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Abstract
Looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past has been a prominent aspect of Shakespeare's afterlife. Even today, his plays continue to be mobilized in the Balkan region in order to address the aftermath of ethnic violence. This article focuses on theatrical and cinematic takes that are chronologically close but geographically distant from the Yugoslav context. Katie Mitchell's staging of 3 Henry VI (1994), Sarah Kane's play Blasted (1995) and Mario Martone's documentary-style film, Rehearsal for War (1998) were all prompted by a deep-felt urge to confront the Bosnian war and reclaim it from the non-European otherness to which it systematically became confined in public discourse at the time. In Shakespeare, these artists found a powerful conceptual aid to universalize the conflict, as well as a means to address their discursive positioning as outsiders and its problematic implications.
Keywords: Balkans conflict, Sarah Kane, Mario Martone, Katie Mitchell, representation of war, Shakespearean adaptation
Commenting on his widely praised production of 1 Henry VI for the 2012 Globe-to-Globe project, Serbian director Nikita Milivojevic claimed that Shakespeare's history play felt like 'our modern history'.1 This perception was equally shared by the Albanian and the Macedonian theatre companies that were appointed to perform, respectively, the second and the third part of Henry VI but also, earlier in the process, by the Globe management when commissioning what instantly became branded as the 'Balkan trilogy' for the multi-national Shakespeare marathon they contributed to the Cultural Olympiad.2 Though the three productions were developed separately and performed, albeit over the same weekend, as stand-alone plays, the trilogy could be seen as aiming to reconstruct a shared narrative about the bloody ethnic conflicts that had ravaged the Balkan region during the 1990s. This aspect became even more prominent when the National Theatres of Serbia and Albania were invited to join the National Theatre of Macedonia and perform all three parts of Henry VI at the 2013 Shakespeare Festival in Bitola. Although the absence of a Bosnian voice arguably prevented the trilogy from fully qualifying as a theatrical form of reconciliation,3 the Olympic flame that ignited these Balkan collaborations has kept on burning, as shown by the very recent joint production of Romeo and Juliet by a Serbian and a Kosovan...