Directed By: Live Bizovic
Premiere: 31. 1. 2025
Performances
Friday / 5. 9. / 21:00 / National Theatre Sarajevo
Friday / 12. 9. / 20:00 / Mail / buy a ticket
Saturday / 13. 9. / 11: 00 / Mail / buy a ticket
Saturday / 13. 9. / 20:00 / Mail / buy a ticket
Cast
Primoz Bezjak
Natasha Keser
Boris Kos
Kaja Petrovich/Dasha Dobersek (jump)
Stane Tomazin
Creators
Dramaturgy: Nik Znidarsic
Set design and video: Dorian Shilec Friday
Costume Design: Nina Chekhovin
Music and sound design: Gasper Lovrec
Light design: Andrej Hajdinjak
Editor: Mateja Dermelj
Graphite: Dorian Shishko
Show host: Ursa Cherv
Description
The starting point of the project is a war photo of an embraced dead couple on the Vrbanja bridge. In 1993, a Muslim woman, Admira Ismi, and an Orthodox man, Bosko Brki, tried to flee from Occupied Sarajevo, but were shot a few meters before the border by an unknown sniper. Two Americans, photographer Mark H. Milstein and journalist Kurt Schork, called the couple "Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet" despite the opposition of both families and created a sensationalist story from the tragic death of two young people, and from their corpses an image and symbol of love mowed down by war. Photography thus hides a whole bunch of unanswered questions about how the public reacts to such images, and whether some stories, some lives are more important than others. Beyond the framework of a concrete shot, however, a broader problem of war photography opens up: its purpose, goal, ethics, effectiveness, the ability to shock today. When it is so torn between glorifying the violence of war and pointing out the horrors of war, it is in a similar position to a play – it is about a thing that cannot be put into words.
From print
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I think there are quite a few of us who are familiar with the story of Sarajevo's Romeo and Juliet. But we do not know the stories of thousands of other Boshkov and Admir, who die in every war. In any unnecessary war. Some were listed in the show. Let's say the story of Bosko and Admira is a reason to think about the necessity of gunfighting on this shitty planet. They all shot, but no one on them. But they still died from a bullet. [...] I have to admit that the show is very strong and it is not at all strange that it is sold out for a while in advance. [...] Hat off! Anyone who doesn't see this show has missed a lot. The rating of the show can end with one sentence: for which k*rca do we need War at all?
(Taubi, Kings of the street, 06. March 2025)
It is a documentary production that masterfully controls the delicate balance between authenticity and artistic interpretation, without being grandiosely theatrical or melodramatic. It also avoids any moral doctrine that could easily creep into the treatment of the topic, but at the same time, by switching between the actual and the symbolic, it manages to place the story of Bosko and Admire in a space of universality, in which it is not their unshakable love that persists even in death that is at the forefront, but the context of their death – war and crime. This also brings to the fore the issue of war photography, war reporting and its purpose, exploring this journalistic current on the thin line between the sensationalist and the informative, between exploiting tragedy to build a career and actual humanitarianism. The performance skillfully questions the ethics of representation and focuses on reflecting on how narratives of suffering are created and reproduced. In doing so, he creates a kind of homage to the victims, while clearly criticizing the systems that convey their stories. [...] The staging thus bravingly goes from the initial critique of pop interpretations of the story, through the possible interpretation of the actual story, to the final scene in which it engages it in the overall context of the world's structure, without at any point pretending to know more than the receivers, more than the people who created it. Bosko and Admi ra are the best works of the living Bizovic for now and certainly one of the best productions of the Slovenian Youth Theatre of recent years, which is embedded in their creative corps with its domestic philosophical and theatrical code, but elevates it with subtlety, freshness and openness to possibilities beyond what we are already convinced of.
(Benjamin Zajc, Work, 20. February 2025 )
Actors often cross the boundaries of the stage and exit through the main door or leave the Hall of The Post Office (formerly The New Post Office of the Slovenian youth theater), thereby effectively expanding the performance space. This directorial decision is especially interesting: when the actors disappear from our sight, all that remains is to rely on the camera to convey to us what is happening on the other side of the wall. But can we really trust her? Or are they deceiving us? The spatial expansion is particularly violent in the scene in which Keser and Bezjak lie outside on the ground (beyond the field of view of the stage), in the position in which the bodies of Bosko and Admire lay, and the camera transmits this image to the screen. Only a few moments later, they take the stage, although the external image is still visible. And for a moment the audience is in shock, realizing that they have just been fooled. [ ... ] The show is very dynamic. It consists of many short scenes, which are only with difficulty completely reworked by the audience due to the fast rhythm. Here and there it can even give the impression that too much is happening on stage. [ ... ] Nevertheless, the thematic and poetic-aesthetic aspect of the play remains very strong – especially its ending.
(Nika Shostaricz, Session, 18. February 2025 )
On the one hand, the director builds the complexity of the discussed content with responsibility and appropriate distance, and on the other, her sensationalist delivery, which is accompanied in the production, for example, in the introductory podcast, is underlined by parodying, irony and, in places, cynicism. [...] The cast, formed by Primoz Bezjak, Natasha Keser, Boris Kos, Stane Tomazin and guest Kaja Petrovich, proves to be extremely agile in passing through different positions of utterance and languages. The clothing-based costume design of Nina Chekhovin takes leather jackets as a trademark, which additionally suggest transitions between characters. The actors skillfully introduce the right amount of humor into the production, which they instantly reorient to more serious tones. With a related sensibility, attempts are made to empathize with the life of the protagonists, who constantly carry a subtle distance, an emphasized awareness of the performance, when, for example, Tomazin and Petrovich, as young lovers, wake up at the beginning of the performance, or later, when Keser and Bezjak are staging a fantasy film of the continuation of the life of Bosko and Admire (in a highly effective stage implementation of the film language right up to the use of the vault of the hall doors as a film frame). Their castings in various roles, which in places lend them only a voice (for example, as parents, whom we otherwise see silently in the recording), and sometimes also a body, underline the decision of the creative team not to indulge in fantasy illusionism or add to the treasury of mythologization of the selected content.
(Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti, Sigledal, Kritika, 07. February 2025 )
Where are the limits of sensationalist reporting? Can we avoid war? Do we constantly fit into the same loops for our entire existence? With a shocking theatrical experience, the living Bizovik and the team open up a range of questions that they have no answer to. [...] The cast is cohesive and acts as a good whole. Natasha Keser, who with her either Admira, influencer, narrator or abstract appearance of the harbinger of death, plays the characters with a strong feeling and sensibility. Her stage presence is precise and committed in all segments of the show. [...] The show sheds a huge amount of brutal truths and opens up a lot of questions to which it does not give answers and does not indicate the 'right' path. He only shows and proves what the world really is, caught in loops with repeated mistakes. Can we really change it? The author team has created a smart, exploratory and powerful theatre that, with minimal interventions and modest elements, creates a full and sentient journey in both emotional, historical and metaphorical contexts.
(Taja Lesjak Shilak, MMC-Multimedia center RTV Slovenia, 02. February 2025 )
In a fragmentary performance that attempts to resolve knots in endless enigmatic loops (namely, this is how the scenes are rounded), viewers are sensitized to delve into reflections on the reasons for the repetition of terrible anomalies in the history of human existence. Scenarios of the experienced and imagined imaginations of the Never Lived are drawn. In fatal contacts, intimate and Public Policy, different perspectives are juxtaposed, but they do not explain the causes of the actual crime on the Sarajevo bridge of love or the distortions of the mind in the general tragedy of humanity. With actors in multiple functions, roles and interpretations, we pass through theatrical compositions of internal and external scenes, we are among spaces of different ideologies at the gates of freedom and captivity, in an actual geopolitical picture of the war networks of the world, on a map of a city in war or even in a dungeon that sharpens the view of two corpses, synonymous with too numerous and nameless victims of mindlessness. Various shocking languages of consonantal and antagonistic narrations, be it textual, sound, musical, video, film and photographic narrative, establish many associations that, like pricked graves, have no end.
(Magda Tushar, Radio Slovenia, 01. February 2025 )
Hosting
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Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5. 9. 2025
Material for journalists
Theater sheet
Photos
Thank you
Marko Turk