Gavella, Branko

Born July 28, 1885, in Zagreb; died there Apr. 8, 1962. Yugoslav director. Member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences (1961).

Gavella’s creative activity began in 1914 in Zagreb, where he was director of a dramatic troupe from 1922 to 1925. He worked in theaters in Belgrade and Ljubljana and staged plays in Brno, Prague, Bratislava, and other cities. Gavella strengthened national dramaturgy in the theater’s repertoire and thereby promoted the development of Yugoslav theater art (for example, Lucićs Slave Woman, Držič’s Miser, and Sterija-Popovićs Kir Janja). Gavella’s more important works included the plays of Shakespeare (Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and others), Molière, P. Beaumarchais, B. Shaw, and L. Pirandello. He also staged operatic productions, including the works of national composers. He wrote articles on theater art and published translations of Shakespeare and French and German playwrights. He was a professor at the Academy of Theater Arts in Zagreb from 1950.