Paul Keogan's typically intelligent set for the Irish premiere of Biljana Srbljanovic's mordant satire on Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic is dominated by children's drawings of violent scenes.
Family Stories, Project Cube, Dublin
The analogy is itself perfectly drawn. Kids who have witnessed terrible events create images that unsettle our perceptions of historical experience. Adults think of wars and atrocities in epic terms, seeing them through the lenses of political categories and tragic emotions. Children tend to draw them with an unnerving mixture of starkness and banality. They treat burning houses, dead bodies, blazing guns and swooping planes with the same mundane flatness they would usually bring to the depiction of trees and waves and the sun. But instead of making the horror seem ordinary, these matter-of-fact depictions cut right to the heart of its sordid, unvarnished reality.
Family Stories, first performed in Belgrade in 1997, when Milosevic was still in power, uses the notion of child's play to create the same mixture of casual, cartoonish violence and nightmarish disturbance.
Srbljanovic picked up on the quality that makes children's drawings of war so eerie - the lack of explanation. Kids don't have the filter of larger reasons. They see what they see and understand what adults often don't - that it doesn't make sense. Family Stories works like this. It explains nothing and leaves the context unstated. With adults playing children playing adults, we see guilt through the eyes of innocence, madness through the eyes of everyday survival.
Srbljanovic's play is rather unusual in the annals of political theatre in that it treats a conflict, not from within the culture of the victims, but from within the culture of the oppressors. The four children who play out a series of related but not continuous scenes are Serbs. If they and their creator were, for example, Bosnian Muslims, the indirect, angular style would probably, at this stage, be impossible. Experiences would be too vivid, memories too raw. In this sense, Family Stories probably gains as theatre what it lacks in political immediacy. For a dissident Serb writing from within the poisonous hysteria of Milosevic's world, there is probably no choice but to be subtle, devious and disorienting.
What we enter, then, is not so much a reflection of 1990s Serbia but a hall of distorting mirrors in which a recognisable history takes on a series of shifting shapes. There are moments in Rachel West's impeccably calibrated production for B*spoke Theatre Company when we can see quite directly that Andrew Bennett's hectoring Daddy figure is Milosevic and that the excellent Pauline Hutton, tapping away at her typewriter with a red flower in her hair is his wife and chief ideologue Mira Markovic. But these are occasional splashes of primary colour in a much more muted pattern of political commentary. Srbljanovic is less concerned with stating the obvious - that Milosevic and Markovic are monsters - than with evoking the broader social distortions that enabled two such damaged mediocrities to cause such havoc.
This disordered culture is conjured through a strange but highly effective combination of Brecht and Kafka, in which the former's alienation effects unfold in the latter's enclosed, implacable and deeply mysterious universe. Thus we get a series of scenes in which the children ape the adults, playing out the misogyny, violence, selfishness and indifference they have learned from their elders. But we also get scenes in which the children become their adult selves, continuing, as it were, to play out the lessons of early life. This double-vision is underlined by the presence of Nadezda, embodied in a fiercely physical performance by Mary Murray, who is both a traumatised child and a dog. Chained as she often is to a dumpster, cowering and whimpering, she evokes the terrible violence against women that underpins Srbljanovic's tracing of the conflict to a warped sexuality.
The challenge of having adults playing children is, of course, the natural tendency of such a device to become winsome almost regardless of the tone and subject matter. It's a challenge to which West and her cast rise superbly. If anything, the humour and playfulness of the writing, which come across strongly in Rebecca Rugg's translation, are reined in a little too tightly - a very minor problem that stems from the overwhelming virtues of the production: its tact, intelligence, clarity and utter commitment. - Fintan O'Toole
Runs until July 2
