By BRUCE DENNILL
Sarajevo / Directed by Thorsten Wedekind / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
A specific set of circumstances is needed to give the simple mention of a city’s name profound emotional impact. Sadly for Bosnia, the brutality of that country’s civil war in the early Nineties, and the coverage of the hardships and depravities involved in the siege of its capital city, mean that Sarajevo is such a name and such a city.
So without looking at a poster or a plot precis, there’s an awareness – even for audiences who didn’t catch an earlier version of this piece a decade ago – that what they will witness is not going to be easy to process. This stage-setting effect is useful, but also potentially limiting – if audiences already struggling with the bleakness of any given day’s headlines cannot bear to face further emotional challenges in an entertainment context.
In short, it’s well worth the investment.
The set immediately offsets perceptions. It’s a war zone constructed from cardboard boxes cut to resemble buildings or stuck onto more solid structures to act as tables and chairs. It looks innocuous, almost like a child’s imagined playground – if you ignore the slogans graffitied on various surfaces. The front central area of this cityscape is the home of Mirela (Aimée Mica Komorowsky), a young Bosniak – a Bosnian Muslim – where she and her two closest, lifelong friends Alex (Alastair Moulton Black) and Slobo (Ivan Nedeljkovic), who are both Serbians, spend much of their time talking, eating, drinking and imagining the future (Mirela and Alex are planning their wedding).
A war photographer, Peter (Jeremy Richard) adds himself to the mix after taking pictures of Mirela and Alex, knowing that their cross-cultural relationship is a potential tinderbox in an increasingly polarised society.
The script, direction and acting all do well to give the sense of an epic story – three friends growing up together, first without a care in the world, then willing and able to prioritise each other over political or military expectations and then finally swept up by historical events that are considerably more far-reaching than their personal dramas. In a novel, this would take several hundred pages. On stage, the same emotional point is reached in half an hour.
The central characters’ profound bond underpins the pathos of the story, with their being pulled in different directions, willingly or otherwise, understandable in the historical context, but no less heartbreaking for that. And the presence of the newcomer Peter simply adds to the complexity, neither making things better nor worse as he provides an outlet for Mirela and Alex to express feelings that otherwise might have stayed below the surface.
Mirela – and Komorowsky, who as a performer is indistinguishable from the character – is the beating heart of the story, strong but vulnerable, defiant but threatened. In a story in which one woman is surrounded by men whose identities have been blurred and confused by war (and in which two of those men are now always carrying guns), she is always at risk, and the spectre of her coming to harm exists from the moment Alex and Slobo are drafted and expected to carry out the desires of the state rather than following their own paths. Peter, as a non-combatant, is theoretically less of a danger, but his ambition for fame means placing his wellbeing ahead of hers.
That Komorowsky also wrote this play (and her role) makes what happens on stage even more affecting – distressing, even. And that she wrote it in her twenties is astonishing, both for the depth of insight included in the script and for the utter fearlessness it takes to embody this character.
It’s notable that, even with all this invested intensity, all the actors make their own indelible mark. Black makes Alex both brash and uncertain, caught between being a lover, a friend, a soldier and a Serbian. Richard’s Peter underlines that outsiders can be both a help and a hinderance in conflict areas. And Nedeljkovic Slobo is remarkable, a hulking presence who can be goofy and gentle in one context and then both the embodiment and cause of trauma in another. The latter’s work here requires a separate level of processing when considering that the actor is from Sarajevo, having spent part of his childhood there.
Thorsten Wedekind’s direction keeps the script’s toughest moments in uncomfortable focus, which the story demands if it is to offer maximum impact. A few pauses could be tightened to improve pacing, but as the play progresses and the audience begins to understand the layers at play in the characters’ interactions – loyalty and betrayal, identity and ideology – some space to breathe is probably welcome.
Sarajevo is a play that will have you frowning and sighing as you process it, but for its depth and tragedy, not for any shortfall in its construction and performance.
