SILYAN THE STORK FROM THE DEBAR DISTRICT

By Slobodan Unkovski

NOTHING

Goran Stefanovski slipped into the small rehearsal room in the Skopje Drama Theater in what was then the Republic of Macedonia, part of Yugoslavia, in the autumn of 1971. He was nineteen and in his first year studying English at the University — tall, shy, long-haired, hesitant, both in his manner and his ideas, there to observe our rehearsals. I had graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and was working on my second professional production, Chamber Music by Arthur Kopit, using the Grotowski Method. I thought I knew everything and the world was mine. At that moment, I was twenty three — much, much older than Goran.

In fact, the Director of the Drama Theater, Risto Stefanovski, had insisted on one of his nephews coming to see me, the one who wanted to study playwriting in Belgrade. I hate meeting such candidates. Especially because, as a candidate myself for theater directing, I had come to the same theater to see a director in the flesh; I’d never had any contact with professional theater beforehand. The most avant garde director of the time turned up — in a wolf-skin jacket, bearded, smoking, looking just as a director should, particularly if his name is Liubisha Georgievski.

I showed up as I was, my main feature being my long hair. I might know this nephew from somewhere, I’m not sure. He stayed for the rehearsals, as I thought that was the best way for him to see things from the inside. He soon became an important part of our team. He was good at taking delight in what we’d achieved in the day; many of the actresses asked for his opinion. He was smart and had direct experience of theater. He was writing and gave me some things to read. At that time, I thought it would be good to do something with our folklore. I can’t remember who mentioned Tsepenkov — I would like it to have been me, but I’m not sure it was.

In contrast to some other authors who liked to complicate things and drag out the process for years, Goran worked fast and with precision. He quickly drew up a concept for a theater piece called Petré, the name of the protagonist, an outline of a dozen or so scenes. That was to remain the basic structure of his first text, Yané Zadrogaz. And, of course, there were those who claimed to have had the same idea but hadn’t actually written anything down.

Everything conspired towards making Goran Stefanovski a playwright: the real-life drama of his extended family, refugees from Western Macedonia before World War II, who had ended up in Skopje; his childhood growing up in the theater in Prilep and in the so-called Debar Maalo (Debar District) of the city; his actor-director parents, who had been banished from Skopje for political reasons and later moved back; and Macedonian literature, which was entering its mature period during that time, precisely through the genre of drama. Nevertheless, I would say it was, above all, his innate talent, his enormous curiosity about all aspects of life, his openness towards world literature and music, the deep-seated restlessness and excitability of his mother Nada, an actor with a profound knowledge of life, together with his theater-director father Mirko’s analytical nature, his determination and enigmatic, vibrant ambiguity, both of them on high adrenaline.

Goran was to begin his playwriting studies as one of the best in his year in Belgrade but, after only a year, still one of the best, he left and came back to Skopje. I never asked him why. Afterwards he started writing plays and I started directing them, as did many others in various countries and in various languages. All very sweet and simple. In fact, it was neither.

MIRKO

It was a pre-war building. Like the set for a Chekhov play, perhaps: high ceilings, slight draft, nurses, doctors, white metal benches painted over with ivory-colored oil paint. I don’t know which of us was more scared — Goran or I. His father was sitting down and didn’t look terminally ill. I can’t remember the date, the time of year, nor why Goran and I were in Belgrade. I do remember a particular light in Mirko’s eyes, which I’ve only ever seen in that family. That’s how Ibsen must have looked when he said his last line: “Tvertimod” (on the contrary). Characters from Mirko’s productions were scattered about the corridors, from his personal dramas between Skopje, Prilep, and Celje, an all-encompassing view of Life and the Theater. Not a trace of self-pity. If I ever want to draw a centuries-old sycamore, he could be my model.

IDADIA

I start thinking what I can possibly say to Goran in November 2018 which I haven’t already said from November 1971 up to that day. What part of our conversations isn’t finished? What topic hasn’t been touched on, what are the secrets we haven’t shared? What emails haven’t we exchanged, usually written in pseudo world languages we didn’t speak? I never went to see Goran and Pat in Canterbury.

I wanted to believe his stay there was temporary and he was about to come back to Skopje, to Debar Maalo, where his soul lives.

I have a picture in my head of Goran walking around Canterbury on the route he once told me about, looking like Dubrovnik in this part of the world; him going to the university, chatting to various acquaintances on the way, dropping into his favorite café on the way back, the one whose owner had known Pinter personally, never missing a visit to the record shops, stopping at the newsagent’s. I never learned the correct name of his university, the names of his new colleagues who meant so much to him, the titles of the courses he taught. It was all just temporary, you see. But when he started to write his plays in English, when that language became his native tongue, I realized that my selfish wishes for his return were never to come true. When he came to Skopje from time to time for a few days, weeks, or months, he completely dissolved into the city, called to say he would be with me in a while after he’d taught his course, done his research, met contacts, been to his special haunts, which had to include the old Turkish quarter and his favorite restaurant, Idadia.

He was like Silyan the Stork from the best Macedonian folk tale about a man who turned into a stork and flew home every year to sit on the chimney of his house, unable to speak, watching his nearest and dearest living their lives out with moments of suffering and of joy without him, certain he had gone forever. In The Black Hole, Goran’s thrilling metaphorical play about the end of a regime, of a civilization, the protagonist Silyan experiences the fate of Silyan the Stork in the folk tale; in Part Two of the play, he is present but invisible, watching how events in which he had taken part now unfold without him, and without his being able to influence them. That’s how I see Goran today.

NEW PLAYS

Goran would usually finish a new play towards the end of the summer, sometimes a month or two later. I would be sitting in the theater café with actors Atso Giorchev and Stevo Spasovski in June when Stevo would ask: So when are we going to start rehearsing Goran — October or November? We’d all smile, but we knew that’s what would happen.

When Goran was a young writer who was developing and making his way, he would give me hard copies of his texts. I would read them over for a few days and then we’d meet up so I could tell him what I thought of them, and when we’d start rehearsals. This was hard for him because he wanted to know my opinion immediately, whereas I’d been conditioned to read a new play when I was completely prepared for it, when I could concentrate on the material. When Goran became a distinguished playwright, some things changed. We’d come across each other one evening at the MCM Club, or in another of our haunts, and he’d ask me, out of the blue, if I was ready to hear his new text. We’d go to his flat and he’d read it out loud to me, so that I couldn’t even touch it. He usually had just one copy, which meant I couldn’t take it home with me to reread it, either. I used to think that the fact that he gave me his texts to read, or read them aloud to me, was a huge privilege. And so it was. But then I’d be in town and say to our leading actor Nenad Stoyanovski: Goran’s got a new play, it’s great, and he’d reply: Right, I know. It’s excellent. Or Chorevski, another leading actor would add: I haven’t read the latest version, but it’s great. And then Goran’s childhood friend from the Faculty of Engineering, or a relation from some other place, would confirm they’d read it, too, not to mention his close friend at the Criminal Court, whose opinion Goran particularly valued. Sophia was interested to know which direction the plot would take, because Goran had told her both options. I’d complain to Zoki, the owner of MCM, that Goran had a new text, Shades of Babel, for example, and that everyone had read it . . . and Zoki would just add: It’s good — just the end’s a bit weird. Risto the Director would ask me: Is the writer writing anything? And just when I thought I’d found one of Goran’s fans who didn’t know the text, Risto would add: It’s a bit hermetic for my liking and seems a bit long. Before that, people would meet me in the street and, being the one responsible for this particular writer, I had to know the answer to the question: Is Goran writing something? Where’s he got to with it? I’m pretty sure I never asked Goran whether he was writing anything and where he’d got to with it.

THE KARPOSH HOTEL

I’m sitting in the Karposh Hotel, next to the Drama Theater, with Goran’s brother Vlatko, a guitar virtuoso and a big name in European music, next to the several actors who will be orphans without Goran’s future texts. We’re remembering happy moments with our great author. The commemoration ceremony for Goran has just finished.

And I’m imagining looking down with Goran, impossible as that is, on his body lying in an English hospital room, a scene from an English war film like The English Patient, or from an English play like Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, his perfect Oxford brogues under the bed, the doctor from Ian McEwan’s Saturday working here, English notices in black Latin letters in relief on white enamel plaques, staff whispering in an English I can’t quite follow, his bed Prospero’s isle from Shakespeare’s Tempest, and around him, in the room, in the corridor, all the way to the car park full of Land Rover Series IIIs and Mini Morrises, their steering wheels on the right, a Citroën 2CV6 lost in the middle of them, its steering wheel on the left, the one he left Macedonia in for England with Pat, everywhere standing at ease hundreds of anxious characters from his plays and screenplays, holding their passports with their British visas in their hands, furtively wiping their tears away, recognizing each other, getting to know each other, for the first time in their existence outside the space of their plays, each whispering their name in Macedonian: Silyan, soon to become a stork; Svetlé with her heavenly body; Sania in a silk kimono; The Father watching “snow” on the TV; Makso with his jeep; Pero listening to a symphony; Anna, wife and lover; Magda, who didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend; The Mother, come to give advice; Goran’s friends from Long Play — The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Animals, The Monkees, Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Yoko Ono, Rudi Dutschke, Ernst Fischer, and others; The Father, who’s a train driver; Yoné, who listens to Radio Luxembourg; The Sister, who wants to be Rita Pavone; The Mother, who likes the Radetzky March; Bond with all his suspicions; Hakim with all his suspicions; Mr. Jones, who has visions; Jane, who doesn’t know and doesn’t understand; Harding, the lonesome hobo; The Secretary, the Youth Organization’s fervent music activist; JFK and Marilyn Monroe in a motel room in Baltimore; Angie waiting for her nineteenth nervous breakdown; Sister Morphine, Cousin Cocaine; Valentina Tereshkova and Comrade Vastok trying to make a baby in space; Che Guevara with his beard and cigar; Sergeant Pepper with his girlfriend, Eleanor Rigby; Rina, who is great at chess, who has come back from England and has healing hands; Damian, who doesn’t understand the play he is in; Blaga, his sister; Todor and Marko, cementing up barrels full of toxic materials; Victor, history in motion; Nevena looking for her lost brother; Petar, the father, sick in the head; Ghosts of the past; Marta, the girl with green hair who wants to go to London; The Boy with no imagination; The Father, who doesn’t know anything; The Mother in amazement; Rampo Prtseski, the Director and nothing; The Chinese Interpreter; Chuang Li and the Second Chinese Businessman, who cherish their traditions; Chorbé, the lyrical lover from Burgas; Mr. and Mrs. Balbakov, the married couple; The Woman Soldier and the confidential dossier; Itso, the untalented actor; Slaveykov, the theater manager under pressure; Tsvetko, Neda, Jafer Aga from another play by Goran; Alexander and Katalin, an unforgotten love; The Music Teacher at the wedding; The Man in Tails from the village of Seltsi; Sara, researcher and architect; Rudi the postman; Gorchin as Gavrilo Princip; Hamdia as Andrich and Tito; Fata; The Chorus of Dubrovnik and of Vukovar; Sulio, the cook and other things; Azra, the woman at the window; Muyo the taxi driver; Maya the journalist; Sarajevo, the city; the god Dionysus; the prophet Tiresias; Agave; The Chorus of Maenads; everyone from the Yugoslav Wars; Zora, the mother, telling the story in London; Konstantin, the father, convalescing from the continuing war; Yana, the daughter, who doesn’t believe her father is dead; Mick, the Englishman, war correspondent and lover; Gavro, war profiteer with a ship; Prajapati, the pitiable U.N. observer; Marko Tsepenkov, who will be Todé the Wise; The Queen, a Macedonian before they existed as such; Yané Zadrogaz, the soul of Macedonia; the very wicked and dangerous Dragon; Yankula, Sekula, Petrula, the Queen’s half-witted sons; Tasé, the musician; Dafina, the village woman; Bozhin, the baker; Magda and Naidé the Leech, the village doctor; Vaska and Dimché, the blacksmith; Kostadinka and Itso, the tailor; all the enthusiastic villagers on their holiday; Dimitri Andreyevitch, father, invalid, mason, announcing the war; Maria, the mother who recognizes wild flesh; Andrei, the grocery shop assistant and revolutionary; Stevo, his brother and employee of an automobile dealership; Simon the waiter, an alcoholic and loser; Vera, the housewife who wants to get pregnant; Herzog, director of the automobile dealership, a Jew; Sara, his daughter, the widely read, stunningly beautiful Jewish woman; Hermann Klaus, the visitor from Berlin headquarters; Sivitch, the adviser; The Prostitute, The Priest; Mihailo and Evto, the fresco-painter brothers; Sultana, their mother, who remembers tragedies; Raina, Evto’s wife, who’s having a baby; Panaiotis, a Greek merchant among other things; Elena, his wife, who will steal the baby; Kiro, a former teacher; Gavril, his rebel-fighter brother; Angelé, the professional performer, juggler and palm-reader; The Pasha, the Turkish authority with the wisdom of a Great Power; Ostoitch, a Serb passing through, among other things; Velkov, a Bulgarian priest, among other things; Boris, the father and grandfather, an ex-convict; Matei, his hi-fi grandson; Sonia, daughter and mother; Mira, the girlfriend; The American passing through; The Russian passing through; The Arab passing through; Jacob, high-energy artist; Bozho, the minister of culture and writer; Paraskeva, wife and mother; Novey, a civil servant; Voydan, an ethnologist in free fall; Tsibra, his dangerous half-brother; Kolyo, a traveler going nowhere; Strezo, who may not exist; Altana, mother and pillar of strength; Ruzha with no support; Mary, as dangerous as Tsibra; Claudia, an unknown entity; The Tattooer, a threat; and yet many others I can’t recognize in the distance.

And through that great throng, I seem to see the Beatles, all of whose songs Goran knew by heart, with his Fan Club membership card no. 2003 like some kind of entry ticket, and the theater audiences from Skopje, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Podgorica, Zagreb, Moscow, London, Stockholm, Antwerp, Vienna, Paris cover the 15km road from the hospital to his Canterbury. Goran and I are looking down on all this and, even though he can’t speak and appears not to hear, he smiles enigmatically, hugs me with one arm and delivers one of his deadly sarcastic sentences, which we will never know. A group of people from Debar Maalo have turned up late, are pushing through the crowd and shouting out his local nickname . . .

And back in reality, in the evening, Pat, Jana, and Igor Stefanovski are alone with Goran in his hospital room. Igor leans his mobile phone next to Goran’s ear and I say to him from Skopje: Unko here. You know how very much . . . Or perhaps I don’t say anything because I seem to be talking to myself as I lie dying.

PETRÉ

When Goran started writing his first play Petré, later to be called Yané Zadrogaz, the most significant playwrights in the previous century of Macedonian drama were the following: J. H. Jinot with his didactic plots with religious and symbolic themes, Voydan Chernodrinski with Macedonian Blood Wedding, Dimitar Molerov with The Dragon’s Bride, Vasil Ilyoski with Guv’nor Teodos and The Runaway Girl, Risto Krlé with Money Kills, Anton Panov with Earning a Living Abroad and Goran’s direct predecessors: Kolé Chashulé with Black is the Color, Tomé Arsovski with Diogenes’ Paradox, Bogomil Giuzel with Adam, Eve, and Job, alongside a whole string of other writers trying to articulate the modern human condition and society. Macedonian drama was late in beginning to free itself from its self-imposed task of providing the torch and herald of the struggle for national liberation, consciousness, and identity of the Macedonian people and to leave the circle of national themes in a modern setting, insofar as that was possible in the given political system for the arts.

During the almost two months of rehearsals for Chamber Music at the Drama Theater, Stefanovski was to write the synopsis and draft for his first play Petré, which was to be worked on in the years that followed and become Yané Zadrogaz — A Folk Fantasia with Songs. Taking the ten volumes of folklore, songs, tales, sayings, and customs collected by Marko Tsepenkov in the second half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, Stefanovski was to extract the essence, soul, and genome of the folk narrator and articulate a new synthesized quintessence with a gentle and careful hand.

In the 1972–73 season, we began rehearsing Yané Zadrogaz, the first text by this potential new playwright. The first night of a new Macedonian play is a real celebration in the theater. But the leading actors in the Skopje theater considered the play wasn’t yet ready for the stage and the play was removed from the repertoire after just ten days of rehearsals. Perhaps they were right, but perhaps the reason was a big film most of them were engaged in. We stopped rehearsing and both of us fell ill from the grief of it. That’s the diagnosis I’d give for the defeat of someone involved in the arts who is condemned before being given any kind of hearing.

YANÉ ZADROGAZ

Two seasons later, in the fall of 1974, at the strong insistence of the Director of the Drama Theater, Risto Stefanovski, Goran’s uncle, Stefanovski’s first text, Yané Zadrogaz, was again in rehearsal, having undergone serious work and with completely new actors, and its first night was a huge success. That was Goran’s debut. The production was invited to important festivals and won awards there. It toured all round what was then Yugoslavia, also going to Paris and Caracas, Venezuela. This is how Goran entered Macedonian drama through the front door with his first play and opened up his path into European drama.

That first fantasia of his was based on a simple formula. A nation has a bad queen with three bad sons and a dangerous, evil dragon. The invented national hero, Yané Zadrogaz (Jack the Joker, Jack the Tease, Jack the Bold), is his nation’s only hope. Goran makes this archetypal story more interesting by having it told by Todé the Wise, with the other villagers acting out the tale on his instructions on a national feast day.

In contrast to the classic Macedonian plays of Voydan Chernodrinski, for example (in whose honor Goran was to write the tragicomedy Chernodrinski Comes Home), where personal dramas are the result of a socio-political situation (The Turkish Occupation), Yané Zadrogaz conjures with archaic language and folklore outside time and politics. In this way, his fantasia with songs avoided the trap of interpreting historical reality, causes, and consequences; even though it is deeply founded in Macedonian folklore with its wealth of drama, it isn’t obstructed by fixed limitations. As in classic westerns, good wins and everything is cheerful and jolly, the hero rides off into the sunset and the audience goes home feeling positive, elated, and happy.

PLAYWRITING

At the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, they recognized Stefanovski’s talent and his skills. Amid strong competition, he was immediately admitted as one of the best candidates. But, after only one year of studies, he left for reasons we can only surmise — perhaps he didn’t like the institution, perhaps his parents couldn’t cover the costs, perhaps he missed his hometown of Skopje, or perhaps it was something completely different.

WILD FLESH

In the following few years, Stefanovski wrote several TV scripts for film and drama and established himself as a major writer, but in summer 1979 he produced his family chronicle Wild Flesh, arguably his greatest full-length play for the theater. The first night at the end of December that year was the result of a new generation of actors at the Skopje Drama Theater, and Stefanovski and I were recognized as an important tandem in Macedonian theater. Goran was then only twenty-seven.

I can’t tell you how surprised and excited I was by the maturity and completeness of the work, by the precisely executed character lines, by the structure and choice of the conflict, by the multi-layered nature of the plot. At the same time, I was worried because the history of the arts is full of examples of those who have created their best work when very young and lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of that first great success, trying in vain to repeat it or surpass it.

Those in the know will recognize Goran’s family history in many of his texts. Wild Flesh, set in the twilight of the approaching Second World War in Skopje, in Debar Maalo, the mythical site of Goran’s childhood and the root of his happiness, speaks of the spread of fascism but, above all, of the disintegration of a family, of the demolition of their home, and of the catastrophe awaiting the country with the coming war.

10.

MONOLOGUE

The apartment block where Lina and I lived on the ninth floor was the famous Block 13, behind the Green Market. Famous, that is, with the stallholders from the surrounding villages, who sometimes used it as a warehouse and sometimes as everything else. Especially the elevators.

While I was doing my military service, Goran lived there, and then, as a result of his particular lifestyle, many people got to know my apartment and, I must say, my bedroom.

Later, when we were rehearsing Wild Flesh, the rehearsals were hard work, although we knew we were on the right path and that we were doing something important. You can feel those things. If you’ve felt wrong, then the first night is very awkward.

Choré, the actor Chorevski, who was playing the role of Stevo, had a scene which he couldn’t act. He understood it, he knew all about it but, somehow, he couldn’t do it. I couldn’t help him anymore. I was thirty or thirty-one at that time, and I’d done all I could. Now I’m older and I still don’t know what to do about that kind of problem except wait. Goran and I talked about what to do. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven and couldn’t help much.

Lina and I had gone to bed in the living room of our two-room apartment in the aforementioned Block 13. Did we have a baby at that time? Yes, he was asleep in the bedroom with our older son. The phone rang: Unko, can I come round? Choré liked to play jokes from time to time and would call after some late-night drinking bout with his well-known message: The Drama Theater’s gone up in flames — I’m the only survivor.

So this time I replied: Choré, we’ve gone to bed, we’re asleep. Choré said: Just a quick visit. He came. We took our famous six-piece thick-foam bed apart and sat there in our pyjamas to see what Choré wanted. He said: I’ve found the solution to the Europe monologue (. . . Stevo Andreyevitch from Debar Maalo now sits astride his white charger . . .). I said: Great. He said: If I don’t show you now, I won’t be able to sleep and I won’t leave till you’ve watched me. We sat down to watch. That was my first rehearsal at home. Choré acted it perfectly, as well as that monologue could ever be played. Instead of getting up on a chair, as he would in the performances, he got up on one of those thick-foam bed sections.

He asked: How was it? I said — I don’t know what I said exactly — but I was really impressed, I said fantastic, fascinating. Take a seat and let’s have a drink — coffee, something stronger. Choré said No, I have to be going, and he got up and left. That’s how he was then, to the point and always on the go. Lina and I stayed awake for hours.

Goran saw him do this monologue a few days later. It was still wonderful and intriguing, but it was never to be the same as it had been after midnight in our apartment. How did you do it? asked Goran. Oh, by magic, professional secrets, special techniques. Grotowski, slightly modified. Of course, everyone, including Goran, knew about the nighttime rehearsal. That’s the advantage of my work. Goran’s characters can come into my living room and share one of their secrets with me. Or later, when they go bad, they can forget what they had which was most beautiful and become my deadly enemies. I can’t tear them up together with the pages on which their lives are written or throw them out of my memory of past events. That’s the blessing and the curse of this profession, my dear Goran.

11.

THE CONTINENT OF DEBAR MAALO (DEBAR DISTRICT)

Families, lost relatives, and brothers with completely different moral and political values are always cropping up in Stefanovski’s plot lines, deftly supported by short, precise speeches, thought associations, with no cheap pathos, in the best tradition of modern plays in English, especially those by his favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. We have the three brothers in Yané Zadrogaz (the Queen’s sons), the three brothers in Wild Flesh (a businessman just starting out, an alcoholic waiter who’s a loser, and the young revolutionary who wants to change the world), the two brothers in Flying on the Spot (fresco painters), the two half-brothers in Tattooed Souls (an ethnologist from Macedonia and a probable American gangster), and so on. Brothers, home, the Macedonian homeland, but not dealt with simplistically, the sense of some indefinable menace, the articulation of the universal states of the soul, the discussion of the sense of a given moment in a given place . . . a multitude of themes which we hadn’t encountered up to that time in our theater.

Some analysts of Stefanovski’s works try to define him as a writer who depends on Debar Maalo, where his grandfather built a house and where his father and his four brothers grew up. Debar Maalo comes up in many places in his work, from the concrete location of Wild Flesh to The Demon of Debar Maalo, for example, and part of Goran’s email address.

I would say that, when Stefanovski speaks of Debar Maalo, he’s not talking about a geographical space — in reality, a smaller area than a block in a modern city, bounded by two streets.

No, Goran’s notion of Debar Maalo is the mythical land of the imagination, of freedom, a world which exists primarily in his mind and whose heroes have died either before Goran was born or when he was little, with just a few surviving there, like his friend Krap, to prove that Debar Maalo did in fact exist as such and meant a great deal in the unwritten history of the city of Skopje. Paradoxically, the street where the Stefanovski house used to stand is called Albert Einstein Street.

Goran’s pictures of the “continent” of Debar Maalo are based on street legends, tales of powerful and dangerous groups of young men with values which only live on there, their devotion and skill in keeping pigeons, their special mentality, strong will, pigheadedness, and perseverance, about remembering injustice, always going against the grain, outwitting and outflanking adversaries, a particular type torn away from the group, with a separate language and culture, their own concept of honor and bravery, an oral passing down of stories, whether they be fact or fiction. About a closed and perhaps marginalized group, who see themselves as important and indestructible, as the essence of a part of the city of Skopje.

In practice, Debar Maalo in Stefanovski’s work is a synonym for Macedonia, from whose soil he drew all of his strength, especially his creative power. Goran’s plays can be divided into many phases or thematic wholes, but certainly into two which I consider the most dominant: the first Debar Maalo/Macedonian/Yugoslav/Ex-Yugoslav phase, whatever you’d like to call it, and the second, the English/European phase. This goes together with the division of his plays originally written in Macedonian and those originally written in English. And this coincides with plays written from his own free will and those written as serious commissions from producers, theaters, and festivals.

12.

STOCKHOLM

When did we create our production about Sarajevo? Where? In Stockholm, in February 1993. And then we worked on it in Antwerp and in London. We needed, both of us, to say something about Sarajevo, against the war in the former Yugoslavia. Haris Pashovitch was chosen as the director; he selected his cast but then went home to Sarajevo under siege and stayed there. I took his place, but his shadow always remained over that project.

In Stockholm the dogs don’t bark and, when they get on a bus, squeeze themselves under their owner’s seat in a well-behaved fashion. That was the setting on the morning when Goran and I were drinking our coffee in the huge, rented apartment near the City Hall, where the Nobel Banquet is held after the award ceremony in the Concert Hall. After Skopje, where there were packs of street dogs attacking its citizens at the time, not to mention the barking with which they had seen me off a few days earlier, Stockholm was like a breath of mountain air. We were preparing for our second rehearsal.

Then Lina called to tell me my mother had died unexpectedly. At that moment, it came into my head that it was some kind of punishment for the topic we had decided to deal with. I also thought of something which I was ashamed of — the fact that I wouldn’t have to pull my hair if I saw a dead cat or dog in accordance with the superstition “So your mother won’t die.” I wondered whether Goran and I were close enough that we could share that moment. Mothers had died several times in our productions, brothers had killed each other, some characters had committed suicide, some had lived on as pale shadows of their former selves. Weren’t we both past masters of the space between fact and fiction? The last thing I remember of that morning is his face, which showed everything. If we could go through it again, would I change that light, which wasn’t right somehow in the way it was coming through the window? Or would I add a little local music from the transistor radio on the kitchen table as a counterpoint? Or say Goran wasn’t up and that he came in after I heard the news? Or . . . I sat at the kitchen table, he talked and swore like anything, then called his and my Patricia Marsh.

Later I reflected it was a Stanislavski situation exercise but not original enough for a scene in a play. For years I’ve been holding back those unshed tears from that morning, and I transfer them from one part of me to another, only for them to emerge sometimes unexpectedly, without a good reason and apparently unconnected to my mother, and they knock me out in a second. Now, since Goran is there, too, the space has become even more cramped.

13.

REHEARSAL

If there was anything that annoyed me about Macedonian playwrights, it was their need to come to rehearsals. If there was anything I could completely understand, it was Macedonian playwrights’ need to see how their text was progressing.

We said to Goran: When you’re writing, do we come up behind you and look at what you’re typing? No. Do we know all the troubles, dilemmas, difficulties, and dramas you have while you’re writing? No.

The playwright expects to see a set result. Because they have a set result in the dramatic form. The stage has a different logic to it. I don’t want to repeat myself here: process, development, phases, layers, elements, and wholes, taking apart and putting back together again. Moods and creative crises, and very limited time.

That’s why Goran and I agreed he wouldn’t come to rehearsals. We’d invite him to come when the time came. When the time was right, when we wouldn’t be ashamed, either of ourselves or of him. He had his misgivings about it. Nenad, who loved him best, told him: It’s your writing, our rehearsal.

He didn’t come.

Then, while I’m rehearsing, I sense someone watching from the back of the theater; I turn round, but there’s no one there. I turn round again and catch sight of the author’s head popping up somewhere in the back rows. We stop rehearsing and all laugh. He may have said: I dropped a pen here yesterday, so I came in to find it, or he may not have said anything.

The truth is, we want to have the freedom to say various things about the text, about individual lines, so we feel relieved, so we can master them completely. So if we say: Uh, this really doesn’t work, it’s not a profound analysis or criticism of the style or composition of the distinguished author, but rather our safety valve, our means of making our way through the complex and complicated texts of our dear writer.

Then he would publish the texts. He never had them printed with our cuts (some trifling line here and there) but presented them as he had brought them to the first rehearsal.

In contrast to his, almost all of Shakespeare’s texts were printed from the prompter’s copy, as they were performed on the stage. That’s all very well, but the profession of theater director was invented many years after Shakespeare’s death and only a few years before Stefanovski’s birth.

14.

THE ARTIST AND THE MINISTER

In The False Bottom, 1984, characters are clearly opposed politically and philosophically (the Minister of Culture v. the Artist), Goran opens up a heated debate about the relationship between art and politics. This play is completely different from the approach in the lyrical folk fantasia with songs of Yané Zadrogaz, the profoundly emotional and poignant Wild Flesh, the exciting and uncompromising Hi-Fi, in which the author first broached a political theme, untypical of his work. The False Bottom at first sight is a play to read, like a thesis play, a discussion in drama about the significance of art. In the three acts, the artist presents his dilemmas and standpoints about pressure and politicization in a direct conversation with the minister of culture, his superficial wife, and their impressionable daughter.

Twelve years later, in 1996, in the new Macedonian democratic state after the fall of Yugoslavia, I myself became the Minister of Culture of the Republic. Goran remained an artist. We could now conduct the hypothetical discussions based on the playwright’s imagination in the real conditions of the minister’s office.

15.

MOZART WAS ALSO

A MACEDONIAN

It was just the next year, 1985, when Stefanovski’s especially significant play, Tattooed Souls, appeared, closer in structure to Wild Flesh than those plays immediately preceding it. A young ethnologist, Voydan, goes to the United States (The Rose Tattoo) to do research for his doctoral thesis on the roots and condition of Macedonian migrants there. He comes into conflict with the most rigid Macedonian myths and illusions about the importance of our small nation in the framework of world civilization. Not one of the questions with which Voydan comes to the States is answered or properly dealt with until the end of the play. He isn’t even sure whether what he has learnt about his father and his second American family is the truth and, even more importantly, whether what he has seen is true. From the superior, ignorant point of view he had on arrival in the States, Voydan becomes entangled in questions which have no answer, questions he can’t understand; he is astonished to find how little he knows himself and his apparently strong scientific position dissolves into the fog of the complex relationships and lives of Macedonian migrants in America.

16.

CASABLANCA CASABALKAN

In contrast to Wild Flesh, which appeared just before the death of Marshal Tito and indirectly formulated the nation’s fears for the future of Yugoslavia, and to The False Bottom and Tattooed Souls, which were performed in the years when we could see that the fall of Yugoslavia was inevitable and we dreaded a potential war, Casabalkan, a paraphrase of the title of the film Casablanca, appeared in 1997 when Greater Yugoslavia had already collapsed into a series of small states through a bloody civil war from 1991 to 1995.

In Casablanca, a war-romance movie made in 1942 with Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund in the Nazi-occupied city of Casablanca in Morocco, enemies come together in Rick’s café — local policemen, German officers, secret agents, and soldiers. Rick is a cynical American expatriate, and the plot revolves around whether or not he will help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis. The film is famous for certain lines around which a whole mythology has built up (“Play it again, Sam,” “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and so on).

In Goran’s Casabalkan, the action takes place on a floating casino during the Yugoslav Wars, frequented by leaders from the opposing sides. The ship sets sail in the evening, the supposedly implacable enemies gamble or take part in orgies, and then they go back to the battlefield the following morning. After more than fifty years since the movie came out, we can recognize its characters in the chaos of various nations and armies, but all the circumstances are different and the context is dramatically changed, even though there is a love story at the center of it. Ilsa is Zora in the play, a refugee who fled to London with her daughter Yana and husband Konstantin, though he has returned to the Balkans. He and his wife’s ex lover Mick (Rick in Casablanca) seem to be trying to finish their own wars, independently of the real war. Zora and Yana reveal their secrets to each other and now their lives can go on in London, the play finishing with the last line of the movie: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

17.

STRUCTURE

A theater studies program based on high science (as their goal) and middling practice (as their reality), where the expression postmodern is used more often than Good Morning, invited me to reconstruct one of the first productions of a Stefanovski text which hasn’t been preserved in any form. Partly by chance, and partly by intention, the conversation never took place. Later, I met some of the students and they told me they had done the reconstruction themselves and that it had been great, fantastic, totally successful.

That made me think. Is it enough if you have a text, some costume sketches, and photos, even a video recording (which was lacking in this case), to have a clear picture of a production from forty years ago? After many years’ work in the theater, I can’t tell you how fascinating Meto Yovanovski was as Yané Zadrogaz, an impossible mix of inner chaos, love, and precise interpretation of what might be called the Macedonian Soul. Where are the wonderful pauses written down in Krum Stoyanov’s introductory monologue as Todé the Wise, how can you reconstruct that archetypal energy, wickedness, and charm, which radiated from Atso Giorchev’s Dragon? How can I describe Todorka Kondova’s acting as the Queen, or accurately convey how Kolé, Dadi, and Dukats played the roles of her three half-wit sons? Even if you could hear the songs, nobody who wasn’t there then can know how marvelous the women’s singing was, as Lenché, Lilé, Snezhé, Maida, Slavitsa, and Sabina opened new phases in the structure of the play.

How could I inform a cyber researcher about the position of Stevo Spasovski’s body as he spoke about his character’s dilemmas, or about the ironic (both funny and wise) ineffable interpretation of the play in which nothing — absolutely nothing — is sacred, and yet at the same time everything is important. Where would that performance have been without Mité’s fanaticism (too narrow a term for it) or Meshko’s present absence . . . and Pero . . .? Et cetera . . . How to pack up a production in a research folder? I’ve seen that it can be done. I just don’t know whether it should be done. At the Moscow Art Theater I once watched productions which they had kept in the repertoire for decades because of their particular significance, even though none of the original cast were acting in them. They have everything: the information, authenticity, the same set, the same space — even the same costumes, now showing signs of wear — but something extremely important has been lost.

What evidence do I have that I worked on Stefanovski’s texts? Some newspaper cuttings, some prize certificates, some half-forgotten photos, a recollection in my soul. The vital members of the audience who still talk about the productions. There’s no process by which I’ll manage to prove with material evidence that they existed, that that was actually us.

You can’t be involved in theater direction and have a need to live forever. The performances exist only from 7:30 pm to 10:15 pm (or however long they last) and everything else is just an idea for a dream. Whereas the text of the play lasts. Be careful how you hold this collection of plays by Goran Stefanovski in your hands. Various personalities, people, characters, actors, dilettantes, and top professionals, children, animals, set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, and supporters who could give us an ounce of strength at the right moment, which had been lacking up to then — any of them might drop out of its pages. These are the footnotes to this book, that’s the selected bibliography of the Playwright, those are the threads which bind us forever.

Shakespeare says in The Tempest: We are such stuff as dreams are made on . . . The life of a whole generation was special, exciting, and constantly challenging because it had its own playwright, Goran Stefanovski. The new generations are discovering him anew and transporting him into the contemporary Macedonian state of affairs. The man who created our dreams . . .

18.

APPLAUSE

At the first night of Yané Zadrogaz in 1974 we stood in the corridor behind the stage and listened to the standing ovation. Then we went into the sewing room so we could laugh with joy. Goran’s cheeks were flushed.

At the first night of Wild Flesh in 1979 we stood in the wings and embraced the actors as they exited the stage after the many bows they took to the long applause. I may well have pushed Goran to go on stage and bow himself. Clumsily, diffidently, for the sake of history.

When in 1980 we were awarded all the prizes possible at Steriino Pozorie, the most important Yugoslav Drama Festival in what was then Yugoslavia, the theater was full of a thousand people and the audience were screaming as if they were at a rock concert.

We didn’t get any prizes for Flying on the Spot. We sat after the Festival and thought our wonderful production hadn’t been understood.

I can’t remember the first night of The False Bottom, but I know it was a joyful occasion. Goran was happy.

Shades of Babel brought us acting prizes. The first night was sincere and dangerous. We didn’t embrace anymore, we didn’t scream, there was no general chaos behind the stage. We were authors who had to show some decorum.

I directed Tattooed Souls in Belgrade with an exceptional cast. While the massive applause was going on, I drew Goran into a prop room near the stage. I remember he was shaking all over. It was his first great success in the Yugoslav capital. He was wearing a new jacket. From one first night onwards, I can’t remember which one, he started wearing a jacket to first nights, colorful ties, pointed leather shoes, sometimes reddish yellow ones.

At the first night of Tattooed Souls in Moscow he brought me two Turkish cakes from Patricia, which we combined with a lot of champagne and a lot of vodka. I stayed in the hotel room for three days — just opening my eyes hurt.

Chernodrinski Comes Home was a play about a playwright. That was the essential thing about it, especially as the playwright doesn’t appear in the play.

Sarajevo opened in Antwerp, European City of Culture, everything very formal. Actors from Sweden, Slovenia, Spain, and Bosnia.

At the first night of Tongues of Fire, I don’t remember whether we took a bow or not. When Goran came a week before the first night of his Demon from Debar Maalo, he was in despair, he really didn’t like it. I think we took a bow.

He couldn’t come to the first night of his adaptation of Ismail Kadare’s The Successor in Prishtina. I took a bow with my set and costume designers.

For a long time, we worked on a script for a big new educational series. Goran wrote half of it in the summer of 2018. He came to Skopje, where we discussed the structure with Sinolichka Trpkova, the co producer, and then he went home to Canterbury, in the United Kingdom, to finish it. The rest is history.

Translated by Patricia Marsh-Stefanovska