ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS BERNHARD (1931-1989)
Studied singing, acting and theatre direction in Salzburg. Wrote court reports for a local paper and started publishing poetry with Rilke and Trakl. Finished studies in 1957 and since then has been a professional man of letters. Has been writing more and more dramas since 1970, at the beginning under a significant influence of Becket’s theatre of the absurd, but later finds a way to his own dramatic expression. There are two basic themes in his work: middle-class mentality and its relationship with governmental authority. In particular, he writes about the age of national-socialist totalitarianism shown in the plays Before Retirement (Vor dem Ruhestand) and Heldenplatz. The relationship between the artist and the bourgeois society is described in the plays Minetti, The Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (Minetti, Ein Portrat des Künstlers als älter Mann), Over All the Mountain Tops (Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh), Deceptive Appearances (Der Shein trügt), Histrionics (Der Theatermacher). The problem of the artist as a proud, grotesque, intellectual loner in the modern society is the main subject in the novels Concrete (Beton), Wittgenstein’s Nephew (Wittensteins Neffe) and The Loser (Der Untergeher). In these novels, it is difficult to separate fiction from autobiographical details. This brings these novels closer to Bernhard’s notes about his childhood gathered in five books: 1. The Cause. A Hint (Die Ursache) 2. The Basement. A Denial (Der Keller) 3. The Breath. A Decision (Der Atem) 4. Winter. Isolation (Die Kälte) 5. A Child (Ein Kind). Together with Bahmann, Handke and Jelinek, Bernhard is the most significant writer in the affirmation of the Austrian literature after 1946. His dramatic works are an indispensable fact in the contemporary German and European theatre.
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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
DINO MUSTAFIĆ
Born in 1969 in Sarajevo. Graduated in directing from the Theatre Academy and in world literature from the Faculty of Philosophy.
Directed the plays Runaway of Life (1993), Let There Be Light (1994), Miracle in Bosnia (1995), 724 (1998), plays by Sartre, Jonesko, Mrožek, Moliere, Koltes, Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder, Schwab, Dorfmann, Gardner, Dea Loher, Nick Wood, Glowacki, Ingmar Vilkvist, Boichev, the opera Cavalleria Rusticana.
Directed documentaries, music shows, and his film Remake, written byZlatko Topčić participated in international festivals in Rotterdam, Montreal, Karlovy Vary, Istanbul, Prague, Rome, Monaco, San Francisco i Belgrade.
Director of the International Theatre Festival MESS in Sarajevo.
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REVIEWS:
MARCIA FUNEBRE
Bosnian director Dino Mustafic, who has seen fascism in action with his own eyes, aims at showing concrete reality in his plays as the scene of the battle between ‘the white and the black roses’, believing that there is never enough pointing at the existing tumors of nationalist hatred. Therefore (Thomas Bernhard is) Mustafic’s natural choice after Helver’s Night and Heldenplatz, which quite clearly dress the Austrians down because of their Nazi past…
The premiere of Before Retirement by Thomas Bernhard, a kind of a sincere confession by an early SS fighter, has been performed by the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, a city which these days should quite palpably decide whether to embrace Vojislav Seselj’s party of the Serbian Radicals or to stay in the lap of bloodless national democrats and the tandem of Tadic and Kostunica…
Behind Mustafic’s civilized drawing room and the fervour of a civil servant (set design by Jasmina Holbus) we see a screaming face of a petty bourgeois, who dreams of a society of ethnic purity, persecution and gas chambers… Mustafic’s heroes about to retire are very down-to-earth, rational and precise, all this to show where those who have permanently decided to exchange tolerance for fascism may land…
To the director, sexual perversity is a natural job description, for Bernhard’s ‘brother and sister’, who have decided, isolated from the public, to celebrate Himler’s birthday every 7 September cannot end up anywhere else but – in bed. The exceptional social importance of this performance lies in the fact that it very clearly indicates – and it is especially characteristic of the grimy societies where we live – what we REALLY politically think when alone and what we say only to our nearest and dearest in strict confidence.
Heroes of the Rule of Law
Then they celebrate Anta’s and Draža’s birthdays, break their necks hating passionately and to the end, take out black uniforms and show daggers and pistols… The energy with which we demonstrate the will for pogroms and murders is much stronger – let’s face it – than political correctness and all that public show where we present ourselves as the heroes of the rule of law. Rudolf, Bernhard’s main character, the former commandant of a concentration camp, who spent the ten years after the war hiding and then reappeared as the chairman of a court, on the eve of his retirement utters the most important political sentence of the region: “We are all national socialists at heart and one day we will be able to speak publicly of what we are now forced to keep in silence.”
Thus this performance is an extremely topical issue in Serbia since it shows – and that is especially obvious at the meetings of the radicals – that undisguised hatred and open racism have come out into the streets, but that it would be more than useful for the Croatian public, for Bernhard’s provocative play Before Retirement clearly shows that in the European smiling offensive we have tapped our would-be home neo-fascist storm troops on the shoulder and assured them that they had better wait…
In addition to the excellent text of the play, the director had more than wonderful actors at his disposal. The performance was superbly dominated by Mijana Karanovic and Branislav Lecic.
Politically speaking, Before Retirement is a real treat for the Serbian public.
Dino Mustafic chose a very serviceable and realistic (petty) bourgeois living room as the play’s setting, in order to picture the only moment when we dare to be sincere, but that set design was unnecessary if he wished to go a step further: to strip the heroes naked on an empty stage between the conscious and the subconscious, which would make it clearer that fascism is not only those other guys, but that, with all the furniture, manners and good upbringing, “the smelliest part of us isn’t the colon but our thoughts.”
Bojan Munjin, Feral Tribune, Split, Hrvatska, 11 October 2006
http://feral.mediaturtle.com/
THE MACABRE RITUAL
Our parts have been assigned to us long ago: this is the message of the lines uttered by one of the heroes of the play Before Retirement by Thomas Bernhard. However, it could be said that this principle does not apply only to characters from a particular play, but is a recognizable feature of all the narrative and dramatic works by the author. In the majority of his works appears a standard constellation of parts and relations, which vary to a higher or lesser degree, but not with a very different result: bizarre relations in an introvert family belonging to upper middle-classes, often intellectual circles, which obsessively confirm the author’s diagnosis of a deep pathology of (the Austrian) society as a syndrome of the general impasse of existence. In the play Before Retirement, that standard play of parts reaches another, specific level… Dino Mustafić has made a much more elaborate composition of Bernhard’s typical structure, which is passive, full of monologue and deprived of complicated action. Not only did he develop a more dynamic, supple and realistic scenic action, but the metaphorical nature of the director’s solutions also sharpen the mentioned aspect of the macabre ritual in the Hellers’ family celebration… Mirjana Karanović confidently establishes the character of the obsessive, strict and essentially heartless sister Vera, frenziedly devoted to Rudolf… The grotesque also prevails in the energetic performance, rich in numerous and diverse resources, shown by Branislav Lečić as Rudolf, apparently the severest case of illness among all members of the Hellers. Contrary to these performances, that of Milica Mihajlović is dominated by the exciting, although in certain scenes exaggerated, dramatic interpretation of the character of the disabled sister… (The director has offered) a deliberate and finished staging that reaches a high artistic standard.
Ivan Medenica, Vreme, 19 October 2006
EXCITING AND ARTISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
The performance, directed by Dino Mustafić, may be defined as a form of metaphoric realism… the fact of evil as a repetitive historical practice is convincingly emphasized through the theatrical ritualization of the celebration of Himler’s birthday… Mirjana Karanović plays her part with an overwhelming, complex naiveté which obviously helps completely to avoid facing the truth, i.e. consciously to maintain an illusion of normality… Before Retirement in Dino Mustafić’s version is a performance which, in a very exciting and artistically significant way, vivisects the nature of evil, delusions, lies and political manipulations, showing that the line between the sanity of peace and the insanity of destruction is extremely thin.
Ana Tasić, Politika, 11 October 2006
THE NEEDLE, THE THREAD AND THE SWASTICA
The YDT performance of Before Retirement is a complete and rounded-off achievement of this theatre which successfully deals with several things. First, we are discussing a performance which clearly speaks of a rare subject in the Serbian theatre, a war criminal who, far from having been punished, is highly rated in the civil service… Second, director Dino Mustafić has successfully found common ground between an intellectual play and what might be termed scenic attraction… The scene in which Mirjana Karanović as Vera ennobles the ease of forgiveness and resignation to the committed crime, consciously looking for an excuse in the characteristic of the people to which she belongs, is faultless… Apart from Mirjana Karanović’s creation, an achievement that has not lately been seen on Serbian stages, we witness the effective performance of Milica Mihajlović and the expressive Branislav Lečić.
Željko Jovanović, Blic, 10 October 2006
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