»The Story of Tzar Saltan as performed by Mini Teater represents a complex theatrical piece, which from the beginning to the end keeps surprising and astonishing us with its coherence, its creativitz, its wide palette of theatrical skills, its modern and fresh performance, its excellent timing and perfect theatrical cast. The creative team has been upgraded through three great performers: Nataša Matjašec, Milan Štefe and Akira Hasegawa. They are simply perfect within the line 'understand-capture-transfer'. The actors use themselves as a complex performing 'machine' (in the sense of a perfect wholeness, where each detail with its excellent features is deliberatekly bound into a unity, into a higher quality representing the sum and also a surplus of details). The director's skill is followed and upgraded. The actors may function as individuals as well as an excellently tuned unity. Within all this excellency of the seen (which goes for directing as well as for acting), the masterfully performed dialogues between Nataša Matjašec and Akira Hasegawa should be specially pointed out.«
(Dnevnik, Mojca J. Zoran, Excellent Beginning of the Season)
»The director placed a trio of completely relaxed and acurately measured actors in the ip-front of the stage performance. Comedian jollyness, wit and skill they joyfully play with Pushkin's romantic poetry, his characters and situations. Pictorial paper scenography and maily flat marionettes, designed by Anna Victorova, are placed on a solid playing table aerving the protagonists as a gentle and nostalgic support, yet on the other hand enabling the actors to create an ironic distance from the story that is being told. The music created by Mitja Vrhovnik smrekar represents an equally valuable component of this rhythmic, melodic and dancing wholeness; it is just occasionally inspired bythe russian national legacy while in most of the scenes it lines up the cicle dramaturgy of the story with joyful tunes and rhythms originating rather from the south of the Balkans.«
(Delo, Slavko Pezdir, Playful Marionettes)
»After seeing the performance it became obvious that the Russian director Aleksander anurov – working with Slovene actora and the rest of the team – was perfectly capable of making best use of the capacity offered by the given space. He placed a big table in the middle and the three actors play around it and on it using flat marionettes or some indispensable set element to create the story of the tragic Tzar Saltan. Due to some famičy intrigues, the Tzar gives order to throw his wife and her newborn son (closed in a resined barrel) into the sea. The two, however, succeed in reachin a desert island where, eventually the young Prince proves to be wiser and mightier a ruler as well as saver of a bewitched princess ... »
(Večer,Uroš Smasek, A playful puppet 'table')
