DIRECTOR’S NOTE

“The task of theatre is to make things impossible.”

Heiner Müller

In an age of realized dystopia, any artistic act carries an initiatory dimension of humanization. And theatre above all! Theatre has always been a living encounter between one human being and another, and even when things are at their worst or most banal, it is still an encounter.

Thirty-four years have passed since the premiere of The Travelling Theatre Šopalović in 1985 at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, directed by Dejan Mijač, my professor. Those years have been marked by new wars, black flags, crimes, the collapse of Yugoslavia, demonstrations, artists’ protests, and the question has often been asked: when is the time for theatre, and when is it not? Is there ever a time when it is ethical for theatre to renounce itself, and what does such renunciation mean, and whom does it serve?

In The Travelling Theatre Šopalović by Ljubomir Simović, for me the most beautiful play in which theatre itself is the main character, a drama steeped in the poetry of essence, questions of a metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, ethical and aesthetic nature are raised. All of them concern the nature of theatrical art, the relationship between theatre and life, and the phenomenon of acting. The play possesses an initiatory power and beauty. The world of Simović’s metaphors is subversive in today’s age of noise, anger, slogans, and impoverished language, thought and speech.

I sought a stage form for Simović’s poetic and philosophical ocean of beauty, humour and tragedy, without reducing the play. I added the poems The Occupation of Užice, A European Night in Užice, In Line Before the Cauldron of the Public Soup Kitchen at Carina, and The Gallows at the Grain Market in Užice. I transformed some of the lines into verse and set the metatheatrical dimension of the stage story in motion beneath the outstretched wings of a steel eagle, whose claws hold both a swastika and a full moon, an eagle that has spread its wings over the boards that signify life.

The whole world is a stage. On that stage of the world, we play roles of which we are conscious. We also play those of which we are unaware, guided by an inner script, described by Eric Berne in his now-famous book What Game Are You Playing? We live in a time of new forms of totalitarianism and unfreedom. In such a time, for me the fundamental question is not whether to perform plays, but what to perform and how to perform it. I was interested in the relationship between beauty and evil, how evil is born, what power beauty possesses, the relationship between beauty and freedom, and whether there is a boundary between theatre and life. What happens when the bloody theatre of life, beneath the shadow of gallows and black flags in occupied Užice, collides with the world of four actors from a travelling theatre?

In Simović’s drama, just as in Dostoevsky, it is beauty that saves the world, that possesses the power to transform, to lead to self-knowledge, and to bring a criminal to repentance. The actor Filip Trnavac says: “I cannot enter reality and take part in it on my own! I can enter it only with all of my art, the art to which I belong!” With this position, he resolves the dichotomy between life and art. The artist suffers, but saves life; he changes the course of events, changes the world when he raises high the sword of the art to which he belongs with his whole soul, without reservation. This conviction of the indivisibility of being, of merging the artistic and the lived act into one, is a feat of poetry—a poetry that the world recognizes as madness because it transcends reason.