The word of the dramaturg
The creativity of Tanja Å ljivar, on several levels, seriously refreshes the recent drama production in the region. Although for some time living and studying in Belgrade, this writer born in Banja Luka deals with topics closely related to the events in her native country. Her first performed drama, âHow much is the pateâ (Atelier 212, Belgrade, directed by Snezana TriÅ¡iÄ), has indicated that it is the author of a unique and recognizable stylistic expression. A moving story of a butcher from a small Bosnian town who, refusing to forget the love of his youth, and now a proud member of a global jet set, decides to build in her honor Buddhist temple in the wake of the bloody war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with no intention to be directly involved in tragicomic way it depicts the fate of a small man lost in a tragic historical circumstances of the Balkans.
New drama of Tanja Å ljivar, Scratching or How My Grandmother Killed Herself in a direct and brutal way, deals with the issue of violence among children, as a consequence of indoctrination by the adult education system and, ultimately, the nationalist environment in which they grow up. In stylistic terms, the author once again excels in the field of witty and unrepeatable sentences by which she builds an entire world of the children, full of unawakened violence and hopelessness, the world whose image should seriously worry us. Below melancholic linguistic finesses, which seductively talk about the mentality of the people in the region, lies almost untouched mountain of consequence of the horrors of nationalism with which to be tackled.
The play is set in 2000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at a time when, in the midst of transition, there was still hope that the future would bring prosperity and change. The group of students staying in the gym ahead of school plays, not knowing that dozens of them served in war as a camp ⊠Tanja Šljivar in this context puts the story of departure and loss, about a generation that has grown up and living in a corrupt system with no value other than those imposed by force.