Belgrade Drama Theatre, premiere 30th August 2024
In Serbia, plays dealing with various forms of violence are being performed more and more frequently. This year alone, numerous titles have appeared that clearly refer to concrete events: Violence against women (The End of the World in Three Acts, BDP), baby theft (Excluded, Sombor National Theatre), paedophilia (Fading Away, Atelier 212), the consequences of war (No One is Forgotten and We Remember Nothing, Atelier 212), to name but a few.
If we look back a few years, we notice that the topic of violence committed against women by men is the most frequently treated topic. This trend in theatre corresponds with the increasing presence of a feminist-oriented discourse, thanks to which the normalisation of violence against women is highlighted and a critical stance is taken towards patriarchal values.
As a consequence of the rightly increasing focus on violence against women, one could argue that the topic of structural violence where men are the victims has been somewhat neglected. Although this topic can be found here and there in Serbian theatre, it is usually only marginally present. In this context, the play Bird Cage, which is based on the play by Nikola Stanišić and won the Sterija Award for the best dramatic text in 2023, is particularly important.
The play is produced by the Belgrade Drama Theatre as part of the “New Voices” project, which brings together the most promising young artists, especially authors and directors. Numerous young actors, set designers, costume designers and composers are engaged to give them the opportunity to take their first professional steps.
The protagonists are boys, teenagers, who are in a reform centre. The dialogues and monologues are designed in an atypical way: Conversations and confessions are framed in rectangles representing the experiences of the young prisoners, recorded in the form of correspondence on social networks, chats in video games, Telegram, etc. The stories Stanišić creates tell of a society that forces young people into crime. They are neglected, mistreated, humiliated and abused. Those who are supposed to look after them have abandoned them. The very conspicuous vulgar language of insults and jargon in this play simultaneously expresses both the need to normalise existence and the inability to shape one’s own life outside the framework of violence.
The dramaturg Vanja Šević succeeds in the challenging transformation of an unconventional dramatic structure into a more familiar format. She transforms the non-linear story into a clear chronological sequence of events and retains poignant soliloquies as a cross-section of the plot. Three educators, who appear in the text only as verbal imitations of the youngsters, were added to the characters of the four convicts. This led to a maelstrom of violence in which the terrifyingly brutal treatment of the boys by the educators changes from scene to scene, which is consequently also reflected in the harsh conflicts between the convicts themselves. It is hard to imagine that there is abuse on such a scale in the reformatory, but unfortunately it is not hard to believe it either. However, by stringing together scenes of violence, one gets the impression that the play creates the effect of exaggeration to emphasise a problem that does exist, but perhaps not in such a raw form. Although one could ask why was a text with a particular dramatic form chosen just to transform it into a more recognisable form, this cannot be an objection to the structure created, especially as the author himself foresees a free arrangement of the given scenes.

Bird Cage, Belgrade Drama Theatre
Director Slobodan Stanković, for whom this is a graduation play, recognised the hyperbolic nature of the resulting text and decided not to burden the plot with symbolic elements or complex stage expression. As the events depicted leave a very strong impression, he focuses primarily on working with the actors. In staging the play, he succeeds in maintaining a constantly violent and dramatic atmosphere, but in such a way that the events never turn into uncontrollable violence. The empty space directs our entire focus onto the suffering of the characters. It relies on the black surroundings, the grey colour of all the costumes and the gloomy lighting. The aggressive atmosphere is further emphasised by Arsenije Arsić’s music. The street rap of the new generation expresses the social vulnerability of young people in the fighting rhythm of resistance against the imposed system.
A predominantly young acting ensemble, some of whom are still in their final year of study, promises a bright future for Serbian theatre. Mihailo Laptošević, Vukašin Jovanović and Stevan Smiljanić play employees of educational institutions who embody the systemic oppression of abandoned children. They are entrusted with the task of portraying pure, shameless and merciless violence without a shred of remorse. Bratislav Zdravković as @atomski_mrav8 plays the youngest member of the correctional centre team who is there for theft. Neglected and divorced parents, a disinterested family who appeases him with video games, and then he falls in love with a girl he needs money for. Budimir Stošić in the role of @cicimange2005 makes moderate use of the motoric tics of a seventeen-year-old boy who also comes from a divorced home and is imprisoned for drug dealing. Rista Milutinović is @06kuravela, the only one who ended up in the reformatory innocently because he took responsibility for the death of his father, whom he caught raping his girlfriend. He is the strongest of the inmates and follows the example of the educators, who become the epitome of violence. Nikola Mijatović, a unique actor, portrays the character of @007miili, a strong and humiliated, resourceful and abandoned, hopeful and repeatedly raped boy. He ended up there because he was beaten by his mother and forced to steal.
They all have the challenging task of breathing life into characters who have not lived a decent life, of prolonging the agony of children who have not forgotten to dream, of being both victims and bullies, of revealing the need for love through the language of hate, of longing for tenderness in a world of cruelty – and they do it with undeniable plausibility.
Birdcage is a play about forgotten boys from the social margins. They are victims of poverty, neglectful parents, broken families, a poor society and a dysfunctional system. They survive indescribable horrors, carry them around with them and, in many cases, become part of the machinery of violence into which they have been forged. Because they have learnt to suffer, they hide their traumas with their own character and so secretly pass us by, begging for a hug or preparing an attack. They long for relief, but we are all afraid to open the door of the cage they are locked in because we don’t know if a bird or a beast will fly out.
Credits:
Text: Nikola Stanišić//Director: Slobodan Stanković//Dramaturg: Vanja Šević
For more information, visit: bdp.rs
Andrej Čanji is a theatre critic and theatrologist based in Belgrade.