A month before the scheduled premiere of the play “Liberated Mostar”, based on motifs from the novel “14. February 1945” by Dragan Markovina, the premiere was cancelled. Director Zlatko Paković went public with the story that the text of the play is controversial to politics in Mostar, while the producers of the play and the author of the novel point out that the text deviates from the theme and idea of the novel itself.
At the beginning of the month in which the play “Liberated Mostar” was supposed to premiere, the theater companies that produced it, the Mostar National Theater, the Mostar Children’s Theater and the Puppet Theater, announced the final decision to end their cooperation with the director.
“The play is forbidden, it’s just called differently here. After three weeks of successful work with the acting ensemble, I was suspended – therefore, prohibited from further work on the play. “Liberated Mostar” is not allowed in Mostar, a major social and artistic event was prevented by petty souls. Quite simply, I entered into cooperation with immature people who are guided solely by fear for their own positions, to which they were appointed by the powerful party – not on merit, but on political and religious suitability,” Paković said.
Private correspondence within the author’s team of the play entered the public space on social networks, on the basis of which conclusions were reached that political and other pressures were exerted on the production companies due to, among other things, insults against the Republic of BiH Army. The National Theater, as the production manager of the project, rejects the director’s allegations.
“Unfortunately, the cooperation with Mr. Paković was terminated due to the director’s subsequent exclusive views on the concept of the play, which clearly depict inadmissible deviations from the contractual obligations arising from the repertoire policy and the needs of the theater companies,” says Adna Ajanić, spokesperson for National Theater Mostar.
And the author of the novel “14. February 1945.” Dragan Markovina points out that the text of the play deviated from the idea of the work, which aims to deal with traumas from the past through dialogue and reconciliation in the community. In particular, he says, the spirit of the novel was deviated from in the second act, which deals with the themes of Islam, which are not present in his novel.
“That would not have contributed to reconciliation in the city or the removal of traumas, nor would the idea with which the play was started be realized, but, moreover, the exact opposite happened. What Zlatko Paković proposed as his text had nothing to do with the content or the message of my novel, after all, nor with Mostar itself,” Markovina points out.
The director, on the other hand, explains that it was not an adaptation of the work, but that he made the play based on certain motifs of the novel. Be that as it may, the play upset the winds in Mostar before it managed to reach the theater boards.
“I think that, first of all, theater art in Mostar lost because we allowed this to happen, and we who participated in all of this. It’s an old rule: if one or more houses hire an artist, then they agree to his methods at the start”, says MTM director Sead Đulić.
It remains a pity, adds Đulić, that the theater arts fill the newspaper columns with articles about the canceled performance, instead of about the poor state in which they work. Bad financing and small ensembles of Mostar’s theater houses are key problems, which have once again come to the fore.
