Belgrade Drama Theatre, premiere 6th April 2024
In response to the neglected financial state of the region’s cultural sector, theatres have increasingly started to pool their resources. As a result, international co-productions are now being created between countries that were once part if a single country, often with additional financial support from European Union funds.
One such project is Shadow Pandemic: Hidden Voices launched a competition in 2022 for three dramatic texts written by women on the subject of violence against women during the pandemic. The competition was organised by the Maribor Theatre Festival, the Zagreb Youth Theatre and the Belgrade Drama Theatre. One text was selected from each of the three countries and director Selma Spahić was entrusted with the task of creating an omnibus play from these three texts in three languages and with three ensembles, to be performed in three theatres.
The first part of the anthology, Under the Skirt by Kristina Kegljen, deals with partner violence in a typically patriarchal community, but in an unusual way. The mother and daughter repeatedly kill the father figure: they beat him with a shovel, a board, a stone and a vase, strangle him with their hands, suffocate him with a pillow, stab him with a knife, shoot him with a rifle, poison him with oleander tea and leave him to freeze to death in a room with an open window.
This violence is presented in the style of a Greek tragedy in that takes place off-screen. What unfolds before the audience is a dialogue about the patriarchal violence to which the two women have been subjected. Kegljen recalls the Sparagmos motif from Euripides’ The Bacchae, the ritual dismemberment of a victim, which implies the symbolic replacement of one order by another. The emancipatory change does not yet take place here – but it is a state drama that shows the death of the patriarchal order by means of a time loop that is repeated in countless similar forms.
The order in which the pieces are performed in the omnibus is not random. Although each part has its own value, the way in which they are arranged and staged results in a dialectical interweaving between the pieces. The second part, The Activists by Slovenian author Katja Gorečan, gives voice to women whose existence is no longer dependent on a male figure. Their partial emancipation from patriarchal shackles entangles them in the intrigues of the precariat.
This mainly concerns the position of young female experts in the arts and humanities. Their position is reduced to a poorly paid part-time job. The projects they apply for force them to do demanding work quickly. The employers are the directors of cultural institutions, mostly middle-aged men. The uncertainty of the work, the volatility of earnings and the atmosphere of competition are the cause of terrible stress, anxiety attacks, depression and hair loss. It is a meta-theatre piece that brings impossible working conditions to the stage.
The third and final piece, The world deserves the end of the world by Tijana Grumić, serves as a synthesis of the entire play. Her piece unites the thesis of traditional family hell from the first part and its antithesis, embodied by the ruthless liberal vortex of the second part. Grumić has written a densely interwoven story about three women: a landlady, a literature student and her mother. They talk about the arrangements they make for their own survival: marriage as a survival mechanism, the countless jobs a woman does around the household, egg cells donation and so on.
At the same time, the author also gives voice to some pigs that have escaped from the slaughterhouse. The drama compares the struggles and views of the three imprisoned women, but also draws a parallel between their fates and the pigs that have achieved freedom. The play ends in a hyperbolic metatheatrical feast of the pigs. who devour everything before them – including the characters in the play and the play itself.
The End of the World in Three Acts, Belgrade Drama Theatre
Director Selma Spahić organises the omnibus in such a way as to create the impression of a single complete story. She recognises the stylistic pattern that is strongly present in the first and third piece and somewhat less in the second – the use of the grotesque as a technique of exaggeration and distortion that combines incompatible factors, especially humour and horror, with the aim of critically questioning social conventions.
All three texts combine the banal with the brutal to a greater or lesser extent. The actors expressions are also orientated towards the grotesque. Their language and appearance have a seriousness that contrasts with their words, which are often charged with a dark, absurd humour. The characters sometimes show signs of a naïve attitude towards their surroundings, which contrasts with their quick and confident demeanour in killing, working or talking about their terrible existence. The grotesque is also reinforced by irony, conveyed through forced cheerfulness and exuberance.
Draško Adžić’s music contributes significantly to this atmosphere of horror, It is full of eerie sounds and beats that repeat like a broken gramophone; Belinda Radulović’s expressive costumes also stand out, especially the pig costumes, designed as a row of five pairs of breasts.
Urša Vidic’s set design is in keeping with the dialectical interweaving of the three plays. The first part shows the interior of a haunted house, with stuffed animals symbolising dismembered men and the scattered objects with which the murders were committed. The second part begins with seemingly emancipated, independent female cultural workers dismantling and eliminating this patriarchal nightmare. However, such a revolution proves to be a fruitless endeavour, as it soon becomes clear that they are trapped in the liberal order of the empty space of possibilities.
These possibilities, however, are presented as a trap conveyed via repetitive choreography: the dance of the precariat. The actresses dance with synchronised movements to the rhythm of ironically intoned eternal gratitude for the temporary and small opportunities that the system offers them. The third part presents itself as a scattered, chaotic, deconstructed space filled with motifs from the first two pieces.
Unfortunately, there will be few opportunities to see this project. Having been performed first in Belgrade, it will have a s short run in Zagreb and finally in Maribor. And that’s it. The end. I have heard that there is an idea that each theatre will keep its part of the omnibus, that is, that the parts will be performed independently of each other, but this would mean missing out on the exciting and coherently designed experience of the whole of the trilogy.
The authors of the plays, together with Selma Spahić, have created a performance which exposes and criticises the very system in which the competition was announced. They expose the fickleness and unreliability of the capitalist attitude towards artists, cultural workers and their work. It is precisely for this reason that the show ends with pigs marching through the audience. They demand the end of the exhibited world. It’s not an entirely pessimistic ending, because the end of this world would be a good thing. As the song by R.E.M. says: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine”.
Credits:
Authors: Kristina Kegljen, Katja Gorečan, Tijana Grumić//Director: Selma Spahić//Dramaturgy: Ivana Vuković//Scenography: Urša Vidic//Costumes: Belinda Radulović
Further reading: Interview with Selma Spahić: “Resistance in the arts is a necessity”
Andrej Čanji is a theatre critic and theatrologist based in Belgrade.
