The New York Review Abroad (41 page)

Having often been asked since my return from Sarajevo if I worked with professional actors, I’ve come to understand that many people find it surprising that theater goes on at all in the besieged city. In fact, of the five theaters in Sarajevo before the war, two are still, sporadically, in use: Chamber Theater 55 (Kamerni Teater 55), where in April I’d seen a charmless production of
Hair
as well as Pasovic’s
Grad
; and the Youth Theater (Pozoriste Mladih), where I decided to stage
Godot
. These are both small houses. The large house, closed since the beginning of the war, is the National Theater, which presented
opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the handsome ochre building (only lightly damaged by shelling), there is still a poster from early April 1992 announcing a new production of
Rigoletto
, which never opened. Most of the singers and musicians and ballet dancers left the city to seek work abroad soon after the Serbs attacked, but many of the most talented actors stayed, and want nothing more than to work.

Images of today’s shattered city must make it hard to grasp that Sarajevo was once an extremely lively and attractive provincial capital, with a cultural life comparable to that of other middle-sized old European cities, including an audience for theater. Theater in Sarajevo, as elsewhere in Central Europe, was largely repertory: masterpieces from the past and the most admired twentieth-century plays. Just as good actors still live in Sarajevo, so do members of this cultivated audience. The difference is that actors and spectators alike can be murdered or maimed by a sniper’s bullet or a mortar shell on their way to and from the theater; but then, that can happen to people in Sarajevo in their living rooms, while they sleep in their bedrooms, or fetch something from their kitchens, or go out their front doors.

But isn’t this play rather pessimistic, I’ve been asked. Meaning, wasn’t it depressing for an audience in Sarajevo; meaning, wasn’t it pretentious or insensitive to stage
Godot
there?—as if the representation of despair were redundant when people really are in despair; as if what people want to see in such a situation would be, say,
The Odd Couple
. But it’s not true that what everyone in Sarajevo wants is entertainment that offers them an escape from their own reality. In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art. This is not to say that people in Sarajevo don’t miss being merely entertained. The dramaturge of the National Theater, who began sitting in on the rehearsals of
Godot
after the
first week, and who had studied at Columbia University, asked me before I left to bring some copies of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
when I return later this month, so she could be reminded of all the things that had gone out of her life. Certainly there are more Sarajevans who would rather see a Harrison Ford movie or attend a Guns n’ Roses concert than watch
Waiting for Godot
. That was true before the war, too. It is, if anything, a little less true now.

And if one considers what plays were produced in Sarajevo before the siege began—as opposed to the movies shown, almost entirely the big Hollywood successes (the small
cinémathèque
was on the verge of closing just before the war, for lack of an audience, I was told)—there was nothing odd or gloomy for the Sarajevan audience in the choice of
Waiting for Godot
. The other productions currently in rehearsal or performance in Sarajevo are
Alcestis
(about the inevitability of death and the meaning of sacrifice);
Ajax
(about a warrior’s madness and suicide); and
In Agony
, the first play of the Croatian Miroslav Krleza, who is, with the Bosnian Ivo Andric, one of the two internationally celebrated writers of the first half of the century from former Yugoslavia (the play’s title speaks for itself). Compared with these,
Waiting for Godot
may have been the “lightest” entertainment of all.

Indeed, the question is not why there is any cultural activity in Sarajevo now after seventeen months of siege, but why there isn’t more. Outside a boarded-up movie theater next to the Chamber Theater is a sun-bleached poster for
The Silence of the Lambs
with a diagonal strip across it that says DANAS (today), which was April 6, 1992, the day movie-going stopped. Since the war began, all of the movie theaters in Sarajevo have stayed shut, even if not all have been severely damaged by shelling. A building in which people gather so predictably would be too tempting a target for the Serb guns; anyway, there is no
electricity to run a projector. There are no concerts, except for those given by a lone string quartet that rehearses every morning and performs very occasionally in a small room seating forty people, which also doubles as an art gallery. (It’s in the same building on Marshal Tito Street that houses the Chamber Theater.) There is only one active space for painting and photography—the Obala Gallery, whose exhibits sometimes stay up only one day and never more than a week.

No one I talked to in Sarajevo disputes the sparseness of cultural life in this city where, after all, between 300,000 and 400,000 inhabitants still live. The majority of the city’s intellectuals and creative people, including most of the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, fled at the beginning of the war, before the city was completely encircled. Besides, many Sarajevans are reluctant to leave their apartments except when it is absolutely necessary, to collect water and their UNHCR rations; though no one is safe anywhere, they have more to fear when they are in the street. And beyond fear, there is depression—most Sarajevans are very depressed—which produces lethargy, exhaustion, apathy.

Moreover, Belgrade was the cultural capital of former Yugoslavia, and I have the impression that in Sarajevo the visual arts were derivative; that ballet, opera, and musical life were routine. Only film and theater were distinguished, so it is not surprising that these continue in Sarajevo under siege. A film production company, SAGA, makes both documentary and fiction films, and there are the two functioning theaters.

In fact, the audience for theater expects to see a play like
Waiting for Godot
. What my production of
Godot
signifies to them, apart from the fact that an eccentric American writer and part-time director volunteered to work in the theater as an expression of solidarity with the city (a fact inflated by the local press and radio as evidence that the rest of the world “does care”—when I knew, to my indignation
and shame, that I represented nobody but myself), is that this is a great European play and that they are members of European culture. For all their attachment to American popular culture, which is as intense here as anywhere else, it is the high culture of Europe that represents for them their ideal, their passport to a European identity. People had told me again and again on my earlier visit in April: We’re part of Europe. We’re the people in former Yugoslavia who stand for European values: secularism, religious tolerance, and multi-ethnicity. How can the rest of Europe let this happen to us? When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilization, they didn’t want to hear. Now, a few months later, no one would dispute such a statement.

People in Sarajevo know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life—for instance, by having to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools. That is how they use most of the water they queue for in public spaces, at great risk to their lives. This sense of humiliation may be even greater than their fear.

Putting on a play means so much to the local theater professionals in Sarajevo because it allows them to be normal, that is, to do what they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water or passive recipients of “humanitarian aid.” Indeed, the lucky people in Sarajevo are those who can carry on with their professional work. It is not a question of money, since Sarajevo has only a black-market economy whose currency is German marks; and many are living on their savings, which were always in deutsche marks, or on remittances from abroad. (To get an idea of the city’s economy, consider that a skilled professional—say, a surgeon at the city’s main hospital
or a television journalist—earns three deutsche marks a month; while cigarettes—a local version of Marlboros—cost ten deutsche marks a pack.) The actors and I, of course, were not on salary. Other theater people would sit in on rehearsals not only because they wanted to watch our work, but because they were glad to have, once again, a theater to go to every day.

Far from it being frivolous to put on a play—this play or any other—it is a serious expression of normality. “Isn’t putting on a play like fiddling while Rome burns?” a journalist asked one of the actors. “Just asking a provocative question,” the journalist explained to me when I reproached her, worried that the actor might have been offended. He was not. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

2.

I started auditioning actors the day after I arrived, one role already cast in my head. I remembered, at a meeting with theater people in April, a stout older woman wearing a large broad-brimmed black hat, who sat silently, imperiously, in a corner of the room. A few days later when I saw her in Pasovic’s
Grad
, I learned that she was the senior actor of the pre-siege Sarajevo theater, and, when I decided to direct
Godot
, I immediately thought of her as Pozzo. Pasovic concluded that I would cast only women (he told me that an all-woman
Godot
had been done in Belgrade some years ago). But that wasn’t my intention. I wanted the casting to be gender-blind, confident that this is one of the few plays where it makes sense, since the characters are representative, even allegorical figures. If Everyman (like the pronoun “he”) really does stand for everybody—as women are always being told—then Everyman doesn’t have to be played by a man. I was not making the statement that a woman can also be a tyrant—which Pasovic then decided I meant by casting Ines Fancovic in the role—but
rather that a woman can play the role of a tyrant. In contrast, Admir (“Atko”) Glamocak, the actor I cast as Lucky, a gaunt, lithe man of thirty whom I’d admired as Death in
Alcestis
, fit perfectly the traditional conception of Pozzo’s slave.

Three other roles were left: Vladimir and Estragon, the pair of forlorn tramps, and Godot’s messenger, a small boy. It was troubling that there were more good actors available than parts, since I knew how much it meant to the actors I auditioned to be in the play. Three seemed particularly gifted: Velibor Topic, who also plays Death in
Alcestis
; Izudin (“Izo”) Bajrovic, who is
Alcestis
’s Hercules; and Nada Djurevska, who has the lead in the Krleza play.

Then it occurred to me I could have three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon and put them all on the stage at once. Velibor and Izo seemed to me likely to make the most powerful, fluent couple; there was no reason
not
to use what Beckett envisaged, two men, at the center; but they would be flanked on the left side of the stage by two women and on the right by a woman and a man—three variations on the theme of the couple.

Since no child actors were available and I dreaded using a nonprofessional, I decided to make the messenger an adult: the boyish-looking Mirza Halilovic, a talented actor who happened to speak the best English of anyone in the cast. Of the other eight actors, three knew no English at all. It was a great help to have Mirza as my interpreter, so I could communicate with everyone at the same time.