The Shelling

Rudi and Miloš meet.

In the night. In the middle of an empty street. It’s almost the end of the war.

A few moments before the shelling.

This is how their love story begins, with a simple meeting.

Between them, their thoughts. Between them, an easily forgettable little apocalypse depicted on CNN.

Between them, their desires and fears, some horniness, hope and the echo of death.

This is how their love story begins, a first date without a single word being spoken, without getting to know each other and without getting to come.

Miloš and Rudi meet, the shelling of the city begins and they take cover.

This is how their love story begins, between life and death, between trauma and hope, between today and some other tomorrow

that is delayed, dragging, that glorious kingdom of postponement.

And then a grenade appears. The grenade’s name is the same as mine. I know, what a tired postdramatic commonplace.

The grenade speaks. And it says, war is the absence of hope, a space of pure, unbearable passage of time.

And it says, the meeting of two strangers is full of potential for hope, its every excess. And the grenade says, I wasn’t able to

write the play I imagined (just as this text about this play eludes me). Because war cancels the future, cancels every tomorrow.

Because in war, tomorrow is death, nothing. Today is merely a delay, a snooze button, a countdown.

In war, tomorrow is the narrowing of imagination, reality without hope, the unbearably real. For survivors, war is a black box.

For those who come after, a fiction or an unwieldy legacy.

And the grenade says, there is a tomorrow after all. In the meeting of two strangers, in falling in love, in everything that we denote lightly

as trivial, kitschy or sickly sweet. Every grandiose tomorrow that becomes the basis for survival.

Any of those things that won’t end up in the evening news. Sex, laughter, a minor triumph or a stranger whose name we have learned,

each of the trivialities of life, each unexpected encounter and every case. Every tomorrow.

Rudi and Miloš meet again.

After 7300 tomorrows, in a night club, in another city, in an excess of hope.

Two strangers finally meet. This is what the end of this drama sounds like. Thus begins their love story.

playwright:

Dino Pešut

director:

Judita Gamulin

cast:

Marin Klišmanić, Luka Knez and Iva Kraljević

costume designer:

Katarina Juričić

music:

Leo Beslać

associate for stage movement:

Pravdan Devlahović

light designers:

Alen Marin and Katarina Juričić

producer:

Romana Brajša

production assistant:

Hana Zrnčić Dim

design:

Verlauf

photographer:

Karla Jurić

production:

KUFER Theater Company and KunstTeatar

premiere:

September 8, 2021

duration:

60 minutes