Infernal Circles of the History Machine

Eastern European Theater after the Iron Curtain edited by Kalina Stefanova, English-style editor Ann Waugh. 2000: Harwood Academic Publishers.

What has happened to the theaters of Eastern Europe since the sudden and unexpected collapse of communism? The collection of twenty-seven essays compiled by the Bulgarian theater critic and historian Kalina Stefanova is the most recent and comprehensive attempt to answer that question. The book takes us through twelve countries, ranging from Albania to Ukraine, but omitting Belorus and Estonia, the editor tells us, due to communication problems with the contributors, while the reasons for not including any of the countries resulting from the breakup of former Yugoslavia remain unexplained--perhaps the wars raging in some of them made it impossible. In any case, the absence of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia leaves a gaping hole in the map; and these could have been among the most interesting case studies.

The format of Eastern European Theater after the Iron Curtain is a bit cumbersome: each essay by a scholar or critic is preceded by a foreword--sometimes two forewords!--by distinguished artists and writers of the caliber of Yuri Liubimov, Václav Havel, Árpád Göncz (president of Hungary), and Ismail Kadare (Albanian novelist and poet). The aim, of course, is to add luster and panache by displaying big names, but these celebrity contributions are often no more than a paragraph or two, and such snippets, not always even written for the collection, tend to be hortatory and high-flown.

The major problem with the book, however, is neither its failure to be all-inclusive or its bumpy multitiered structure, but rather its attempting to serve two not entirely compatible goals. Stefanova's collection sets out to be up-to-date reportage on the current state of Eastern European theater and at the same time serious historical documentation about a specific period. Written between 1994 and 1996 by highly knowledgeable Eastern European theater critics at universities and state institutes, the essays are full of anecdotal "insider" information about what director left which theater for what new position. The endless facts and figures about state budgets, ticket prices, government funding percentages, and actor salaries are no longer actual. By the year 2000 much of the statistical content has already been superseded. For this reason Stefanova's collection is an uneasy mixture of theater journalism and theater scholarship, and the title itself reflects its rather unfocused goals. "Eastern European Theater in Transition: 1989-1996" would be more accurate. Yet despite these flaws inherent in the project itself, the essays themselves contain many penetrating insights and offer glimpses of the disappearing world of totalitarian communist theater caught in flux between stifling state patronage and grim market forces threatening to turn theater artists into orphans.

The story that emerges from the diverse Eastern European countries is essentially the same for all--the same tales of woes, the same faint hopes for the future repeated from essay to essay. Having achieved the freedom from repression that they so long sought, the theaters of Eastern Europe seem to have lost their reason for being and are directionless. Without communism, the stage stops functioning as covert political protest and simply becomes moneymaking entertainment--a previously unknown concept and a shocking new fact of life. Subsidies dry up, tickets are too expensive, attendance dwindles, public life provides better spectacles, imported videos and commercial pap swamp the market. And then there are crumbling buildings that need renovation and huge dinosaur companies supporting scores of actors who rarely act--and without state sponsorship, there is no one to pay the bills.

In postcommunist societies theater oc-
cupies one of the least important positions. Artists who once had a special mission and enjoyed a privileged place in society feel anxious and unwanted in the world of privatization. Having become just another part of the European culture market, the theaters of Eastern Europe must somehow rediscover their own national identities and purposes. Nostalgia is...