Literatura in cenzura - Društvo za primerjalno književnost - ZRC SAZU

Aleksandra Jovićević:Censorship and Ingenious Dramatic Strategies in Yugoslav Theatrepublic), but almost no documents or traces survive of these cases. Perhaps theregime was aware that sooner or later it would be criticized for censoriousinterventions, so it preferred to act silently and anonymously, moresubtly than by means of public stigmatization. There are hardly any officialrecords of banishment, signed documents, or material traces. In short,nothing tangible survives – only hints, rumours, indirect proofs, and dubiouswitnesses that prefer to keep silent or “do not remember well”. MostYugoslav theatre professionals accepted this invisible censorship as a factof life, even if it made theatre look conformist. There was no hard-coredissidence and no real underground theatre, except for a few distinct dissidentvoices with considerable influence.Intertextual grotesquesThe cause célèbre of Yugoslav theatre dissidence is the Croatian playwrightIvo Brešan, whose four early plays faced problems with theatrecensorship within and outside Croatia because they offered a gloomyview of the post-war conditions and accused the communist ideologyof narrow-mindedness and oppression. As in many similar cases, theseplays were never officially proscribed. If they were attacked publicly, itwas under the guise of an aesthetic norm, and they were then quietly removedfrom the repertories, or banned in the midst of rehearsals. Thefirst such case was Brešan’s Predstava ‘Hamleta’ u selu Mrduša Donja (ThePerformance of ‘Hamlet’ in the Village of Lower Jerkwater); a tragic farcethat premiered in 1971 and received major national awards. In 1973, however,when a more conservative communist line prevailed, the productionwas attacked on Croatian television for being ideologically “unsuitable”,and this provoked a number of unsigned polemics that appeared in theCroatian press. Soon afterwards the play was taken off the repertories atmany theatres, except at Teatar ITD in Zagreb and Kamerni Teatar ‘55 inSarajevo, where it played for ten years and more than 300 performances.In 1973, the film director Krsto Papić turned the play into a film that wona number of national and international awards but never had a wide distribution.The campaign against it was part of a more general ideologicalattack on Yugoslav film noire, which allegedly depicted Yugoslav reality ina dark and critical manner.Brešan’s second play, the Faustian parable Nečastivi na filozofskomfakultetu (The Devil at the Faculty of Arts), was supposed to be producedat the ITD when his Hamlet was attacked in 1973, when political pressureson “ideologically unreliable university professors” were increasing. The241