Taking Sides on Brijuni: Cvetkovic Plays Furtwangler

Taking Sides opens with its central figure missing. The conductor the whole case is built around walks on late, and Svetozar Cvetkovic, who plays him, treats that delay as the load-bearing beam of Ronald Harwood’s script.

“The play is written so that everything is a wait for Furtwangler’s first entrance,” Cvetkovic said in an interview two weeks before opening night.

The premiere took place on Friday, July 31, 2026, at the Minor fortress on Mali Brijun, on the open-air stage of the Ulysses theatre. Two preview performances were played on July 29 and 30, in front of audiences who saw the piece before the official date. It is the central title of the theatre’s 26th season and a co-production with the Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR) and the production house Realstage.

What is actually on trial

The action is set in Berlin in 1946, inside a denazification hearing run by an Allied commission. Cvetkovic plays Wilhelm Furtwangler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who stayed in Germany and kept working for as long as the regime lasted. Ozren Grabaric plays the American major Steve Arnold, the man whose job is to decide whether staying amounted to complicity.

The historical Furtwangler was cleared by that commission. Harwood does not save the verdict for a final twist; he uses it as a starting point, because once the legal question is closed the other one is still standing, and no panel is equipped to rule on it. The cast also includes Matea Mavrak, Dzana Dzanic, Alban Ukaj, Davor Sabo and cellist Belma Alic.

The set is by Lejla Hodzic, costumes by Bjanka Adzic Ursulov, music by Nigel Osborne, lighting by Andi Krakic, video by Adla Isanovic and choreography by Stasa Zurovac. Djordje Krivokapic translated the text from English, with dramaturgy by Emina Kovacevic-Podgorcevic.

Who Ronald Harwood was

Ronald Harwood spent a career circling one subject, the artist who has to work inside whatever state he was handed. The Dresser is a backstage story about an actor and his servant in wartime London, and his screenplay for The Pianist won an Oscar. Furtwangler is the hardest case he ever took on, because the man did not sign up for the regime, he simply stayed and insisted the two things were not the same.

Why this text is back now

This is the second time Lenka Udovicki has staged Harwood’s play. She first directed it at Atelje 212 in Belgrade, where it opened on February 14, 1998, with Ljuba Tadic and Petar Bozovic in the leading roles. That production later toured to Novi Sad, Podgorica, Niksic, Bar, Vienna, Skopje, Pancevo and Nova Gorica, a list of cities that stood on several different sides of the same recent war.

Twenty-eight years on, the same director stages the same text as a Croatian and Bosnian co-production, with a Serbian actor in the role of the man explaining why he did not leave. The directing signature is recognisable; the addressee is not the same one. In 1998 the question of the artist and the regime read as a question about Belgrade at that moment. In 2026 it reads as a question about whose dead each side chooses to mourn.

Cvetkovic does not approach that obliquely. Asked about relations across the region, he called them “completely inadequate and unacceptable,” and then added:

“I am afraid I have reached an age where I have understood that many things will not change.”

Coming from an actor who spends the evening playing a man defending himself before a commission on the grounds that music stood above politics, the remark works as a note on his own part.

When it plays next

The next performances are set for August 2, 3 and 4 at the same venue. The stone stage under an open sky suits a piece that is almost entirely interrogation, because it offers an actor nowhere to hide.

Taking Sides is not a play that hands out a verdict on the way out. Its wager is that the question stays uncomfortable after the curtain call, and that is an ambition few theatres take on in the middle of a summer season.