In his novel The Morning Star, Karl Ove Knausgård recounts the events that occur in just two-day period in September. We are treated to a remarkable interplay of multiple family dramas and fantasies that occur in this period. Knausgård, in his signature style enhances the narrative with essayistic and almost philosophical passages. At first glance, this mixture seems untameable, but theatre allows us the opportunity to simultaneously follow the stories of individual characters that Knausgård juxtaposes in the novel one after the other, so that his rich literary world unfolds in all its scope. This seemed to me the best starting point for my stage adaptation; in this way separate scenes can begin to communicate with each other and deliver the viewer a new and surprising whole. It turned out, as it often does, that my plan was very unpredictable as it is rather different to interweave five narrative streams on paper than to present them on stage. I knew it therefore, from the very beginning, that the final version of the stage adaptation would be completed on stage, during the rehearsals.
Goran Vojnović

The Morning Star is a novel that perfectly fits my profession as a director. For the last ten years I have been working passionately on adaptations of major prose texts. For contemporary theatre these texts provide supremely stronger material for stagings than plays. The structure of The Morning Star is distinctly narrative. In the production I would like to show different stories interfering simultaneously. The morning star, as a metaphor for a utopian future and an apocalyptic omen, shines ominously over the nine characters, and disasters seem inevitable. I am interested in the fortunes of the characters of the middle generation who have reached a certain maturity and aspire to crown their lives with successful careers and stable intimate and family relationships. Knausgård’s characters spend inauspicious days of their lives wrought in their personal struggles, undergoing crises of faith in anything, suffering from existential despair. The explanations are flawed, but life goes on and one wonders whether the characters have a premonition of their fate. Not only do scientists and experts have no explanation for the celestial natural phenomenon, for the new astonishing light, but things that are difficult to understand and strange also happen. In short, this is a novel about phenomena and events that we do not fully understand, about people who find it difficult to take control of their lives, and of the outcome once the dark forces of the world are unleashed.
Ivica Buljan