Writer: Marius von Mayenburg
Director: Veljko Micunovic
Scenography: Numen + Ivana Jonke
Eldorado unfolds as a nocturnal suburban “idyll” teetering on the edge of an encroaching apocalypse. The stage is anchored by a half-unraveled artificial lawn, pressed against the glass wall of a modernist bungalow. A chaotic accumulation of objects and symbols freely arranged blurs the line between a tentative order and the creeping collapse: fragments of designer furniture, life-like cutouts of wild and exotic animals, a glass cube serving as a fishpond, crashed drones, a self-propelled lawnmower, a piano, stray neon tubes, the suspended life-size carcass of a humpback whale. In the background, a grove of conifers, a lone streetlamp, and a brutalist Belgrade high-rise shrouded in red helicopter haze - are framing the scene. Radiating from the house, a spatial installation of taut ropes traced with neon lighting stretches far into the audience, evoking a frozen explosion or a salvo of fired projectiles. This, alongside other agents of chaos drives the apocalyptic tension of the scene. Things unfold at random, detached from the narrative, amplifying the pervasive anxiety of the story. The idea is to move toward a crescendo of controlled disorder, with the gradual collapse of elements—whether automated or triggered by actors. By weaving together a broad, often discordant array of materials, processes, and techniques, the set underscores the surreal, destabilizing nature of the narrative, leaving the audience questioning the boundary between the seemingly real and the blatantly simulated. This maximalist approach fits the discordant text by Marius Von Mayenburg but also opens up possibilities for experimentation and improvisation in subsequent work with the actors.
