Output details

The Odyssey - a play for the theatre

(wiritten in Serbo-Croat)

In developing the play of Odysseus the key research question was what happens to individual and national identity when it undergoes tectonic historical and political changes. The specific area of investigation was the identity crisis of the population of ex-Yugoslavia after the civil wars of the 1990’s.

Drama by definition deals with characters out on a limb, fish out of water. The script articulates, in dramatic form, issues of liminality, the convulsive ‘rites of passage’ when social hierarchies become reversed and dissolved, when continuity of tradition becomes uncertain and the future is thrown into doubt. Theoretical texts that analyse these issues are, for example Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre – Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (Bruster and Weiman, 2004) and Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality (Turner, 1979).

The methodology applied was practice-based dramatisation of these issues. It leads to a performance, a showing of these issues on the stage, where they are given affective urgency and immediacy. Using some of the methods of Brecht (alienation) and the theatre of the absurd of Beckett and Pinter (stasis, language as smoke screen) the piece points to the uncertainty of identity, the ambiguity between text and subtext, collision between what seems and what is, contradiction between the spoken and the inferred.

The theories of affect generally point to visceral forces beneath, alongside, or outside conscious knowledge. The articulation of these forces through drama can serve to drive us toward informed thought and action, and create the possibility of social change. The play offers emotional meaning as a form of new knowledge. It integrates the emotional aspects of meaning with the meaning of emotion, and brings about new insights often neglected by official history or misconstrued by daily politics.

The play is a subversion of the epic narrative by Homer. The central character is Odysseus, an anti-hero war veteran who is a victim of serious post-traumatic stress disorder. He finds it hard to return ‘home’ and come to terms with himself, his family and the people around him. He is in a state of permanent limbo. The play questions the national stereotypes of ‘home’ and ‘motherland’. It switches the genre and polarity of the narrative from mythological melodrama to tragic farce. It dramatizes the ambiguities of identity, war trauma and repetitive historical cycles of violence.