National Theatre Deletes Golden Arena Post, Cast Condemns Management

There is a moment when an institution reveals what it truly thinks, and it is usually not the moment when it says something, but the moment when it abruptly deletes something. Belgrade’s National Theatre had such a moment this week. Its congratulations to actor Vucic Perovic, who returned from Pula with the Golden Arena for best male actor, first appeared on the theatre’s official account and then, as if someone had suddenly realised the praise had become inconvenient, vanished without a word of explanation.

Perovic won the award for his role in the film “Our Father”, at the Pula Film Festival ceremony on July 15, at a festival where Serbian cinema this year collected six Golden Arenas. That is not a minor footnote. It is the biggest regional festival success for domestic film in recent memory, the kind of result any national theatre would, by the logic of the profession, celebrate for days. Instead, the home institution of the awarded actor chose to withdraw its brief congratulation, turning a professional gesture into a political message nobody had to say out loud.

Why is one deleted post worth more than every spoken word?

Self-censorship is always more eloquent than censorship, because there is no external culprit to point a finger at. No one formally banned the congratulation, no one issued an order that could be produced as evidence. The post simply existed, then ceased to exist, and between those two states sat the entire logic of a cultural policy in which the success of one’s own artist is measured by how politically acceptable it is, not by how artistically valuable.

What makes this case especially uncomfortable for the management is that it all played out on the very same account, “@narodno_je_narodno”, through which the congratulation had been posted. The same channel used to quietly remove the praise was used by members of the Drama ensemble to say loudly what the management would not. On July 19 the ensemble publicly condemned the theatre’s move, calling it unacceptable and a mark of disrespect toward the artist, his work and the reputation of the institution itself.

When actors must defend their own house from itself

There is something almost perfectly dramatic in the fact that, in a story about a theatre, it was the actors who took on the role that should by nature belong to the management. Instead of the house defending its man, the man’s colleagues defended the house, and did so against its own leadership. It is an inverted dramatic arc in which moral authority has moved from the top of the institution to its ensemble, and such a migration rarely happens without consequences for trust inside the walls.

The victory in Pula, after all, did not pass quietly at the ceremony either. The Golden Arena presentation was accompanied by ovations for students, alongside appeals from filmmakers over a suspended fund for financing film, which means Serbian cinema that evening was celebrating and warning at the same time. The National Theatre’s management appears to have been frightened precisely by that context, that blend of celebration and protest, and preferred to retreat into silence rather than risk having the congratulation read as taking a side.

There is a price to that retreat, however. An institution that is afraid to publicly stand behind its own awarded actor admits that peace with those in power matters more to it than its relationship with its own ensemble. And what is a theatre, really, if not a community of people who every evening, on the same stage, hold one another to a line and a look? Does a house that deletes a congratulation to its own actor still have the right to ask that same actor for trust tomorrow?