Milena Marković's "Ship for Dolls" is a story about one or all of women's destinies, or for all human destinies – how a woman experiences her life as a series of unfulfilled fairy tales. He recognizes the pattern of fairy tales in the events of his life, those real fairy tales that teach us that life is not at all beautiful, that in life there are also witches and evil wizards and dangerous monsters and that everything can be waiting for us in some dark rooms at the end of the corridor, at the end of it all.
We are all in a position to reconsider our living and few of us are satisfied with our own lives. Those fairy tales without a happy ending mark the life of people in these areas, here where we live, where everything happened after the collapse of the earth, with the collapse of the economic and political system and created nervousness, hungry and humiliated people living an unhappy life. That search for the meaning of one's life in a series of unrealizations is something that makes this poetry of Milena Marković magnificent, both literary and stage work.

Kokan Mladenovic, director

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Milena Markovic (1974, Belgrade) is a poet, playwright, screenwriter, full professor at FDU - Belgrade, in a word, an artist whose work destroys myths and stereotypes, recreates reality and existential reality in powerful and poignant images.
She has won many awards for her poetry and screenplays, and she also wrote plays that are performed with great success on the international and domestic stage. It is the winner of a special prize in Vienna for the best drama from the ex-yu areas and three international awards for the best text, among them Ship for the Dolls and Dragon Slayers., and with the novel in verses Children won the NIN award for the best novel in 2021.
The drama Ship for Dolls brings the essential problems of man to the stage, his fears and existential questions taken from a familiar context – the fairy tale where, as the ancient tragedians did with myth, and put into a new discourse gradually gaining a new identity.
As the author herself will say: "The most beautiful fairy tales have no lesson. Because they do not serve for comfort here for and for excitement – they prepare for death. “
Doll ship – in seven plots and seven different settings refers to the seven incarnations of the heroine and the seven metamorphoses of her passive female principle.
Eager to experience life, the little girl opens the door of the forbidden room and suddenly the beasts jump in front of her and her safe world collapses - the world in which mom easily chases the "scarecrows", and dad can always send the broken toys on the doll ship to some nice place,
This intimate story of a woman – a victim of a little girl who chooses to remain silent on her own or when advised, to neglect, to be morally discredited because she deserved this abuse with her actions.
The woman changes roles and existential statuses incredibly quickly as Alice with an intense desire to escape from the home where you "make a fool of yourself when your grandfather pinches you": as Snow White – a deluded high school girl between heroin and weapons – a man's world where everything is charged with sexual services; like Goldilocks, where the toxicity of the patriarchy stands out the most, where as a result we see a young spoiled man unable to live without his parents - and the woman who is in charge of giving birth bears the blame because from the fertilization with his good seed a "defective child" is born; like Paleshka who could not get a prince by kissing an old Toad; so a woman who has no ovaries and is therefore obliged to suffer the Eagle and his whims so that in the end Ivica and Maritsa visit her in the forest as the Witch - the failed artist who will finish this work with her death – waiting for the paper doll ship to sail by.
"Only monsters and artists stay alive.", they are talked about and people fear them. Sometimes even those who are well positioned at the beginning do not win, but those who have a miracle. That is why there is an artist in this drama. She has a miracle in her. Except it's a miracle, she is also a monster" – says Marković.

Biljana Krajchevska, playwright