How Theater Adapts to the Discourse of War

It would be wrong to say that during the 1990s the war being waged in our neighborhood was a taboo topic. This war, in which Serbia played no small part, simply was not a topic. It still has not been the subject of serious and responsible public discourse. We have witnessed both directly and indirectly a multitude of brutal acts of destruction, deaths, and mass exoduses, while officially we have not even established whether we were or were not at war.

What does this circumstance--war as the subject of an unestablished and at best quite confused social discourse--have to do with the theater as our profession? When we speak of establishing a responsible discourse of war, and in this milieu responsibility has to be a key word, we are not only thinking of the political order of things but also of the public and therefore of the cultural scene. The response of our theater to war is the final result of the confusion which has dominated the entire Serbian public/artistic scene on this subject for almost ten years. In theater, the war has been approached according to that same official principle: "There was and there was not a war." That is, approached carefully, cautiously, furtively, often with a noticeable measure of humor, and even more often through metaphors or abstractions. This kind of adaptation to the basic form of our public/political discourse was even more pronounced in theater than in literature or the visual arts, which by their nature show a greater measure of individuality. The statement we're somehow so proud of, that theater is a mirror of life, has come back on us like a boomerang.

In what way has Serbian theater in the 1990s been a mirror of a situation in which war "is and is not"? Two assumptions should be borne in mind. In the first place, Serbian theater, even during the most terrible years of war, hyperinflation, and isolation, managed, if nothing else, to preserve its own continuity: only to us who live in this country is it clear that this is a kind of success. We must acknowledge this (which does not mean putting it in second place), and then we can ask about the aesthetic level of achievements created under such circumstances. War is by definition a state in which any kind of critical thought is unwelcome. Still, perhaps we can ask ourselves how many times we spared an objectively poor performance just because it tried-- compared to many other pseudoescapist, impersonal, even benign works--to say something at least of what our lives were like. Did we do the theater a bad favor by this?

We should remind ourselves of the theater expert Mirjana Miocinovic's sharp and radical observation that Serbian theater has followed the basic phases of official Serbian politics--namely, most of the noted productions on the topic of war were performed after the president of Serbia officially signed the [Dayton] peace agreement and became "an irreplaceable factor of peace and stability in the Balkans." The basic intonations of these productions were more nostalgic than rebellious, often packaged as anecdotes or adapted to the popular-entertainment market, and only abstractly antiwar. War is shown simply as the product of the irrational in human nature, as if other conditions did not go into its making. Engagement is toyed with, and courage smuggled in in harmless microdoses. Ultimately, it comes down to the amount of war the audience can tolerate.

Remember that throughout the entire Serbian cultural scene during this period, the dominant tone was struck by the so-called national intelligentsia (whether it was for the regime or against it), permanently obsessed by national ghosts, and not infrequently prone to populist demagogy. Thus there were few productions which attempted responsibly to analyze the causes of the war and the accountability of the various opposing sides, and incomparably more which easily glided...