On 10 of June, 2009, a special theatre train “Orient Express” arrived at platform 1 of the Zagreb Main Station. It was soon moved to platform 6 where it remained till the 18 of June. That platform was the place were temporary stands for 200 people were erected and every night, instead of passengers, actors and theatre fans gathered there. During eight days there was one performance of a play of the Serbian National Theatre and of the Turkish State Theatre and four performances of the play of the Zagreb Youth Theatre.
These unusual events at the Zagreb Main Station, which caught the attention of the media, took place in the scope of a theatre project called “Orient Express”, initiated and organised by the European Theatre Convention, an association which gathers theatres from 40 European countries. Six theatre houses participate in the project (from Turkey, Rumania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Germany).
The “Theatre Train” began its journey in Ankara the 18 of May 2009 toward the Western Europe. The goal of this project is to explore the relations between East and West, the attitude toward the other and the different and our behaviour in these transitional times. The Train will stop at six stations from Ankara to Stuttgart. Stations represent symbols of transience and changes. The plays commissioned from national playwrights were performed on a train wagon with the possibility to open up a theatre stage on the side. A national play, a Turkish play and a play that was performed in the previous station are performed at each station where the Theatre Train stops.
For the “Orient Express” project, the Zagreb Youth Theatre applied and gave its first performance of a drama “Seven Days in Zagreb”, by Tena Štivičić, a playwright from Zagreb who lives in London. All four days this one-hour play was performed on a wagon – stage with background of train shunting, arrival and departure announcements, shouting of shunters and engine divers, and comments of postal workers who handled parcels behind the audience at the Post Office’s platform near the station. The actors quickly got used to these natural sounds, as well as the railwaymen got used to the unusual train and, according to the station manager, there weren’t any problems with its passengers. The employees of Zagreb Main Station, Unit for Special Trains of HŽ Passenger Transport and Corporate Communications gave their contribution to the organisational preparations for the arrival and stay of this special train at Zagreb Main Station.
The journey of “Orient Express” ends in Stuttgart, where from the 9th to 19th of July 2009, six different performances that were played in Ankara, Temishvar, Novi Sad, Zagreb and Ljubljana stations will be presented at the International Theatre Festival.
After this project, the words “Orient Express” will not only remind us of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, but also of a theatre train that has established and strengthened the connections between the theatres of Eastern and Western Europe, and intensified their cultural dialogue.
"Such cooperation of theatres demystifies the other and the different, demystifies the East and deconstructs the image of the so-called new Europe. The other is not observed from distance any more, but rather the margin is moved to the centre, and the ethics of exotic is replaced by the one of familiar and as a matter of fact close. So, discovering of different theatres has become the way for abatement of the limits of art, a new route of “Orient Express”, a draft for a new image of European theatres” (quote from the brochure).
