Director Kokan Mladenović talks to Nick Awde about his recent work, the ensemble system, his thoughts on audiences and the need to resist artistic compromise.
“Theatre is one of the last bastions of free thought and free speech,” says Serbian director Kokan Mladenović, “or at least it should be. And this is precisely why our governments – who are followers of big capital like the majority of the world – want to limit that free space. Their aim is to reduce theatre to an entertainment or aesthetic function that has a value system which removes the role of the audience as creative participants and limits the artists as hired workers who agree to treat each show as merely a product that should be packaged and sold, instead of being an artistic work that has relevance for performers and audience equally.”
In this age of digital communication and control, the public word spoken from the stage still holds huge power, its spontaneity placing it beyond any control – well, at least that’s the theory. Mladenović defines this sort of theatre as the art of the polis, which affects all the community and speaks for it. “There are theatres that are afraid of their power, but fortunately we still have people who know how to use it for the benefit of the community where they create and for the pride of the theatre itself. So even today, theatre has the opportunity again and again to be the one that will synthesize the experience of our epoch, ask the right questions and offer hope for the future.”
Mladenović’s latest show takes satire as the vehicle to address these questions. Smrt na dopustu (Death with Interruptions), produced by Zagreb’s Satirical Theatre Kerempuh, is his adaptation with the theatre ensemble of As Intermitências da Morte, the influential 2005 novel by the Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. The premise is simple: in an unnamed country, Death is distracted and stops killing, but after the initial euphoria dies down everyone realises that Death is the basis of everything that makes up the life of a country – the church, politics, the social and health care system, even the economy.
“So while Death is not actually killing people because she has fallen in love with a cellist from the local orchestra, her absence highlights the reverse side of the societies that we live in. Nothing is really what it appears to be as the whole state system becomes dangerously overloaded. No one is deceased – the hospitals are full of the dying but not the dead – and as the state pays more and more pensions, no one is taking out life insurance, and the church is deprived of its unique selling point and top product: selling eternal life after this earthly life.”
It’s an irreverent yet supremely relevant take that neatly fits the vision of the Kerempuh, where new artistic director Sonja Kovačić is transforming the repertoire. Her aim is to restore the authority of satire by staging plays that have their fingers on society’s pulse and so connect and confront audiences with the reality of the world in which they live and not just to make people laugh.
The challenge of adding this extra level certainly matches Mladenović’s way of creating. “I came to the first rehearsal with just Saramago’s novel and an idea of what could be done with it in the context of theatre. For the next few months, the creative team and ensemble examined the novel’s potential for the stage and we developed a template for a new satirical play.”
Death with Interruptions is a good example of Kerempuh‘s move to widen satire’s remit as a style – or, better, a method – that transcends comedy and informs every level of the productions. As Kovačić has stated, the theatre should embody this style that extends through everything it creates on stage as a “red thread that binds all the performances” – and of course binds the audiences.
Death with Interruptions, Kerempuh Theatre
In fact the audiences need revamping too, it would seem. “There are two types of audience in theatre,” Mladenović points out, “which are more or less the same at least in the countries where I work. The first is eager for dialogue, ready for theatre to ask it questions about the pressing issues of our time and offer possible answers. This represents the real theatre audience, the audience that is the interlocutor, inspirer and companion of good theatre.
“And then there is the audience that is shaped by the general bad taste of the times we live in, like reality shows and talent shows, ‘educated’ to observe everything including theatre through the cheap emotions, scandals and colourful lies that are offered to it at every corner. This audience expects the actors to conform to its standards, to entertain it at any cost in the belief that the price of a ticket gives the right to receive a product that satisfies it. Such an audience is the plague of the world we live in and it must be educated and defeated, it must be offered a theatrical language that will turn it around, that will attract it to this side of taste and reason.”
He doesn’t pull his punches, and yet the law of the market is never far from a production, a constant financial pressure that conspires to compromise the final shape that a production presents to its audience. Certainly the downward slide of funding in the Balkans contributes to keeping the message off stages.
Mladenović points out that “in Serbia, the country where I live, the budget for culture is 0.62% of the total budget. It’s clear evidence of our political elite’s attitude towards culture. Everything that starts with zero eventually turns into zero, and as long as these political zeroes make decisions about us, it is illusory to expect that the situation with our theatres will improve. The reduced number of premieres due to lack of funding has had the effect of forcing the management of theatres to play it safe. They refuse to take risks with plays, directors, collaborators, new forms, aesthetics. They’re forced to renounce provocative subjects and courageous opinions about the ugly reality we live in.”
Certainly in Serbia, Mladenović sees the devastation of the education and culture system as being deliberately implemented because the political elites have no need of free, cultured and thinking citizens and so they have no need to respond to them. However, since he also works as a lecturer in theatre directing at FDA Belgrade, does Mladenović see academia as a way of keeping the struggle going from within the system?
“What our students have to do is to invent their own theatre, to come up with a new system that is suitable for their age, generation and the barriers they face in the world they live in,” he explains. “As a teacher I try to open up as many opportunities as possible for our students, to inspire them to find in themselves the artistic form that best represents their worldviews. They grow up in a world of surveillance capitalism without ideology, progressive ideals or platforms for collective betterment, where money and power are the only two deities. This is precisely why I encourage them to find a strong individual, artistic response to their times and that they need to believe that this response can be part of a movement that will make our world a meaningful and humane place again.”
In the meantime, compromises continue to be made which, within theatre’s precarious economy, can prove daunting for even the most experienced theatre makers. Part of the problem lies in the permanent subsidised state ensembles that are often the dominant structure of theatre organisation in the countries where Mladenović works, sustaining a model of lifetime contracts and secure salaries that he sees as having a disastrous effect on the creative process. “So if there is a problem in our work – direction, scenography, costume design and so on – it will be the result of the collision with such an outdated system and the way it holds back creativity. Entering this form of theatre is a compromise from the very beginning and it takes a huge amount of effort, skill and knowledge to overcome it in a way that does not jeopardise the essence of the work you are doing.”
As good examples of how to resist any sinking into mediocrity, Mladenović singles out the work of his peers Oliver Frljić and Andraš Urban. They share the belief that theatre, like any art, can fight for the “absolute values of justice, honour, morality, love” and therefore represents a natural and necessary critical platform to counter any government, even the most democratic.
The Last Girls
One way of throwing up a critical mirror to the present is making connections with the past. Together with the Deže Kostolanji theatre ensemble from Subotica, Mladenović devised Oblak u pantalonama, based on Mayakovsky’s poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’. “A hundred years after the October Revolution, we set out to re-examine the revolutionary potential of our own era, looking for the answer to the question of what could motivate us today – after all the negative experiences we have inherited – towards a collective or even individual revolution. What ideals are left to us that we would fight for at the price of losing our lives in that fight?”
Another play reflecting today through the past is 2022’s Nenadoma, reka (Suddenly, the River) at SNG Nova Gorica in Slovenia, based on Dimitri Kokanov’s text which was inspired by Orwell’s 1984. “The play looks at today’s totalitarianism and the relationship of the individual against the system as well as the self-limiting freedom that we have imposed on ourselves by adapting to modern life. The play creates a dystopia that ends in a post-apocalyptic world where people have to form new communities from scratch, but it proves impossible because we have carried with us the only constants of the human species from our previous lives – hatred and aggression.”
Mladenović’s production of Maja Pelević’s Poslednje devojčice (The Last Girls) in Serbia and abroad is based around an artificial insemination clinic where even the new-born babies are treated as commodities in a process that only cares about profit, devoid of humanity or empathy. “For Maja, it was the basis for creating an anti-utopia that leads us to the end of our world, filled with Beckettian emptiness, and sets us in front of a new beginning, without compass or landmarks, abandoned to ourselves.”
Work like this can get audiences to consider positive new beginnings. “We all have to reinvent the theatre of our times,” says Mladenović. “The world around us is changing at such a speed that the current snail’s pace evolution of theatre is illogical, especially when audience often thinks faster than the performance they are watching. I think the combined experience of the past theatre generations, both literary and performing, has to be the starting point for creating a new theatre – a theatre of synthesis.
“The less compromises we make in searching for the new, the more successful our theatre will be. In addition, in a world ruled by neoliberal fascism and whose only framework is money and power, theatre has the chance to offer that much-missed platform of optimism and hope for the world that surrounds it.”
For more information, visit: kazalistekerempuh.hr
Further reading: interview with Selma Spahić: “Resistance in the arts is necessary”
Nick Awde is a journalist, playwright, editor, critic and producer. Based in the UK, he is co-director of Morecambe's Alhambra Theatre. Books include Equal Stages (diversity and inclusion in theatre), Mellotron, Women In Islam, and translations of plays by other writers. Much of his work focuses on ethnoconflict and language/cultural genocide.
