Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo

WAITING FOR GODOT IN SARAJEVO Susan Sontag "Nothing to be done."/"Nista ne mole da se uradi -opening line of WaitingforGodot 1 went to Sarajevo in mid-July 1993 to stage a production of Waitingfor Godot not so much because I'd always wanted to direct Beckett's play (although I had), as because it gave me a practical reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a month or more. I had spent two weeks there in April, and had come to care intensely about the battered city and what it stands for; some ofits citizens had become friends. But I couldn't again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heartbreaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. IfI went back, it would be to pitch in and do something. No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Plenty ofexcellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as I am) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism. I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do-write, make films, and direct in the theatre-which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there. Among the people I'd met in April was a young Sarajevo-born theatre director, Haris Pasovi6, who had left the city afte he finished school and made his considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia. When the Serbs started the war in April 1992, Pagovid went abroad, but in the fall, while working on a 0 87 spectacle called Sarajevoin Antwerp, he decided that he could no longer remain in safe exile, and at the end of the year managed to crawl back past UN patrols and under Serb gunfire into the freezing, besieged city. Pasovi'c invited me to see his Grad ("City")-a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors-which he had put together in eight days. Now he was preparing a far more ambitious production, Euripides' Alcestis, after which one of his students Palovik teaches at the still-functioning Academy of Drama) would be directing Sophocles' Ajax. Realizing suddenly that I was talking to a producer as well as to a director, I asked Palovi6 if he would be interested in my coming back in a few months to direct a play. "Ofcourse," he said. Before I could add, "Then let me think for a while about what I might want to do," he went on, "What play will you do?" And bravado, following the impulsiveness of my proposal, suggested to me in an instant what I might not have seen had I taken longer to reflect: there was one obvious play for me to direct. Beckett's play, written over forty years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo. U Having often been asked since my return from Sarajevo if I worked with professional actors, I've come to understand that many people find it surprising that theatre goes on at all in the besieged city. In fact, of the five theatres in Sarajevo before the war, two are still, sporadically, in use: Chamber Theater 55 (Kamerni Teater 55), where in April I'd seen a charmless production of Hairas well as Pagovic's Grad; and the Youth Theater (Pozoriste Mladih), where I decided to stage Godot.These are both small houses. The large house, closed since the beginning ofthe war, is the National Theater, which presented opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the handsome ochre building (only lightly damaged by shelling...