Before the Fall: Yugoslav Theaters of Opposition

Introduction:
After the Fact, October 2000

Parliament has burned in Belgrade, and suddenly this report is about the past. My notes six months ago described theater under a regime whose wars, crimes, and miseries had dominated the bad conscience of Europe and America for nine years--a regime, everyone agreed, that showed no signs of ending soon. Now they document a time and mood irrevocably gone. No matter what happens under Kostunica (who is, after all, deeply nationalist and conservative), the Milosevic period is over.

At last it's possible--and it's certainly necessary--for Serbian theater to address its wars directly, though whether it will do so is hard to predict. For almost ten years the whole texture of Yugoslav life came from war--its mafia economy, its fake-folk fake-cool culture, the police state, the paranoia. Young men who fought in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995 returned as victimizers claiming victimhood. An enormous silence, unbroken by artists, intellectuals, or the political opposition, hung over the repression in Kosovo and fed its racism and viciousness. Then NATO brought the war home. When I visited in May, war criminals and war profiteers were still in power. An invasion of Montenegro seemed possible at any moment. War wasn't a subject for Serbian theater, but it was the inescapable stage on which every subject was played.

I have searched my notes for premonitions of Milosevic's fall. Some can be found, but at the time I hadn't read them right. In part my own preconceptions, shaped by American reporting and Yugoslav movies, had misled me; but people close to the situation hadn't been exactly optimistic either. A Yugoslav playwright, now living in another country, was invited to the same symposium in Novi Sad that was the starting point for my trip. He wrote me:

I have decided not to go. I have been in Belgrade last March. It was painful to meet decent people who had fought many battles only to be defeated, humiliated, and to feel now infinitely helpless. They are in jail in this wretched country without any hope, to serve the sentence which they did not deserve. A miserable destiny: Prisoners of Milosevic, prisoners of NATO, prisoners of poverty, prisoners of an endless agony. Serbia is a place where I know in advance what I can expect.

That's the Serbia I expected, too. It was not exactly the Serbia I found.

I hadn't been there since summer 1996, when Belgrade's solitary "critical" play--later turned into the film Café Balkan and released in the United States--showed violence, heavy drinking, and extreme misogyny as the understandable, even downright endearing, results of Serb suffering. At that point, theater seemed to have regressed since the Dayton peace treaty--back in 1992 I had had the good luck to encounter Dah Theatre (dah means "breath," as in "inspiration") performing Brecht's Poems from Exile in a downtown Belgrade square. The street mood those days was thuggishly hyperpatriotic, but Dah's exquisitely trained actor-dancers recited their strong antimilitarist texts for passing housewives, bureaucrats, bums, and soldiers, made them stop and listen, and went unscathed.

In 2000, after the huge but fruitless demonstrations of winter 1996-97 and then the NATO attacks, Belgrade was surely more miserable than it had been four years earlier, though less nationalist than in 1992. But the mood sounded different: poverty and hopelessness were accompanied by a vigorous culture of complaint. The complainers themselves interpreted this as merely a phenomenon of repressive tolerance. "The small theaters can say anything because our dissent is absolutely meaningless to anyone in power and makes them look openminded," a critic grumbled. Though many of the largest cities...