phenomenon, even if theatre in this novel is intentionally portrayed as a vane delusion. On one hand, drawing from the authentic historical record of the Academy of the Idle ones – an institution active in Dubrovnik from the late 17th to the early 18th century, following similar Italian associations, from which the author borrows the key attribute for his fictional theatre – the novel, however, under this historical guise, smuggles in allusions to contemporary productions by Lero. These are »vane« and »idle« in their persistent ambition to restore Dubrovnik to the glory of its centuries-old civilization, thus realizing a poetic of patina underlying a series of dreamy, unachievable projects, the descriptions of which form the fragmentary fabric of the novel. The article interprets the novel’s persistent denials of the existence of such theatre in light of the psychoanalytic theory of »negative hallucination « (Green), while inserting the topoi related to Dubrovnik’s past into the tradition of the Western European obsession with »obsolete objects« (Orlando) and emphasizing its aesthetics that, aware of its own utter redundancy, explicitly resists modern functionality.
Keywords
the theatre novel; Davor Mojaš; Kazalište isprazni; the city-as-theatre myth; negative hallucination; obsolete objects
Hrčak ID:
347162
URI
Publication date:
6.5.2026.
Visits: 0 *