A Letter to my Co-Citizens

Theatre, Nationalism, and Disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia

I hereby wish to thank my co-citizens who have joined so unreservedly in this small, marginal, and apparently not particularly significant campaign against me. Although marginal, it will change and mark my whole life. Which is, of course, totally irrelevant in the context of the death, destruction, devastation, and blood-chilling crimes within which our life now goes on.

This is happening, however, to the one and only life I have. It seems that I’ve been chosen for some reason to be the filthy rag everyone uses to wipe the mud off their shoes. I am far too desperate to embark on a series of public polemics in the papers. I do, however, feel that I owe myself and my city at least a few words. Like at the end of some clumsy, painful love story, when you keep wanting, wrongly, to explain something more, even though you know at the bottom of your heart that words are wasted; there is no one left to hear them. It is over.

Listening to my answering machine, to the incredible quantities of indescribably disgusting messages from my co-citizens, I longed to hear at least one message from a friend. Or not even a friend, a mere acquaintance, a colleague. But there was none. Not a single familiar voice, not a single friend. Nevertheless, I am grateful to them, to those noble patriots who kindly promise me a “massacre the Serbian way” and to those colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who, by remaining silent, are letting me know that I cannot count on them any more.

I am grateful also to all my colleagues in the theatre with whom I played Drzic, Molière, Turgenev, and Shaw, I am grateful to them for their silence, I am grateful to them for not even trying to understand, let alone attempting to vindicate, my statement concerning my appearance at the BITEF Festival in Belgrade, the statement in which I tried to explain that taking part in that production at that moment was for me a defense of our profession which must not and cannot put itself in the service of any political or national ideas, which must not and cannot be bound by political or national limits because it is simply against its nature, which must, even at the worst of times, establish bridges and ties. In its very essence it is a vocation which knows no boundaries. I know that all this talk about the cosmopolitanism of art seems inappropriate at a moment like this. I know that it may seem out of place to swear to pacifism, to swear to love and to the brotherhood of all peoples while people are dying, while children are dying, while young men are returning home crippled and mangled forever. How can I say anything which won’t sound like an ill-fitted nonsense at the moment when, for absolutely unfathomable reasons, Dubrovnik is being threatened, the city where I played my favorite role, Gloria? But I have no other way of thinking. I cannot accept war as the only solution, I cannot force myself to hate, I cannot believe that weapons, killing, revenge, hatred, that such an accumulation of evil will ever solve anything. Each individual who personally accepts the war is in fact an accessory to the crime; must he not then take a part of the guilt for the war, a part of the responsibility?

In any case, I think, I know and I feel that it is my duty, the duty of our profession, to build bridges. To never give up on cooperation and community. Not the national community. The professional community. The human community. And even when things are at their very worst, as they are now, we must insist to our last breath on building and sustaining bonds between people. This is how we pledge to the future. And one day it will come. For my part, until recently I was willing to endure all manner of problems in transportation, communication, and finances to trek the 20 hours across...