Bitef Closes Tonight With a Play About Waiting to Flee

Someone is waiting to escape. Someone is waiting for something to change. Someone is simply waiting, with no clear object to the waiting, because even hope has long since become a habit. That is the world of The Runaways, a play by Vafa Tabubi produced by the National Theatre of Tunisia, and it is the image that closes the 59th edition of Bitef tonight. There is an irony in this: waiting, as a dramatic device, was also the fate of the festival itself this year. It was unclear whether Bitef would even take place, unclear who among the invited artists would stay, and unclear whether Black Gold would survive its own program.

The Runaways follows people waiting to escape, waiting for something to change, waiting for life to finally move forward, but in the meantime their waiting has stopped being the empty space between two events and become the event itself. Instead of filling that emptiness with plot, Tabubi fills it with repetition, and according to the festival’s program notes, it is exactly that repetition which turns waiting into a new kind of prison, one without bars, that people build for themselves while staring at the door.

Bitef runs from September 13 to 20, 2026, under the slogan “Dare to Know,” with Spasoje Z. Milovanovic as this year’s selector. The main program includes seven plays from Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, Turkey, Tunisia and Serbia, plus a Russian production in the accompanying program. Performances are staged across six venues: Atelje 212, the National Theatre, Bitef Theatre, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Terazije Theatre and Yugoslav Drama Theatre. After every performance, the festival holds Meetings with the Artists, hosted by dramaturgy duo Jelena Kajgo and Bojan Munjin.

What Is Left of the Original Lineup?

The answer is short: only one play. The festival was announced in its original form in late June, and then came a wave of withdrawals in protest over last year’s censorship of Milos Lolic’s selection and in solidarity with colleagues in Serbia. According to what our sources have recorded, Germany’s Gob Squad, Portugal’s Teatro Praga and Italy’s Motus all pulled out, Slovenian director Ziga Divjak canceled his production, and the same wave of withdrawals was joined by Lebanese director Ali Carur and Argentine author Marina Otero. The only piece from that original lineup to survive to September is Black Gold by Dejan Dukovski, directed by Oliver Frljic and performed by the Belgrade Drama Theatre, the play with which the festival opened this year’s main program.

Yesterday we published a piece titled “Frljic Speaks Out, BDP Pulls Black Gold From Bitef,” at a moment when it looked like this play, too, would leave the program. Now the situation is reversed: Black Gold is the only link between the Bitef that was announced and the one that was actually staged, while Frljic himself, as he said earlier, admitted he had not even known the piece was on the program, and warned it would be a bad sign if the play were used as an excuse to let last year’s censorship be forgotten.

Selector Milovanovic explained the new lineup by pointing to the circumstances in which the festival’s very existence had become a matter of public and political debate, rather than starting from a predetermined theme or position. In one of the few statements he gave about the program, he said:

“There are also those who believe the Festival should not exist at this moment, just as every artist has the right to decide whether or not to take part in it. Just as the audience has the right to its own opinion. Holding the Festival does not resolve the circumstances in which it is held, nor does it explain them; it only confirms one fact: theater keeps happening.”

That is a sentence that could stand as a subtitle for The Runaways as well: theater happens even when no one knows whether the waiting has an end.

Who Is on the Jury, and What Happens Tonight?

The awards will be handed out by an international jury made up of German actor Verner Den, Vasil Vasilev, director of Bulgaria’s National Theatre, Turkish actor and director Kadri Ozdzan, along with Molina Fotez Udovicki and Irena Belojica. Their verdict closes a seven day program that, alongside Black Gold and The Runaways, also included KPGT’s The Merchant of Venice, directed by Strahinja Padezanin, which moves the action to Venice in 1938 and the era of racial laws, with Slobodan Bestic in the lead role. The program also featured Albion by Mike Bartlett from Sofia, the documentary piece Chisinau at Night by Mihai Fusu, a Georgian Stalker based on Tarkovsky, and a Turkish Antigone by Samsun’s Karma Sahne theatre, while the accompanying program included the Russian production Russian Blues.

The festival center was based at Bitef Theatre, at 1 Mira Trailovic Square, and was open from September 7 to 13, on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; our sources give no hours for the center during festival week itself. Running alongside the official program, Belgrade also hosted ne:Bitef, a self-organized festival that emerged in response to last year’s censorship, staged across roughly sixty micro venues with more than a hundred participants. It stands as proof that the question hanging over Bitef this year, namely whether institutional theater is even possible while its own survival is being questioned, is not resolved simply because the festival ultimately took place.

That is why The Runaways is not just the last item on the program but its most precise commentary on it. A festival that spent the whole summer waiting to see who would stay, who would cancel, and whether it would have anything to show at all, closes tonight with a play about people for whom waiting, against their own will, has become the only form of action left to them. Whether that amounts to defeat or stubborn persistence will only become clear once the jury announces its decision, but the simple fact that Bitef, after everything, made it to its seventh night is already an answer to the question this edition asked of itself more than any other.