Making brutes of us all
Nehad Selaiha revels in the horrors of a Yugoslav slapstick tragedy
Watching a play through a crisscross wire fence can be a very unsettling experience, especially when the scene of action is a black box and the audience are confined to two-level narrow galleries running along two walls of the small hall, with barely enough room for two rows of seats. Family Stories, by young Yugoslav playwright Biljana Srbljanovic (translated by Rebecca Ann Rudd) is a shockingly cruel piece and it gained in brutality through this bizarrely novel environmental design. The timing of the production too, close on the celebration of Mother's Day, made the whole affair seem like a mischievous, vindictive, childish prank directed at the parental establishment and the family institution everywhere. What better fun than to lure mummy and daddy into those cages, make them sit down, as Hamlet ordered his mother, and attempt, with all the subtle arts in their command and the furious twitchings of a murderous imagination, to wring their hearts "If it be made of penetrable stuff," trusting that "damned custom" has not "brass'd it so,/That it be proof and bulwark against sense."
Though obviously, almost laboriously distanced in the Brechtian sense, with the original seating arrangement, the parodic acting style, the flagrantly mocking musical interludes and the fact that adults take on the roles of children playing at being adults, acting as extreme alienating effects, for those made of penetrable stuff, Family Stories came too horribly close to all the irking doubts and misgivings that bedevil their course in life as parents. That the two parents were palpably a grotesque travesty of the conventional stereotypes of the macho hubby and conniving, obsequious wife, put upon by one sprite, upstart parochial male after another, did not absolve the parents in the audience, no matter how good and upright they think they are, of that malignant, untraceable, intractable sense of guilt that comes with parenthood. Squatting on a black leather mattress hitched up on high and peering at the dismal scene below and those poor, grubby specimens of humanity, those pathetic worms crawling between heaven and earth, I remembered the terrible panic and many miserable tears I shed when I was pregnant -- the terror of the disciplining process that lay ahead and a vague foreboding that it would ultimately be a thankless job.
Though I know I am a prisoner in many ways -- of my culture, social habits and the many values inscribed on my body and mind from birth -- I furiously resented being cast in the role of prisoner and being told, to boot, that I was no different from the old Roman who patronised blood sports and reveled in the sight of slaves and animals tearing each other apart. For this is what the play amounted to ultimately. In the name of amusement we were treated to some of the ugliest and most horrifying aspects of human nature -- sheer, gratuitous malignancy.
The brutal irony of the entertainment was multiplied by the innocent-looking set -- its bright, cheerful colours, alphabet-inscribed cubes, slide and sandpit. The structured playground becomes the scene of a series of satirical, cartoon-strip like variations on the theme of the happy family: with mummy, daddy, Johnny and nice dog. True to character, with every variation, the scene is ferociously subverted in the way characteristic of the expressionistic German drama of the 1920s. Such plays, however, were dismally shorn of humour, which makes them appear coyingly and befuddlingly sentimental and over-emotional in retrospect. Like Ionesco, a Hungarian, not far distanced from the cultural milieu in which Family Stories took its roots, Srblianovic learnt the virtue of black humour. The world of Nadezda, Milena, Vojin and Andrija is not far removed from Ionesco's The Lesson, The Bald Primadonna, or Jacques, or the Future is in Eggs. In the same way as Ionesco used the English language teaching manuals to ridicule the inanity of the family establishment and the framework of a private lesson to farcically denounce the mental and psychological subjugation process involved in teaching, Srblianovic used an innocent given, the playground, to create a surrealistic space of venomous criticism, unrelenting aggression and vicarious satisfaction. Oh, how we would love to be rid of our parents seemed the message. You burn them, then you shoot them, then you break their hearts and lay them dead, but they keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny.
In the nine scenes which constitute the play, the human, underdog, Nadezda, and the viciously abused son, Andrija, are ranged against the indestructible parents, Vojin and Milena. All is not harmonious, however, on either front: Vojin abuses Milena both physically and mentally and encourages his son to ill-treat her and Andrija rapes Nadezda and loudly boasts about it. The tensions among this weird quartet can only be resolved by a dynamite blast which constitutes the end of the show. Such tensions were manifest in the contrast between the vexingly deadly coolness of the marionette-like mother (Sarah Youssef), and the threatening immediacy of that heaving, panting lump of soiled, deformed and degraded humanity, groveling all over the floor and issuing heart-rending, lugubrious howls (Diana Brauch) -- both superbly played.
Quite devastating too, in its final effect, was the crafty, deliberate blurring of the demarcation lines between play and reality. Outside the game, the world as portrayed by the author and bodied forth by Frank Bradley, Ratko Ivekovic and their team, was no less brutal than inside and the kids, impersonated by adults, seemed like ferocious, ungovernable beasts, beyond redemption. At the end, after a hilariously blasphemous take-off of the last supper, in a scene where the family feeds on tranquilizers, including the dog, and each recounts a dream of their own death, and where an interlude of silence and complete inertia stretches beyond the expected endurance and toleration of any ordinary audience (as long as the audience can bear it, the text says), the human dog, Nadezda, bursts forth in a mournful wail over the stretched corpses of the parents. In her zeal to get them back to life, she launches a mournful threnody in which she remorsefully recounts all her deadly sins, from the parental view point, and vows repentance; the sins ridiculously range from sitting at table without washing her hands to falling in love and having political opinions. The act of recounting the long list of sins gradually alerts the declaimer to the enormity of the injustice inflicted upon her by the deceased and this is visually translated into her physical drawing away from them and by marked shifts in her vocal intonation.
This scene in which the dumb brute, the alien, human underdog, literally embodied in a concrete, visual metaphor, is made to realise the roots of her oppression, replays the scene of the son's departure in a different, but equally sombre and emotional key. It is only here that parents are granted a modicum of sympathy; but, in the final analysis, Family Stories spares no one. All are condemned -- men and women, old and young. And though the women in the play come in for a lot of battering and putting under, the author withholds her sympathy and seems to lay the blame squarely at their door: they have blindly swallowed the roles assigned to them by patriarchy and allowed themselves to become the guardians of its hierarchical value system. Children fair no better in Srbljanovic's book. They are portrayed as little brutes with not a hint of the affectionate sentimentality that usually marks their representation in fiction. To be asked whether you liked this play would be simply baffling. This is no play anyone could 'like'. Going down in the lift I heard a young woman asking another if she had enjoyed the show. "It made me feel frightened," was all the interrogated victim had to say. This is no way anyone could have reacted to a show at AUC 10 years ago. But then, since the coming of Frank Bradley who seems keen on expanding the concept of theatre and exposing his students to unfamiliar imaginative worlds and acting styles, the AUC has become a pretty adventurous, quite unpredictable and invariably thrilling theatrical space.
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