CLAUSTROPHOBIC COMEDY

Dusan Kovacevic

A word by the author

I wrote Claustrophobic Comedy thirty years ago. While I was writing it, I had a feeling that we were living in a stifling room which was dissembled by cracking a window every now and then. Stepping outside that stifling house of ours – the fatherland – into the countries housing “liberty”, most frequently Italy, we felt like prisoners sentenced to life in a comfortable jail and vigilantly watched by “one of the best European police forces” who had obtained a weekend pass. Sava, the chimneysweep, in the role of the working poor and dark-skinned Othello, in love with life beyond his reach, said it best: “Man can be stuck in a lift as well as in a country.”

The subtitle of this bitter comedy may well be its title: The theatre snitches on life. This is an accurate and, I guess, the only honourable version of snitching – as a craving for truth.

Darko Bajic

A word by the director

The phone rings. I pick up. It’s Dusan.

Dusan and I had been planning to do The Professional, Claustrophobic Comedy and Larry Thompson, but it all came to nothing. There was no money for the culture, like any other year. We documented neither the time nor ourselves.

The Zvezdara theatre gave me a hit play A LITTLE GIRL (MALA), an intuitive drama of our tragedy LIFE OF JOVAN (ZIVOT JOVANOV), a tragedy of Eastern Europe’s non-colonisation THE LOVE BOAT (BROD LJUBAVI), and a global installation of intellectuals into media attraction PUBLIC FIGURE (JAVNA LICNOST). Theatrical provocation…

Thirty years later, the phone rings again. It’s Dusan… I am driving to the airport with one hand, and holding a phone in the other. A new play!

After three decades, a lot of good people are now gone. Bata, Daca, Misa, Zarko, Seka, Sofi… Three decades. The 80s were our Claustrophobic Comedy, and the present is the comedy of our claustrophobia. Has everything really changed that much? Has all this time really passed? Have I really learnt to love the theatre…?