LegalAliens Theatre, Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR), and the MESS International Theatre Festival (presented at Heartefact House, Belgrade, on 14th June 2025)
The Flowers of Srebrenica was created to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. It is based on the illustrated novel of the same name by Aidan Hehir, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom. The novel, published by Qendra Multimedia, emerged at the margins of Hehir’s academic work, as a researcher’s foray into the realm of art; it distils the experience of an Irish professor confronted with the horrors of ethnic cleansing in a distant country.
Hehir’s book recounts a single day in the author’s life, as he travels from Sarajevo to Srebrenica with Mustafa, a local man and war survivor. Their restrained interaction, through sparse and cautious exchanges, as well as prolonged silences, reveals several layers of interest. Most evidently, it reflects the challenges of a foreigner navigating through a foreign country, and the difficulties of overcoming cultural distance. In this case, the connection is specific: it entails a desire to hear the testimony of someone who lived through war, but also a deep hesitation to reopen those old wounds. More significantly, the novel addresses the inadequacy of scholarly discourse to fully convey aspects of experience that escape academic methodology: impressions, revulsion, moments of awe, smells, sounds, sensations, intuitions, and the inner experience of the researcher himself. Bound by the constraints of his profession, these zones of lived experience are articulated only through a turn toward art. Yet art, too, is not a space of absolute freedom because it has its own rules, structures, and limitations.
For readers from the former Yugoslavia, such a narrative, bearing the toponym Srebrenica in its title and telling of a brief journey rendered in cleverly restrained prose, might appear as little more than an outsider’s thoughtful note on horrors that ultimately defy representation. Aware of this limitation, the theatrical adaptation of Hehir’s journey was undertaken by LegalAliens Theatre, Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR), and the MESS International Theatre Festival, under the direction of Lara Parmiani and with dramaturgical support from Becka McFadden. While preserving many of the idiosyncrasies of the original text, they replace the first-person narration with a chorus of women played by Taz Munyanezza, Valeria Poholsha, and Selma Alispahić who come from countries with recent histories of war (Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine).
The script is enriched with theoretical and factual interludes. The dialogue between Mustafa and the Professor is replaced by Brechtian, didactic interventions, an ironically delivered “recipe” for carrying out ethnic cleansing, wartime footage, lists of victims, and similar material. The scenography by Isabella Van Braeckel is simple but layered in meaning: a heap of shredded rubber initially represents the charred remains of victims, from which the chorus pulls out clothing, later transforming into earth, finally poured into the audience’s open palms. Soil soaked with blood, as the play simplistically suggests, can be cleansed only with the seed of peace.
A plausible and nearly realistic story in which one can almost feel the summer heat and touch the whiteness of gravestones, smile at the subtle humour of Mustafa and the Professor’s exchanges, and sense the initial tension of their relationship, is, in Parmiani’s staging, given a more explicitly activist framing. She strips away the subtle allure of the bond between the two characters and instead uses their journey as a trigger to ask broader questions about the nature and recurrence of atrocity, a task taken over by the female chorus.
The use of three actresses in a stylized register initially feels somewhat clumsy, particularly in scenes where they pretend to be parts of the car in which the two men are driving. Their role is most effective when they engage with the production’s central symbolic motif: the shifting mound of earth.
The Flowers of Srebrenica. Photo: Raisa Šehu
Once the narrative focus shifts away from the two companions, a vital dimension of the story loses its traction. With the Professor no longer acting as narrator of his own story, this sense of reticence and hesitation vanishes entirely, and the character – portrayed by Cillian O’Donnachadha – serves more of a role of a structural device: a catalyst for the journey and a bearer of questions. A similar fate befalls Mustafa, played by Edin Suljić. Rather than a man carrying the trauma of war and offering a grounded, almost sage-like reflection on its aftermath, he becomes a perpetually puzzled figure who delivers compressed, emblematic statements seemingly by accident.
One gets the impression that the creators intended to produce an informative, educational, and activist commentary on Srebrenica, but the source material subtly resisted this purpose. The resulting production oscillates between the curiosity of a road trip and the forceful impulse of Brechtian political theatre, without fully settling into either register.
When representing genocide on stage, a particular challenge lies in how the victims are addressed. In The Flowers of Srebrenica, the names of the dead are used as a theatrical device, rapidly projected in long lists that, while illustrating the scale of the atrocity, also risk reducing individuals to statistical entries. Oliver Frljić attempted to radically circumvent this problem in his 2011 project Cowardice at the National Theatre in Subotica, where, toward the end of the performance, the actors recite the names of all 505 known victims (a number that has since surpassed 8,000). In doing so, the performance both halts and generates a powerful theatrical act, one that is simultaneously provocative and deeply affecting.
This is not so much a criticism of the directorial intent in The Flowers, as is a reflection on the deep difficulty of finding a form that can combine reverence for the dead with critical engagement. To speak of genocide victims, of life after genocide, and of the imperative that such crimes never be repeated, especially in a country that still denies this one, and at a time when a genocide of significantly larger proportions is unfolding elsewhere, in Palestine, requires a delicate balance of ethical sensitivity, political awareness, and artistic responsibility. Flowers of Srebrenica does not always succeed in striking that balance, but it points toward the necessity of continually reopening the question within the space of art, where every act of representation is also an act of memory and accountability.
Credits
Director: Lara Parmiani//Dramaturg: Lara Parmiani, Becka McFadden//Producer: Amy Sze//Set/costume designer: Isabella Van Braeckel//Projection designer: Edalia Day//Sound designer: Jovana Backović//Lighting designer: Nedim Pejdah//Cultural consultant: Edin Suljić// Original illustrations: David Frankum
Cast: Selma Alispahić, Taz Munyaneza, Valeriia Poholsha, Edin Suljić, Cillian O’Donnchadha, Jeremiah O’Connor
For further information, visit: Legalalienstheatre.com
Andrej Čanji is a theatre critic and theatrologist based in Belgrade.
