Sandra votes: after the premiere, where Corporate Fairy Tale stands at Atelje
Ten days after its premiere, Veljko Micunovic's production has turned into one of those rare Belgrade plays in which the audience laughs at bad news and falls silent on the expected victory, perhaps its true thematic centre.
Toward the end of the second act of Corporate Fairy Tale at Atelje 212, when Sandra enters the meeting room so that each of her colleagues can decide separately whether to vote for her continued employment or for their own bonus, someone in the audience drew an audible breath during the 16 May premiere. It is a moment for which there is no applause, because no one knows how it ends, but neither does anyone hold their breath. Director Veljko Micunovic staged the scene as a sequence of monologues in which each colleague, in one long paragraph, explains to Sandra why he will vote against her, while she stands silent. There is no dialogue, a directorial decision that returns Veljko Micunovic and Slobodan Obradovic’s text to the moral equivalence space of the Dardenne brothers, whose 2014 film Two Days, One Night is the inspiration.
The play has been performed five times during May since the premiere, and tickets for the June dates, according to Atelje’s box office, are sold out to halfway. Sandra, played by Jovana Gavrilovic, is a call-centre worker whose company has declared her redundant, but she is given twelve hours to persuade each of her eight colleagues to vote for her continued employment at the cost of their thousand-euro bonus. Filip Hajdukovic, Bojan Zirovic, Hana Selimovic, Natalija Stepanovic, Ljiljana Dragutinovic, Dejan Dedic, Uros Jakovljevic and Milica Stefanovic play the colleagues, each a separate moral unit, an acting ensemble rarely seen in Belgrade outside the canonical repertory.
A text aware of its source
Micunovic and Obradovic worked textually on what the Dardennes’ film material did not explicitly lay out. In the film, Sandra’s encounters with colleagues are shown as a sequence of real-time scenes, with the camera following Marion Cotillard from one address to the next. In the theatre, such spatial naturalism is not possible, so Micunovic chose to reduce Branko Hojnik’s set to a single moving stage platform on which locations alternate, with the colleagues entering from different directions of the stage. What the text supplies is precisely what the film omits, a sequence of interior monologues by the colleagues as they try to formulate their decision in a language that is not simply “I need the money”.
Veljko Micunovic has spent the past five years directing at the Maribor National Theatre, where he has just staged Nusic’s Mrs Minister, which returns this summer to Sterijino Pozorje. His directorial style in those Slovenian productions was noticeably cooler than in his Belgrade work, with minimalist sets and acting ensembles that hold at the edge of neutrality. Corporate Fairy Tale is the first time he has brought that idiom to the main stage of Atelje, a shift from the comic aesthetic that has dominated the house through the past decade.
That Atelje chose to close the season with this kind of work also speaks to the repertoire shift of the past two seasons. A theatre historically home to Aleksandar Bercek, Mirjana Karanovic and Jagos Markovic is gradually opening to younger directors and texts that do not explicitly thematise Balkan history as their central topic, the framework that defined the house for thirty years. The Sandra of Corporate Fairy Tale could be a worker from Sabac or a worker from Charleroi; the story’s space is the collective European middle capitalism.
The casting is in places uneven, primarily because of the generational gap between Dragutinovic and Stefanovic, who in certain scenes produce clearly different acting registers. But Jovana Gavrilovic in the central role carries the play with a cold, almost documentary attention, avoiding any pathetic intonation, and it is precisely there, in the decision that Sandra neither cries nor pleads, that the emotionally heaviest centre of the play lies. The piece runs two hours and ten minutes without an interval, which for a Belgrade audience accustomed to intervals and chatting is an additional element of concentration that keeps the production tight. The June performances run from 4 to 26 June, and a regional tour follows in autumn.
