The Blacksmiths: Egon Savin's Satire on Imported Love

Picture a municipal council in a small German town putting an unusual item on its agenda: the citizens are tired, middle aged and, for the most part, indifferent to one another, so something has to be done. The solution the council adopts is not therapy or a bigger culture budget. It is import, literal import, of people from the Balkans whose job is to bring passion back into marriages and bedrooms. That is where the title of Egon Savin’s new play comes from, The Blacksmiths, which opens the season at the Theater of Humanity in Belgrade’s Dorcol district at 8 p.m. on September 26, with a preview a day earlier.

The play is based on the work of Alek Popov and produced by the Mozzart Foundation, staged at Cara Dusana 35. The ticket for every performance is not money but a humanitarian text message for the treatment of Branko Glamocak, sent to the number 1990 with the text 3030, while sign ups run through the foundation’s Instagram page. Alongside young actors Teodora Vincic and Danilo Milic, the cast includes Ljubomir Bandovic, Elizabeta Djorevska and Mladen Andrejevic, a lineup serious enough on its own to signal that this farce will not stay at the level of a sketch.

This is Savin’s second production for the Theater of Humanity, and his name carries enough weight that the choice of subject reads as intention rather than coincidence. A director whose style has for years been built on plays where the personal and the political constantly intertwine is now taking on material that, at first glance, looks like a comedy about marriages in crisis, but is, as he puts it himself, an allegory about what is left of desire once an entire life is reduced to work and accumulation.

Savin lays out the premise of his own play without hedging:

“The Blacksmiths is a satire about love. This play is an ironic look at the intimate life of a middle aged man in wealthy Western Europe. How people worn out by work and accumulation can still love and be loved.”

That sentence also shows where the punch comes from. This is not a caricature of the Balkans as an exotic reservoir of passion, even though the premise sits dangerously close to that cliche. It is a diagnosis aimed at the West, which, by its own account, is so organized and successful that it needs imported labor for the most basic human need: to love and be loved. The irony is that the fix meant to save an apathetic town ends up tearing apart the very thing it was supposed to repair.

The town where the story unfolds, according to Savin, is Osnabruck, a quiet place in eastern Germany where a municipal decision, however well meant it sounds as a social measure, soon starts dismantling exactly what it was supposed to heal.

“This ‘unfortunate’ political idea leads to family breakdowns, uprisings, even crimes in the peaceful town of Osnabruck. The conclusion could be that our Blacksmiths is a rather cheerful tragedy.”

The mix of genres in that line, a cheerful tragedy, is not just a tagline for the poster. It is also a dramatic contract with the audience: laughter is allowed, but it must not become an alibi for failing to see what is actually falling apart behind the imported passion. How big the gap turns out to be between a production that stops at the first level, the exoticism of imported lovers, and one that reaches the second, the picture of a society in which passion has become a service, will only become clear once the curtain goes up. Either way, the material is more serious than the farce genre usually allows.

What is the Theater of Humanity, and why is there no ticket price?

What sets The Blacksmiths apart from every other premiere that week is not just the text but the space where it is performed. The Theater of Humanity has already built a recognizable model: the ticket is not money but a humanitarian message, this time for the treatment of Branko Glamocak, so anyone who takes a seat in the hall also becomes a donor. In another context that mechanism might look like a marketing trick glued onto art, but in a play that is itself about what is left of solidarity once money becomes the only measure of value, it works as an extension of the theme rather than its decoration. Audiences who buy their ticket with a text message before walking into the hall have already, in a small way, done what the characters on stage cannot: given something without asking for anything in return.

Whether the satire about imported love will really stay a cheerful tragedy, or whether one of those two words will win out, will only be shown on September 26. Until then, one thing is certain: the price of admission to Dorcol this season is not a question of ticket cost, but a question of solidarity.