In the besieged Sarajevo, one month after the breakout of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on May 17, 1992, Sarajevo War Theatre/Sarajevski ratni teatar (SARTR) was founded.

Aleš Kurt, for many years the director of the theatre, remembers how the opening of the theatre and its first performance Sklonište (The Shelter) on September 2, 1992, was the moment when “people stopped being walking targets, and became bearers of civilization and its positive values” (qtd. in Bedem duhovne odbrane May 13, 2017).

Under the roof of the SARTR theatre, artists from other Sarajevo theatres gathered and started making art. Senka Kreso-Hasanović in The First Season in Hell gathered testimonies from many artists who took part in the theatre’s war productions. The play The Shelter is practically a documentary about life in Sarajevo under the siege. However, the artists “didn’t even think about trying to create tragedy in such evidently tragic circumstances. Unanimously, we opted for the grotesque” (Plakalo qtd. in Kreso-Hasanović 2020, p. 8).

In the play, the characters named Dramaturg and Director talk about “ethical and aesthetical questions of making theatre in war” (p. 6). Dramaturg argues that theatre requires distancing, while Director argues that theatre must be “inundated with life” (Plakalo, qtd. in Kreso-Hasanović, p. 7).

On November 17 of the same year, in Sarajevo’s Kamerni Teatar, another event that would later become a cult performance was staged, the multimedia project Hair—Sarajevo Anno Domini 1992, inspired by the famous musical composed by Galt MacDermot. In the film about the performance, the participants express their feelings about staging the famous musical in Sarajevo. The most common reactions were “it was a streak of light,” “a therapy,” and “an explosion of energy” (Kosa Sarajevo 1992a, 1992b). The Sarajevo musical, directed by Slavko Pervan, departed from the original for practical reasons since there was no electricity and water, and there was a shortage of equipment. The play “was adapted and shortened to fit its own cause. The love story was kept but rewritten, with ‘make love not war once again’ as the ultimate message of the show” (Bilić n.d., p. 3).

The director, in an interview with Bilić, explains that he was inspired by Partisan theatre, as “they would make theatre in the worst conditions … Partisan Theatre, we’re hungry, barefoot, naked, but that’s what we have left; Soul” (Pervan qtd. in Bilić, p. 4). As Bilić points out, theatre “came out of helplessness and an artistic attempt to define the suffering being caused” (p. 6).

Another play made during the war but outside of Sarajevo, Tales from a City,Footnote 1 failed, according to its creators, because the events the play depicted were too immediate, happening in front of their eyes. Dragan Klaić, who created the play with Haris Pašović, believes that

theatre needs time to distance itself from the event in the reality it wants to address. Making a theatre production on the destruction of Sarajevo while the assault was still going on turned out to be an endeavour taxing both the human and artistic strengths of those involved. After the war, with some breathing space recovered, some time-distance built in, theatre would have more of a chance to dramatise wartime experience. (qtd. in Bilić, p. 20)

Haris Pašović returned to Sarajevo and directed the performance Grad (The City), which premiered on February 7, 1993. The performance is based on the literary source written by Semezdin Mehmedinović in collaboration with Haris Pašović. The text is a collage of poetry written by various artists: The City by Constantine P. Cavafy and Report from a Besieged City by Zbigniew Herbert (Kreso-Hasanović, p. 10).

The American singer Joan Baez and the guitarist Paul Pesco held a humanitarian concert in Sarajevo on April 14, 1993.Footnote 2 Baez was the first celebrity who visited Sarajevo under the siege. In The Washington Post of May 16, 1993, Baez talks about her visit to Sarajevo:

I had nothing to offer but an act of love, sharing, witness and music. I didn’t have an answer to the horror. There is as yet no answer to this nightmare of mindless violence. But I could respond with an act of nonviolence. When a newsman suggested I would be fiddling while Rome burns, I recalled a line from a millworker’s song: “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses.” I would take my finest roses to Sarajevo. (Baez 1993)

Susan Sontag arrived in Sarajevo in April 1993 and returned one more time in August of the same year to stage Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.Footnote 3 She decided to do something to help the residents. To her, the most logical choice was theatre:

I decided to come here and do something. I only know how to write books, make films and theatre performances. I decided not to do a film because that would mean filming Sarajevo through the eyes of a foreigner and creating a piece that would serve people outside of Sarajevo. Therefore, I accepted Haris Pašović’s invitation to participate in the festival that he is organizing in Sarajevo, and for that festival I am doing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. (qtd. in Kreso-Hasanović 2020, p. 14)

Sontag’s Waiting for Godot, produced by Haris Pašović, opened on August 17, 1993. Unlike the original play, the Sarajevo version was a one-act performance, since that was an easier choice in the war-ravaged city without electricity and water. The major intervention in the original play is Sontag’s decision to multiply the characters: in her version, there are three Estragons and three Vladimirs (Kreso-Hasanović, p. 14).

In an interview for the daily newspaper Oslobodjenje, Sontag commented on Beckett’s themes that resonated with Sarajevans in 1993:

Godot is a play about people who are abandoned, who are waiting for salvation by chance, from an unknown power, which could bring them good or evil. The central situation is that they are waiting for something they do not understand; they are waiting day after day, while they know they are waiting in vain for something promised to them, they feel humiliated, waiting for something beyond them … And if this isn’t a description of Sarajevo, then I know nothing about Sarajevo. (qtd. in Kreso-Hasanović, p. 14)

Waiting for Godot created a controversy, but mostly in the outside world, while the reaction to Sontag’s staging of Godot was generally positive in Sarajevo because people felt that she cared and was prepared to risk her life while staging the play with them.

Baudrillard’s criticism of Sontag was one of the harshest. In “No reprieve for Sarajevo” (Liberation of January 8, 1994), Baudrillard used the expressions “false apostles and voluntary martyrs,” while the Sarajevans faced real suffering but did not look like martyrs and had their “objective plight” for the war to be stopped. He puts Sontag’s act in the context of “toothless intellectuals [who] swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other, both of them locked in a perverse agreement” (Baudrillard 1994).

On the other hand, David Bradby points out that “the significance of the production lay simply in the doing of it, not so much in the artistic solutions chosen” (qtd. in Bilić, p. 14). As Bilić notes, Sontag’s “artistic decisions are the ones that have angered many, but interestingly so, those angered were also from the outside world” (p. 14). Also, Bilić points out that “the devotion of those partaking in [the performance] must overshadow any of Sontag’s grievances; her production was for the city, in which she spent considerable time, risking her own life in order to help in the only way she could” (pp. 16–17).

Sontag’s view that staging Godot in Sarajevo “was a practical response to a genocidal war” (Sontag qtd. in Toole 1998, p. 2) becomes part of the central discussion about how to respond and assign meaning to suffering. Toole sees the Sarajevo Godot as “a remarkable convergence of text and world” (p. 4). Sarajevo is the evidence of the failed Enlightenment dream, “a dream that simply has not withstood the test of time” (p. 3). The idea that people could overcome their differences in a non-violent way and “reach a higher order of reason” has been repudiated over and over again by “the suffering that lies at the heart of the world” (p. 3). However, Toole finds significance in Sontag’s staging of Godot because it speaks of “suffering with dignity” (p. 269). Politics should be more than “a lamentation for the dead.” In his reading of the play, the universe is “a tragic place, but it’s not meaningless […] All may not be well with the world, but the world is not lost, at least not as long as chance is the god of history” (p. 269).

Toole ends his book with Dževad Karahasan’s contemplation of Sarajevo as an imaginary place:

Shall we […] on the eve of every holiday, when the day that we wish to be beautiful is about to begin, repeat as a dream, as an oath, and as a prayer: ‘Next year in Sarajevo’? (Karahasan qtd. in Toole, p. 271)

Sarajevo during the war was indeed suffering with dignity. The city was buzzing with artistic activities, from Pašović’s ten-day film festival to the METRO Programme that featured Sarajevo’s alternative scene. Also, in the theatre programme THYRSUS from August 1993 to the end of May 1994, the following plays were staged:

  • Euripides’ Alcestis, directed by Haris Pašović

  • Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Susan Sontag

  • Selimović’s Fortress, directed by Ahmet Obradović

  • Sophocles’ Ajax, directed by Pjer Žalica

  • Japanese traditional theatre Svileni bubnjevi (Silk Drums) Haris Pašović

  • Peter Schumann’s Circus (Kreso-Hasanović 2020, p. 15)

Peter Schumann of the famous Bread & Puppet Theater came to Sarajevo in the spring of 1994—his second visit to the city. With a few Bosnian actors and actresses, he “put on a circus in the street in front of the Sarajevo National Theatre, which shielded them from sniper fire” (Kalish Apr. 6, 2021).

Haris Pašović recalls the event:

[Schumann] was completely pale … It was really shocking to come to the besieged city. I couldn’t believe it [that he had come], because I knew Bread and Puppet all my life. It was like a miracle, like a fantasy. (qtd. in Kalish)

As Kreso-Hasanović points out, during the siege of Sarajevo, the theatre had an important aesthetic function: to help the audience forget reality and “step into illusion.” At the same time, theatre exposed the absurdity and madness of war and created a sort of aesthetic distance from reality, which helped Sarajevans keep their sanity (p. 17).

Bilić also emphasises the healing power of theatre in war:

The citizens of Sarajevo involved in any theatrical work … sought to escape from the every-day brutality imposed on them, in order to feel normal […] the need to escape in order to avoid insanity and depression proved theatre’s ultimate strength and importance during this time of struggle. As a form of resistance, it did not halt the incessant attacks, but it did resist their aim; to wipe out the city, reducing its people to ghosts without the mental strength to stand up and defend their culture. (p. 11)

During the siege, there were many more theatre performances, concerts, exhibitions, and forums, so it would be impossible to give an account of all the creative activities that were happening in Sarajevo at the time.Footnote 4 It would require another book to give credit to all the artist who contributed to the art scene in the besieged Sarajevo as well as in other theatres in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Also, the archival material is not complete since in the war it was difficult to record some events. Most of the supporting material for this section is based on the testimonies of the participants in the events. It is also important to emphasise that many other artists, journalists, and activists visited Sarajevo during the siege. Ferida Duraković remembers “Juan Goytisolo, Vanessa Redgrave, Maruša Krese, Annie Leibovitz, Nedim Gürsel, Predrag Matvejević, Christopher Merrill, Drago Jančar, Joan Baez, Bruce Dickinson, the Laibach group, Boris A. Novak, Zubin Mehta, David Wilde, Phil Alden Robinson, Bibi Anderson, Bernard-Henry Lévy …” (Duraković Oct. 7, 2019).

The Post-War Period

In the post-war period, the theatres that operated before the war reopened their doors, and Sarajevo’s art scene was soon in full swing. Life was back to normal, and “theatre return[ed] to its normal function within society; to entertain, educate and inform” (Bilić, p. 22).

The post-war period was soon marked by an outpouring of war-related themes on screen, on stage, and in literature. Many artists who reached adulthood during the war brought new sensibilities as well as their personal war experiences. The post-war theatre in Sarajevo is marked by war-related themes and by the focus on the adaptations of works of young authors who came of age in the war and poured out their experience into stories, novels, and plays.

Enver Kazaz points out that after the war, writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina responded by trying to document the horrific events of the war, but at the same time, the experience of exile features prominently in the post-war literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kazaz also identifies the themes of homelessness, cultural nomads, and uprooting, which situates Bosnian literature in the larger universal context (Kazaz 2009, pp. 5–7).

Igor Majić (2007) points out that the literature in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war features a strong antiwar ethical stance, with a focus on testifying and documenting, and it often includes the elements of autobiography, memoir, and diary.

Miljenko Jergović, Dževad Karahasan, Abdulah Sidran, Faruk Šehić, Aleksandar Hemon, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Ivan Lovrenović, Tvrtko Kulenović, Jasna Šamić, Ferida Duraković, Alma Lazarevska, Igor Štiks, Nenad Veličković, Ozren Kebo, Ivica Đikić, Almir Imširević, Zlatko Topčagic, Bekim Sejramović, Saša Stanišić, Namik Kabil, Emir Imamović, and Stevan Tontić are some of the most prominent writers from Bosnia and Herzegovina who marked the post-war period.

The reopened theatres in Sarajevo and other places in the country staged adaptations of literary works that concentrated on the war and the destruction of the pre-war social fabric.

The image of the burned Sarajevo National Library has been a recurring symbol in Bosnian literary works and films. The library’s rich collection was reduced to less than one-quarter of its pre-war volume. The image of the National Library and the books in flames feature prominently as a site of mourning. As Ivan Majić points out, “The City becomes a symbolic place where humanist values of civilization are defended against the onslaught of the madness of war” (2007).

To give justice to all relevant literary works and stage adaptations in major theatres of Bosnia and Herzegovina would require much more space. This overview focuses on some adaptations in Sarajevo theatres that illustrate possible relationships between the source and its adaptation relevant to this study. Also, I will present some related works of theatre critics and scholars from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Tajna džema od malina/The secret of a Roseberry jam, by Karim Zaimović, was written during the siege and published posthumously since Karim was killed in the last days of the war, in August 1995. In 2013, the collection of stories was adapted for the stage of the SARTR theatre, directed by Selma Spahić. Zaimović’s collection of stories about Sarajevo mixes fantasy and reality. Its characters are a man with Goofy’s face, a vampire of the Austro-Hungarian period, and the invisible man Amir Amrić. In the story Tajna džema od malina, the author offers an “alternative history of humanity,” while the other stories of the anthology present the history of Sarajevo until the war years of the 1990s. The adaptation also uses other texts written by Zaimović and published in various magazines. As Jergović testifies, Karim “started the book as a screenplay for comics and films” and “the authorial prose [of the book] occasionally feels as if Daniil Kharms found himself in a Hollywood supermarket, where he turned completely childish and became an epic narrator” (Jergović, May 6, 2022).

Staging a novel is probably the most demanding type of adaptation in theatre. Aleksandar Kron believes there are at least three ways of adapting prose to the stage, and the one labelled “based on the motives from the novel” is the most significant in theatre as the adaptation is thus almost independent from the adapted text, so “the dramaturg becomes the author” (qtd. in Ibrišimović-Šabić 2019, p. 38). One example of this type of adaptation is the play Dead Souls by Mihail Bulgakov, based on Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. Bulgakov claimed that the novel “cannot be staged,” so he wrote a play based on the motives from the novel. Ibrišimović-Šabić makes the point that in the history of the Sarajevo National Theatre Bulgakov’s play Dead Souls has been one of the most successful performances (Ibrišimović-Šabić, p. 38). The least fruitful principle of adapting prose to the stage is to directly transpose a novel to the stage without “changing the lenses.” This approach “impoverishes the novel without adding anything to theatre” (Kron qtd. in Ibrišimović-Šabić, p. 38). Another approach is to transpose “scenes from the novel.” Selected segments of dialogue from a novel are “connected” through the role of the narrator on stage. A classic example of this approach is the first adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov on the stage of MHAT,Footnote 5 directed by Nemirovič-Dančenko in 1910 (Ibrišimović-Šabić, p. 39).

Ibrišimović-Šabić’s book Čehov u Sarajevu/Chekhov in Sarajevo (2019) is a remarkable historical overview of the repertoire of Sarajevo’s theatres with a focus on the adaptations of Anton Chekhov’s plays.

The author provides a useful theoretical frame for her analysis of specific stage adaptations of Chekhov’s works and presents the observations of relevant Russian contributors to adaptation theories. Ibrišimović-Šabić refers to three types of interpretation of the adapted text: understanding the text (Russian smysloponimanie); creating meaning (Russian smysloporoždenie); and presenting meaning (Russian smyslopredstavlenie). The very choice of one of the three principles of interpretation is based on all kinds of contextual factors (social, ideological, cultural) (Natal´ja Skorohod qtd. in Ibrišimović-Šabić, p. 37). Natal´ja Skorohod attempts to define the boundaries of interpretation and to establish a strategy for critical evaluation of adaptations of works of prose (p. 37).

The attempts to find the authorial voice in a discourse meet the major obstacle: language.

Ibrišimović-Šabić believes that contemporary theatre adaptations of Chekhov’s plays often end up in the absurd, in circus and kitsch, because that is our reality (p. 159).

In the last story of Karim Zaimović’s novel Tajna džema od malina, the author predicts his own death. In the story, a journalist named Karim Zaimović is killed in the studio of a local radio station by a shell shot from one of the hills around Sarajevo. The absurd reality is a suitable match for the novel’s flights into the surreal.

The central story of Zaimović’s novel Tajna džema od malina is a humorous and absurd history of humanity in which raspberries play a crucial role: the original raspberries, which have been the source of humanity’s balance and creativity, are now corrupted and their quality degraded. There are now two groups of people: the raspberry people and the anti-raspberry ones. The references to the war, local history, and politics are obvious, but the novel’s humour and charming childlike flights into fantasy go beyond the narrow local context. Spahić’s adaptation preserves the novel’s surreal aspects and flavour, and the screens representing the pages from the novel featuring comic characters provide a suitable backdrop for staging the novel’s playfulness about its genre.

Almir Imširević’s play Kad bi ovo bio film/If this was a film was in 2013 adapted for the Sarajevo National Theatre by Dino Mustafić.

The stage emulates the film’s deep focus. In the background, a small orchestra consisting of four musicians functions as a tableau that punctuates the passage of time in the performance; the music stops, the musicians freeze, and the action on the stage picks up at a different point in time. This is also marked by the projection of a train moving across the entire stage, making a clickety-clack sound.

The stage design suggests the view through the window into an apartment. The drapes made of plastic cover the proscenium, which situates the action in wartime. The mother is sitting behind a sewing machine; one son in a wheelchair addresses the audience directly and breaks the fourth wall. The light goes on and off to activate the background—the orchestra freezes when the light is on the musicians. The light in the window in the front right corner goes on, and in the window frame, the photographs that the father had taken are lit. The characters are often in close-ups, their faces lit, the darkness around them.

Dino Mustafić, in an interview for the portal Radio Sarajevo, on January 21, 2013, talks about Imširevic’s text and its strong autobiographical elements: Mustafić explains that the play could almost be read as the writer’s “autobiography of the siege.” The text is “cinematically concise,” while the performance is “fragmented” and its “dramaturgy elliptic.” The performance includes “reflections on Imširevic’s earlier work If this was a performance” (Mustafić 2013). Mustafić also probes the question of whether cinematic truth or the truth presented on stage is sometimes stronger than actual truth and concludes that for theatre artists “who live parallel lives” the truth presented on stage could be “more powerful, more beautiful or uglier than actual truth” (2013).Footnote 6

The adapted text’s concise and effective dialogue is transposed to the performance. In one dialogue line, the son in a wheelchair gives a diagnosis of an entire generation by summarising his sibling’s problem: “He’s still racked between Metallica and Mecca, and yet he’s never seen alive either of them.”Footnote 7

Another, more recent Mustafić adaptation for The Sarajevo National Theatre, is an ambitious project that attempts to stage the novel by Tvrtko Kulenović Istorija bolesti/History of an Illness (2016). The stage adaptation titled To nikad nigdje nije bilo/It Has Never Happened Anywhere premiered in October 2021. The general approach to adaptation is “based on the motives” from the novel.

The performance mixes citations from the novel, the actors’ personal testimonies, and non-fictional documentary material. The play starts as the actors enter and choose the items of clothing from a large clothing rack at the back of the stage. As they each pronounce the names of the people killed in the war, their age and their relationship to the speaker, the actor playing the writer, Tvrtko Kulenović, takes to the centre stage and cites segments from his novel in first person. The screen hanging from the ceiling features personal photographs, short citations from the novel, and other images. A slow-motion dance with a shovel symbolises digging a grave as dancers/actors hand the shovel to each other. A huge pile, a sculpture made of plastic water canisters, is in the background. In the climactic scene of the performance, an actor and two actresses spread a white plastic sheet, pour red dye across the surface, and start rolling in “blood,” half-naked, while the actors-onlookers curse them using nationalist slogans. Three piles of clothes are lit against the dark background. An old woman in black slowly walks among the piles. U2’s Miss Sarajevo is played. The lyrics “Is there a time …” accompany the actresses collecting the piles of clothes and emulating a scene from the beauty contest staged during the siege when the contestants wore plastic bags with the UNHCR logo. At one point, the actors lay down candle lamps: the lights go off as this visual requiem for the victims is being played.

The personal and the collective constantly mix, both in the performance and the novel. As we learn, the novel’s title History of an Illness is not a reference to the collective illness but to the writer’s personal tragedy: his wife Lidija died of cancer during the war. The novel’s lengthy narrative about the death of Kulenović’s wife is condensed into a powerful stage image: a doorframe opens, and an actress enters the frame and undresses. As the snow starts falling on her, the door closes while an accordionist plays a popular children’s song, whose refrain is cited in the novel. It is a children’s song about a bunny who becomes sad when on a winter’s night the creek gets covered in ice. At the play’s ending, a powerful musical score, with whispering actors in chorus, acts as the background sound for the female vocalist singing a song about loss and the imperative to remember.

Dramaturg Darko Lukić explains how the performance, like the adapted text, relies on documentary material. They wanted to create a theatre of remembering, “a window into our past,” which also serves as a “frame for the picture of our present.” The work on the performance represents a “process of conversation between the book, the stage, and the audience.” The performance stages the conflict between a “myriad of small, private histories and the large, collective, official history” (Lukić Oct. 27, 2021).Footnote 8

Lamija Milišić, in her analysis of the performance for the theatre art portal drama.ba, identifies three major problems that the dramaturgs faced when adapting Kulenović’s novel: the anachronistic action, the fragmented space, as well as the fragmented personalities and the rupture between the factual and the fictional. The performance approaches the problem of the fragmented time by staging the scenes from the novel by the principle of “associative remembering,” where the author, who is present on stage, functions as a witness who remembers “in stages,” and whose narrative is a thread that connects his discourse with the fragmented references and memories of other characters and actors themselves. Also, the stage space is fragmented as several actions are happening simultaneously, which parallels “the associative remembering” of the characters, so “the parallel actions on the stage suggest the associative logic of memory” (Milišić n.d.). The time locus of the performance is the present, and the events are presented in retrospect, while in the novel “the writer writes about the war while being in the war.”

As in the novel, the main character is the author himself, which contributes to the “friction between the factual and the fictional.” In Waiting for Godot, the principle of fragmentation is respected in the characters as well: “The voices of the characters on stage are split between the voices of the characters in the performance, loyal to the fictional world of drama, and the voices of the actors on the stage, loyal to the factual world.” The performance created a “collage of citations” using segments from the novel, citations from other Kulenović works, critical works about Kulenović’s novel, as well as the personal memories and witnessing of the actors in the performance. Milišić concludes that “this matrix of references” successfully “creates a unique dramatic space” (n.d.).Footnote 9

Almir Bašović affirms “the impossibility of the equivalence between the speaking subject and the author” even in autobiographies because language functions as the mediator between the two (2015, p. 61). The author refers to Andrea Zlatar, who wrote that “the history of autobiography could be written as the history of the figures that are constructed in the autobiography, as the history of the mode of self-representation in front of the others … the history of public masques that individuals have been putting on” (Bašović, p. 61).Footnote 10

In Mustafić’s performance, the author of the novel wears at least three masques: of the author, the speaking subject, and the actor.

Unlike Mustafić’s collage, the performance Brašno u venama/Flour in Veins, staged at SARTR in 2015, transposes all the adapted text on the stage. The play, written by Igor Štiks, depicts a family reunion that exposes complex societal conflicts dramatised as conflicts between family members. After twenty years, Igor returns from Chicago, invited by his brother’s wife, whom he had dated before he left during the war. The ideological conflict between the father, a communist, and the American son, a professor of economics and a pundit for capitalism, turns personal as the play progresses. The stage is minimalistic: the long dinner table covered with a white tablecloth becomes the stage for historical conflicts that are reflected in personal tragedies. The dramaturgy of the play is straightforward: the dialogue lines are all transposed onto the stage. However, the play’s stage directions are transformed into dialogue lines. Thus, the actors step out of their characters to deliver the text of the stage directions: “At this moment, the interphone starts buzzing,” “Silence”. The actor steps back into his character. This approach is used systematically throughout the play. The minimalism of the staging is also reflected in the metonymic function of the stage signs: A character climbs the table, which then represents the roof of the building.

The white dinner table is soiled during the long dinner, as the performance uncovers the family’s secrets and grievances. The war theme is present in retrospect, through the unresolved traumas and haunting memories. Igor Štiks, the writer of the play, explains that “the misunderstanding and the emotional and ideological conflicts […] between different generations in the last hundred years, from the First to the Second World War to the recent war, but also to the present time of peace with its own conflicts, is the theme of this text” (Štiks 2015)

Perhaps the most widely known theatre company from Bosnia and Herzegovina is Haris Pašović’s East West Centre Sarajevo, founded in 2005 (East West Centre).Footnote 11

The adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 2005 was one of the largest co-productions in the region. By transposing Elsinore to Istanbul, to the Ottoman’s Topkapi Court, Pašović “has merged very delicately an Oriental culture and an Occidental text” (East West Centre).

Transparent white curtains form the background of the stage. The characters enter behind the many entrances in the curtains as dark shadows against the white silken screen—a nod to the Turkish shadow theatre.

The elements of Islam and Bosnian folklore are interwoven. The characters greet each other in Arabic—salaam—the prayers in Arabic are whispered in chorus, and actors sing Bosnian and Turkish songs in chorus or solo. The singing is accompanied by the live music performed by the four-person orchestra on the stage.

Fortinbras, in Pašović’s staging of Hamlet, is a princess: “She has my dying consent, tell her that,” says Hamlet to Horacio.

The Shakespeare text is inevitably read through the prism of the Bosnian war: “So many dead, for no reason, live to tell the story,” says Hamlet to Horacio.

The band on the front right side of the stage plays live music by Damir Imamović. The stage is minimalistic: the characters use poles to signify swords, which demonstrates the mobility of theatre signs.

There are not many modifications of the original text, but the Oriental setting and the music that evokes Oriental mysticism transposes the play into a different cultural context, that of a Turkish court, but also of Bosnia and its recent bloody history.

Hamlet is dressed like a dervish in a long flowing white tunic and loose shalvareFootnote 12; the gravediggers are a man and a woman; the bones invoke the victims of the Bosnian war whose remains are still missing. At the same time, as Pašović reminds us, the Ottoman court, with its intrigues and scheming, is not unlike Shakespeare’s Elsinore: “HAMLET is universal, and could have happened at the Danish, Elizabethan, Ottoman or any other royal courts. We share the same problems and dilemmas” (East West Centre).

Pašović’s other performance, Europa danas/Europe Today, a co-production between the National Theatre Maribor and the East West Theatre Company, is an adaptation of the essay “Europa danas” by Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža. The essay was written in 1935 as a sharp indictment of fascism in Europe and a foreboding of what was to come.

Pašović finds striking similarities between today’s Europe and the Europe of 1935: “Krleža’s words sound as though they were written this morning, and the essay was written in 1935 when Europe was heading towards the darkest days in its history” (Pašović qtd. in Šito-Sučić 2011).

In an interview for the Slovenian newspaper Delo, Pašović also said that the essay “is an accurate analysis of Europe, whose social, political and metaphysical matrix hasn’t changed much” (Predstava: Europa danes kot tista leta 1935, Feb. 15, 2011).Footnote 13

The performance stages a simultaneous narration from the essay, performed by the actor Miki Manojlović, the live concert of Laibach, and Edward Clug’s dancing. The focus on the collective experience in the narrated adapted text is visually juxtaposed to Clug’s dance of a suffering individual. In Clug’s choreography, a “dance ritual” creates a vivid image of “a lonely and isolated citizen of today’s Europe” (Predstava: Evropa danes …).

Laibach’s phantasmagoric spectacle of light and music dramatises the context of Europe today, using the iconography of military uniforms and European emblems—yellow stars on a blue background. Against this spectacle of the light reflectors and live music, Krleža’s text functions as a leitmotif, a historical refrain. The writer-actor sits behind a computer desk while the video on the screen accompanies Laibach’s performance. Laibach’s performance functions as a parallel text to Krleža’s. They are simultaneous and juxtaposed, not interwoven. The lyrics of Laibach’s songs and their visual iconography mirror European ideologies, while the music and the lighting amplify Krleža’s text in Manojlović’s interpretation.

In an interview for The Brooklyn Rail, Laibach commented on their use of the iconography from Nazi Kunst, as well as Socialist and nationalist iconography. Laibach’s controversial iconography has received different interpretations. The appropriation of the paraphernalia of Nazi Kunst is seen as “dangerous for manifesting this over-identification and as a result challenging it […] Nazi Kunst, socialist and nationalist images are extremely iconographical due to their brutal symbolism and pragmatic relation to ideology. But they also retain power due to their superficial perception, which is loaded with the usual prejudices and preconceptions” (Laibach May 2010).

By juxtaposing Laibach’s mirroring of brutal symbolism, Clug’s choreography, and Krleža’s prophetic indictment of Europe, Pašović created a collage of texts that are jostling against each other and destabilising the viewers’ interpretations.

This selection of the analysed performances in Sarajevo theatres after the war is limited and not guided by the principle of merit. It is a glimpse into the post-war complexities of the Bosnian art scene, dominated by the adaptations of new literary voices that attempt to come to terms with the catastrophe that befell the country from 1992 through 1995.

Conclusion

Bosnian Literary Adaptations for Stage and Screen does not begin to scratch the surface of the many remarkable literary works and adaptations made in Bosnia. To give them the attention they deserve would require broad collaboration with researchers and institutions from Bosnia and Herzegovina; in other words, it would require writing another book. I hope that future studies by Bosnian scholars and artists complement my brief historical review and offer not just a glimpse into theatre and film culture in the country but a systematic and critical overview of these practices.

I hope this text will spark the curiosity of those unfamiliar with Selimović’s works, entice them to read his books, and perhaps demonstrate that it is not inconceivable that our national, ethnic, religious, and personal fortresses could one day be dismantled.

My research in adaptation theories and practices attests to the impossibility of advocating for the “right” approach. Film and theatre practitioners continually demonstrate that there are many forms of successful adaptation. They all have one thing in common, however: they engage in dialogue with the adapted text, which involves listening to the text and being compelled to talk back. It could be as simple as a meeting point between two minds initiating the conversation. The ensuing multilogue shapes itself in the process and creates its own world of images and sounds.