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Nearly as much time, or perhaps twice as much, has elapsed since the emergence of the myths that one of the greatest of Roman poets made use of to put together his Metamorphoses. But he used them merely to serve as motifs and tales for the poems and stories, which, it would appear, are increasingly being condemned to oblivion in this our industrial, technological and information age. Or is this just a mirage. Most probably these motifs and tales have remained ingrained somehow in the collective unconscious of modern-day man because unconfined love, eroticism and much other involving pronounced passion or/and even aggression have become part of our everyday lives. If not in our private life, then at least in some thinly disguised and easily unveiled part of public life, in media, etc.
 Perhaps for this very reason Macedonian director Aleksandar Popovski and dramaturge Jelena Mijović came up with the text for this play, as they focused primarily on the first six books of the total of its fifteen, to offer natural, visible, passionate, and for monotheistic religions’ taste even overly fantastic and lascivious love stories of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 18 AD).
There are hardly any props on the stage (scenography by the NUMEN group) in the production of Metamorphoses premiered on the Yugoslav Drama Theater’s Ljuba Tadić grand stage on June 9. Just gaping space furnished with ancient columns, albeit rather thin from the standpoint of antiquity, that symbolically reach up toward the sky and Mt. Olympus, the house of gods, on the one hand and on the other, partly dwell also in Hades. The play, unfolding through narration, dance, song, music of the 1980s and psychedelic music of a group called Silence, and with the cast including Nebojša Glogovac, Tamara Vučković, Nikola Djuričko, Jelena Djokić, Goran Šušljik, Nada Šargin, Radovan Vujović and Marija Vicković, as well as the choreographer Dalija Aćin, and dancers Luka Lukić, Ana Dubljević and Darko Bursać, and in costumes done by Jelena and Svetlana Proković, recount the selected love stories, briefly glued together, as required or desired, by scotch tape -that deliberately picked and valuable achievement of our age. Like Ovid and his Metamorphoses – a dictionary of the origin of the creation myth -director Popovski and his team are trying to convey a message to all those who watch the play not to forget their own and nature surrounding them, to be prepared to tell and listen to stories, to play freely but also to be prepared to learn something from playing.
  -Once you have red Ovid, you come to realize just how little humankind has changed. How little it changed in terms of people’s character. Technologically - it is progressing, but essentially we are where we are. There’s nothing new. Metamorphoses are a transformation from one body into another, and another. We try to fixate all things, make them stable, unchangeable, once and for all because in that way we feel we can be sure of them. Marriage, job, success, failure. Ovid tells us something other: everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Nothing is forever. Tomorrow you may turn into a river, wood may become stone. This is something that is inherent. Metamorphosis is our natural state and once we become aware of this we’ll be much better off, wrote director Popovski about the production.
Rebellion against the gods was a popular theme in ancient myths. Derived from Chaos -as all living beings have, people needed to get used to good feelings but much more to pain so that as their last resort they would be turning against the higher powers. This was repeated innumerable times throughout history, and is being repeated still today.
 Clash of the Titans, Louis Leterrier’s 3D movie with a mythological theme, is shown in movie houses this year. But it is inconsistent regarding original mythological stories. In Metamorphoses, the Yugoslav Drama Theater season’s seventh and last premiere, the stories are told in their original form and probably for a good reason. Although while watching the play you may occasionally be surprised by the pronounced eroticism or brutality of men and gods, if you watch it and read it scrupulously enough, you may perhaps come to understand that this was neither Ovid’s nor the production authors’ sole aim.
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