By: Lamija Milišić

Watching a scene of violence onstage very often implies feeling a sense of power due to the mere fact that we have then and only then been able to endure the look of evil. Watching a scene of violence onstage very often implies making oneself, or recognizing oneself, as a highly perceptive, uninvolved dilettante. The risk of the sterility of boundaries of that perceptivity is something we become aware of only if the non-theatrical immediate present itself is extreme and invasive, i.e. if we perceive the theater as a space of privilege that shields us from the doom which is dangling on the horizon. What is the purpose of Dostoevsky at this meagre age of wars of conquest? – is a question you might ask yourselves with a shallow doubt that staging this Russian classic might only contribute to this sterility which, as Oliver Frljić’s Alyosha Karamazov put it himself, makes adult people play poverty in the theater.   

The 62^nd edition of the International Theater Festival MESS opened with the Zagreb Youth Theater production of “Brothers Karamazov”, by the directorial-dramaturgical duo – Oliver Frljić and Nina Gojić at the Sarajevo National Theater. The performance was preceded by the speech of the Festival’s director Nihad Kreševljaković who ended his address with the Brechtian question about the theater’s ability to master the rules governing the great social processes of our age. This act of mastering contains an ingrained impulse to bring the above-mentioned social processes into a state of latent chaos, where every one of their factors is exposed to the question of self-justifiability. It is the impulse for rebellion that holds nothing sacred, it is an impulse for the deconstruction of a well-tuned, self-explanatory reality. In that polyphony of all human (im)purities, powers and violence, we are greeted by the “Brothers Karamazov” diptych.

The painful absence of hypocrisy

The first part of the diptych titled “Happy families are all alike” opens with an impressive scene in which the three Karamazov sons, with ropes tied to their necks, are towing some kind of a wooden throne on which their father Fyodor and Grushenka are seated. Followed by distorted, processional tones, the happy family is moving, all in a numb rage, towards the light at the other end of the stage. Everything onstage is color neutral except Grushenka’s dress of sparkling red color.

This character sculpture is then moving downstage, closer to the audience, and the scene continues with the dialogue with Father Zosima who awaits them there. Hence, when upstage, the characters we are confronted with appear in the ossified form of their social status; they are almost like icons fused with their own power. This manner of imaging the constellation of characters present onstage into a grotesque shadow of their personalities introduces us to a considerable number of scenes. Once the dialogue commences, this constellation mellows like a shadow in the background, opening into the complexity of every single character. The acting performance of the entire cast is thereby aesthetically arranged in a complete commitment to that vision of the demise of every individual character, and of the whole world for that matter. The demise of all those characters has been depicted through their different mental states, whilst every one of them is followed by a perfidious, self-devouring aggression. Consequentially, as reflected in frenetically spoken lines, the characters’ struggles and the impulses of violence are simultaneously directed both towards the characters themselves and the world.

The actors’ exceptional interpretations are solidified with one of the key directorial decisions that actors are to play different roles in different parts of the play, i.e. in the second part, they very often repeat the lines from the first part. It is, therefore, important to see both performances as a single entity which deepens its own meaning through the use of internal echoes. The lines are repeated in a somewhat new context, even though one gets the impression that the narrative of the first part – the narrative about “happy” families and the narrative of the second part, that of “unhappy” families are transcended with one and the same fatal destiny.

The polyphony of diverse and oftentimes confronted voices and views we find in the narratives of F. M. Dostoyevsky has been impeccably made use of in this performance, thus acknowledging the theatrically potent value of polyphony – the painful absence of hypocrisy. And it is precisely because of the fact that it does not allow either hypocrisy or some black-and-white image of the world, because it stares into the face of violence at such a close distance that it can almost breathe in its very breath, that “Brothers Karamazov” is an almost perfect play about war. As the director himself put it, in spite of the play being spontaneously adjusted to the newly arisen context of the Ukrainian war, the timeliness of the question about man’s will to do evil remains indisputable. The engagement of this play, alongside the occasional direct references to Ukraine and Putin’s speech on the “genocide of the Russian people”, has been shaped into accordance with narrative of this Russian classic. In other words, “Brothers Karamazov” is a play that reaches a rare level of social engagement that does not float on the surface.  The content is not explicit because it shuns ambivalence. Instead, its expression is completely inherent to a more than a century old story, i.e. it uses the powerful ambivalence of the literary world to serve the contemporaneity of the world of theater. Provided for in this manner, the room for our present-day situation within the narrative about the Karamazov brothers, has throughout the play been emphasized either by incorporating the red and black cover of the “Brothers Karamazov” novel into the stage design in various manners or by literally referring to Dostoyevsky as a “dangerous ideal” (especially in Part II).

If it’s not dangerous, is it an ideal?

The second part of the “Brothers Karamazov” diptych, titled “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, redirects the focus from the Karamazov family from Part I and brings the Snegirev family into the center of events and character motivation. That Part II is structurally commenting on Part I becomes clear right at the beginning where we do not encounter a distinct portrayal of the Snegirev family. Instead, we see a classroom and also a banner that states “Family is opiate for the people”. The story about the unhappy Snegirev family then develops towards the ossified grotesque of their community, in poverty and sickness that feeds on hopeless pride. Snegirev’s wife, whose mental illness is portrayed by the deformed bodies of two women who played Grushenka and Katerina in Part I, seems to be the key to this grotesque. Her face is, on the one hand, a happy face of lust and manipulation, whilst on the other, it’s the unhappy face of illness. Carnival-like scenes of utter revelry in Part I now seem to resonate in all their pestilence. However, this is not about any kind of judgment with hypocritical undertones; this is about the acknowledgment of the same mythological composition in seemingly different, happy and unhappy fates.

The second part of “Brothers Karamazov” is by all means more pronouncedly political, with quotes from Demons as well as Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary, with female questions and male answers, as a certain response of the unhappy to the happy, regarding the acceptance of damnation for the sake of fatal attainment of resistance. However, being one hour shorter than Part I and nevertheless introducing new characters in a limited number of scenes, Part II does not appear to be as developed and articulated as Part I.

The axis of Part I is (Father Zosima’s) funeral. He has the same role in Part II (Ilyusha Snegirev’s funeral). Even though the first funeral, through a playful gradation ranging from solemn procession to folk dancing, has a sharp, comic, dark humorous tone, whilst the second plummets into deep grief, both depictions of ritualized death are effective in provoking a sense of embarrassment. Father Zosima spends most of Part I naked, silently crawling from one end of the stage to the other. In his body, we occasionally see the shadow of a martyr, but it has been predominantly employed to depict that shame that lingers helplessly. In Part II, we only see him at the far end of the stage, but he is still present as a witness of the events that take place.

Finally, Alyosha says that adult people are playing poverty in the theater and nobody seems to be ashamed of it. It is precisely in that line and the sense of shame, that the play is confronting its own methods of mastering the rules governing the great social processes of our age. Those methods relate to what O. Frljić talked about in a recent interview – to the institutionalizing of artistic poetics with an impulse for rebellion whose value, one might conclude, self-destructs thus becoming hegemonically digestible. In that context, “Brothers Karamazov” uncompromisingly portray the brutal force of our ever-rotting world and in that incoherent force they perhaps surmise (if you really crave a dilettante ray of hope) the question – is there anyone who’d be strong enough to stop the decadence.