Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad, premiere 2nd October 2024
Veljko Mićunović’s performance last year of Fathers and Forefathers at the National Theatre in Belgrade captivated the minds of the audience, regular theatregoers and performing arts professionals alike (the performance was awarded the Sterija Prizes for the best performance and best direction, among others). Mićunović’s retro-Bitef-esque directing style – the cold, detached way of acting that symbolized alienation, the minimalist and symbolic set design and the pronounced musicality – was a refreshing to audiences accustomed to Serbia’s often artistically conventional theatrical landscape.
This glitz of old-avant-garde-made-new aesthetics was enough for the majority of the public to overlook the reactionary political core of the performance, in which the establishment of socialism in Yugoslavia was portrayed as the greatest tragedy of the first half of the 20th century and in which stereotypes and misunderstandings between different ethnic groups (especially between Serbs and British) were seen as irremediable. All this was disguised inside a multi-generational saga of the Serbian inter-war bourgeois Medaković family. For me personally, the question was whether the right-wing politics of the show were intentional or whether they slipped through while the director focused on the aesthetics.
I still had this question in mind while I was on my way to the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad to see Mićunović’s new production Redemption. I was wondering if this latest performance was going to offer a completely new artistic and political angle, not in any way connected to Fathers and Forefathers, and if my previous question was going to be archived in my personal theatre history.
For a while, especially at the beginning of Redemption, it seemed so. When Boris Isaković enters the stage playing the main character Grigorije Zidar, the World War II hero turned truck driver, he looks simultaneously as exhausted and resigned as an old man near the end of his life and as naïve and bored as a child (this latter impression is reinforced by a toy truck that moves around the stage representing the character’s vehicle). After the toy truck gets stuck in a pile of dirt, we learn that our character is stranded in a fictional provincial town called Nehaj – literally translated as “Indifference”. (It’s worth noting that, at the beginning of the performance, piles of dirt were spilled from bags on stage by other members of the ensemble who later represent corrupt, opportunistic members of society.) Soon, this story will turn into something that resembles an existential, Kafkaesque narrative of a man who cannot prove his identity.
As it turns out, Isaković’s character once fought the Nazis in Nehaj, earning the status of a war hero, after which he was captured and sent to a concentration camp in Norway. After liberation, he stayed and married in the Scandinavian country, returning years later as an anonymous to Yugoslavia. When he is by chance stranded in Nehaj – and it’s in the 1970s when the story takes place – no one believes him that he is their war hero, whose monument stands uprightly in the centre of the town. Even worse, local and state officials accuse him of identity theft. Because, as the local legend goes, the war hero is long dead and, accordingly, this newcomer is trying to profit by pretending to be someone he is not.
By the end of the show we learn that the protagonist did not have a reason to lie and that, in fact, local and state officials had a benefit in characterizing him as a fraudster. While this can still be interpreted as a symbolic existential story about a small, everyday man who gets ground in the bureaucratic state machinery, the concrete political implications become much clearer. Redemption transforms into a parable about the inherently corrupt, undemocratic socialist Yugoslav system of the 1970s which discards its national heroes for the sake of the profit of kleptocratic individuals. It is a story about a system that subjugates the truth and well-being of its citizens for the benefit of the ruling class (the ruling class being, as this interpretation goes, the uneducated schemers who relentlessly cling to power).
The complex social and political reality of socialist Yugoslavia is a theme that not only deserves to be explored on theatre stages but should be an essential part of any public discussion that wants to understand the societies that arose from the chaos of Yugoslavia’s break-up. On one hand, there was corruption and partocracy in the government but it was also a period where workers, women and other portions of society enjoyed envious rights, many of which we can only dream of in our present-day neoliberalism. It was a country where censorship existed but to a much lesser extent than in the Eastern Block and in many countries in the West. Contradictions of Yugoslavia are many and all of them can make great although demanding theatre topics, but shows such as Redemption resort to a simplistic, one-sided and revisionist narrative that often succumbs to nationalist forces which use the forgery of history as its tool.
Redemption, Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad
On that note, Mićunović’s performance is based on Branimir Šćepanović’s novel of the same name which was dramatized by Slobodan Obradović. The novel was published in the early 1990s while Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody dissolution, torn by competing fascist-like nationalisms in the region. The horrors of the 1990s were so drastic that they eclipsed any kind of societal malfunction a peacefully multicultural country such as Yugoslavia might have had. To present readers of this period with a simplistic allegory that sees Yugoslavia as a Kafkaesque structure that devours its citizens only feeds the false nationalistic view that the country was a totalitarian system and that the antidote to it was individual nation-states based on ethnic supremacy.
If it’s a puzzling question why Šćepanović chose to write a novel one-sidedly critiquing a bygone Yugoslav system while the new order in the region was creating war crimes and soon-to-be genocide, it’s an equally bewildering question why Mićunović decided to stage a dramatization of the novel today, especially since the book fell into relative obscurity. To be fair, the director might have not wanted to focus on the story’s politics towards Yugoslavia but on broader, universal man-versus-the-system implications. Redemption tries to communicate with our present-day society. Marina Sremac’s costume design has more than a touch of contemporary with its almost hipster style, with coloured leather jackets and pants, shirts with whimsical patterns and Isaković’s Adidas (or Adidas-inspired) sneakers. More importantly, the audience is at one point given a chance to save the protagonist’s reputation. As we are for a few moments turned into Nehaj’s citizens, we are asked by the actors to speak up if we are sure that the man in front of us is truly the war hero Grigorije Zidar. Silence. The audience is turned into a passive public that’s afraid to act and tell the truth.
However, I would argue that these contemporary implications are not strong enough to detach the story from the 1970s Yugoslav context. Redemption is so firmly based in the politics of the period that its universalist implications fade in comparison. This production remains primarily a revisionist piece that ignores the historical complexities of Yugoslavia, although it cleverly hides its intentions behind an allegorical tale.
For a short time, I still wondered if Veljko Mićunović intentionally coloured both Fathers and Forefathers and Redemption with such revisionist tones or if they slipped through (again!) while he was focusing on more artistic or metaphorical aspects of the story. In the end, I decided that it does not matter. Both shows represent an irresponsible and reactionary view of history and they deserve to be called out for it.
Credits:
Director: Veljko Mićunović// Dramatization and dramaturgy: Slobodan Obradović //Scenography: Zorana Petrov// Costume design: Marina Sremac// Music selection: Veljko Mićunović
For more information, visit: snp.org.rs
Further reading: review of Fathers and Forefathers
Borisav Matić is a critic and dramaturg from Serbia. He is the Regional Managing Editor at The Theatre Times. He regularly writes about theatre for a range of publications and media.
He’s a member of the feminist collective Rebel Readers with whom he co-edits Bookvica, their platform for literary criticism, and produces literary shows and podcasts. He occasionally works as a dramaturg or a scriptwriter for theatre, TV, radio and other media. He's the administrator of IDEA - the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association.
