Bitef Opens With Merchant of Venice Set in 1938

On Sunday evening, on the stage of Atelje 212, the lights went down and a Venice appeared that was no postcard, but the year 1938. With that gesture, the 59th Bitef officially began, opening with a play that chooses to speak about the law before it speaks about feeling: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, produced by KPGT. The festival was opened by Bulgarian director Vasil Vasilev, and among the audience sat, alongside others, Belgrade’s city secretary for culture, Jelena Medakovic, which made the opening as much a protocol event as an artistic one.

The production, directed by Strahinja Padezanin, is set in Venice in the year Italy’s fascist regime used racial laws to strip Jews of citizenship, the right to public office, and the possibility of mixed marriage. That is not a historical costume but a frame for watching how, step by step and through legal means, an enemy gets built.

The festival’s selection was put together by Spasoje Z. Milovanovic, under the slogan Dare to Know, and he explained that he shaped it at a moment when the very holding of Bitef had become a subject of public and political scrutiny, without starting from a predetermined theme or poetics. That is a key sentence for understanding the program: the selector did not choose plays that illustrate a ready-made position, but ones that refuse an easy answer. The lineup includes productions from Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, Turkey, Tunisia and Serbia, while a Russian production has been placed in the accompanying program, a decision that, this year, carries weight on its own.

What links the seven productions is a resistance to simple explanations of the world, visible as soon as the program is read as a whole rather than a list of titles. Sophocles’ Antigone, directed by Hakan Alkan and performed by the Turkish company Karma Sahne from Samsun, returns to European drama’s oldest conflict: the individual against the law, conscience against command. Placed right next to The Merchant of Venice, it turns the festival’s opening into something like a thesis on law as an instrument that can protect or destroy, depending on who writes it.

Documentary voices enter through Mihai Fusu’s Chisinau by Night, built from the real stories of taxi drivers, receptionists, doctors and dancers of Chisinau’s nightlife, in which the city stops being a backdrop and becomes a character with many faces. A similar logic, translated into the family space, runs through Dejan Dukovski’s Black Gold, directed by Oliver Frljic and performed by the Belgrade Drama Theatre ensemble: politics here does not happen in the square but at the kitchen table, in what is said and in what is left unsaid. The Georgian Stalker, directed by Avtandil Varsimashvili, goes in an entirely different direction, taking Andrei Tarkovsky’s film not to illustrate it but to think through it about the line between truth and lies at a moment when that line is harder and harder to see.

The remaining two productions close the circle on two different registers. Mike Bartlett’s Albion asks what happens when a personal need to return to the past grows into a demand from an entire community, while Vafa Tabubi’s The Runaways, from Tunisia’s National Theatre, turns waiting into its own kind of prison, because its characters are not waiting for something to end, they are waiting for their lives to begin at all. Together, six productions from six countries and one in the accompanying program offer no comfort, but ask the same question from different angles: who decides who belongs, and by what right.

Until a few weeks ago we were writing about the Bitef boycott and about the alternative ne:Bitef that grew out of it, in other words about the festival as the target of a dispute. Sunday’s opening is an answer that does not arrive through a statement but through the repertoire: instead of defending itself, the festival chose to pose a question about how, legally and politically, one community gets turned into a threat to another. Whether that is enough as a defense will be for audiences to judge, but as a gesture it says more than any denial could.

The festival runs through September 20 across six stages: Atelje 212, the National Theatre, Bitef Theatre, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Terazije Theatre and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. Talks with the creators follow the performances, led by dramaturges Jelena Kajgo and Bojan Munjin, and anyone who wants the program firsthand can visit the festival center at Bitef Theatre, at Mira Trailovic Square 1, open every day from September 13 to 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. This year’s selection has no weak link and no production included merely to fill out a country count, which is rare to say of seven titles at once. What it lacks is ease, but even that is not a shortcoming, it is the consequence of a decision not to play it safe this year.