Restaging Europe: A Critical Diary

In London Exile

On the eve of the royal wedding here in Amsterdam: the crown prince is marrying an Argentine beauty whose father isn't allowed to show up because he was the minister of agriculture in the Videla military junta in the early 1980s. Everywhere kitsch displays of orange dynastic decorations, flowers, pictures of the groom and bride and saccharine slogans, an avalanche of bad taste and trivia, a tourism bonanza and a security paranoia because of all the expected royalties and VIPs. I decide to exile myself from this monarchic operetta invading Amsterdam and leave on time for London.

In London I get a fair amount of kitsch dished out in the Royal Academy exhibition on twentieth-century art in Paris and in the new Tate Modern. But I don't complain because both places hold great art as well. In the Academy show it is the art of the 1950s that looks problematic nowadays, and at the Tate Modern I am lucky: a great Andy Warhol exhibition is opening in a few days. I feel spared and use my time to admire the splendid Thames view outside and a unique Joseph Beuys collection of conceptual arts inside.

At the RSC I see David Edgar's The Prisoner's Dilemma, which premiered last summer in Stratford. This is Edgar's third play about the aftermath of the Cold War; it follows The Shape of the Table and Pentecost. It is a long, talky play with a lot of characters, and the action covers a several-year span of ethnic and religious conflict in a splinter province of a newly independent Caucasian state—it could be a stand-in for Nagorny Karabach, Chechnya, Abhasia, or Osetia, but at some moments I feel it could also be a Balkan variant, Krajina or Republika Srpska. Edgar probes the protagonists' inability to develop trust for each other, to set aside the grievances of their historic memory of traumatization and injustice, real or imaginary, even under the well-intended but inept mediation of the so-called international community. What begins as a role-playing game in an international conflict resolution seminar at a California university continues as a series of failed negotiation attempts in Helsinki, in Geneva, on a U.S. ship in the Mediterranean, and in the dark corner of the conflict-ridden land.

Once the spiral of mistrust and violence is constructed and demonstrated, the play loses direction; whatever their nature or their relationship to events, the characters cannot alter this constellation but can only dwell on its destructive logic. At some point I thought the problem might be Edgar's seriousness and thoroughness; if he had written a satire on the bungled meddling of international peaceniks, their hypocrisy, limited insight, and selfish agenda, the play would have been liberated from its rhetorical burden and could be more surprising and revelatory. But given the steady supply of trivial, small-subject plays that dominate the London stage, on and off the West End, I appreciate the seriousness of Edgar's intellectual effort, his steady focus on the issues of protracted conflict, whose variants reach to the Middle East and Northern Ireland. Edgar exemplifies the English dramatic tradition of the debating play and is continuing it in political circumstances that have lost the certainties and the predictability of the colonial era or the Cold War. That the entire action is set outside the British Isles is a major score against the United Kingdom's self-obsessed isolationism.

My Belgrade friends who live in London, prompted by the sentimental memories of the Bitef festival in Belgrade in 1970s and 1980s, insist that we go to see Lindsay Kemp's new show at the Peacock. Indeed, in his several Bitef appearances Kemp was seductive and outrageous, kinky and hilariously funny. But that was twenty years ago, and I wonder what has happened to him in the meantime. Since theater memories fascinate me (what do we remember from our theater experiences, and what do we...