Marked with Red Ink

Abstract

Marked with Red Ink Dubravka Knezevic (bio) In Danton’s Death—arguably the best historical play ever written, at least from a European, and especially from an Eastern-European point of view—Georg Büchner contrasts scenes of revolutionary passion and suffering with grotesque sketches of crowds in the street—with the savage, farcical, and naturalistic side of the same phenomenon. What is first presented as a refined human, philosophical, life-and-death dilemma instantly repeats as a bloodthirsty farce, a vicious Grand Guignol with no return. The former belongs to the theatre, the latter to a reality that is by definition always theatricalized in oppressive totalitarian and inhuman regimes. The street, indeed all public space, always has been the place for unquestionable, obvious, and strictly controlled manipulation of the masses. The absence of every “dangerous” artistic street activity that could slip out of governmental control or that might happen without its interference amidst the euphoric crowd that literally lives on the streets day by day is just one of several analogies that can be drawn between France during the so-called Revolutionary Terror (1789–1799) and ex-Yugoslavia on the eve of civil war, as well as Serbia today. Abraham-Joseph Bénard Fleury, one of the most outstanding French actors before and during the Revolution, vividly depicts the societal mode in which the theatre, and the people, had to survive: Nothing was fixed, nothing was settled, nothing was permanent; everything was, as they say in financial circles, to come due this month, or to come due next month. It was a time when kings lasted three months, books an hour, plays half an evening, and constitutions fifteen days. The scene shifted constantly, the nation lived in tents, and as we were part of the nation, we followed the trend. 1 Fleury, leading actor of the Comédie Française, was one of those theatre practitioners jailed because they were considered to be counterrevolutionary, performing in luxurious costumes that might provoke memories of the ancien régime. By the time a long and exhaustive court procedure finally began after he had been imprisoned for eleven months, the mark in red ink already had been written beside his name—“G,” for “guillotine.” Some others had more luck—they got only “D,” for “deport.” [End Page 407] Dealing with theatre, particularly with theatre addressing broader, even accidental groups of spectators on the street always has been a kind of hazardous, unsafe, breakneck activity. It is true that thanks to the theory and practice of many authors—including Piscator, Brecht, the Living Theatre, Schechner, Mnouschkine, or Boal—we already have learned what a forceful weapon theatre can be in the fight against social injustice, all forms of violation and abuse, or at least in support of the evolution of the human race. 2 But what we cannot learn without personal engagement and experience is the response from both sides—the regime and the spectators. Any prediction is absolutely impossible in some drastic situations, such as war, destruction, lack of any system of values—especially in a climate of socio-psychosis caused by the devastations of fratricidal war and by living under long-term oppression permeated with hatred and inflamed by jingoistic propaganda. Only those who have never found themselves in such circumstances could assume that they provide fertile ground for any prompt artistic action or an ideal case of the direct clinch between theatre and reality generating straightforward and indispensable effects right on the spot. Experiencing the worst of all curses, “may you live in interesting times,” people in Belgrade who opposed the war—whether in ex-Yugoslavia right before it or in Serbia today, whether they be artists or just “ordinary” passers-by—also experience living on the borderline between rare theatrical events deeply grounded in our actual problems and a para-theatrical reality far from any common sense. Street Theatricality and the Nationalistic Regime(s) Based on experiences following the hippie movement, and under the impact of “documentary” theatre, a strong wave of provocative, polemical theatre arose during the late 1970s and the early 1980s in ex-Yugoslavia, a wave called, once again, the “political theatre.” When nothing else could...