Theatre of war: Alistair Moulton Black as Aleksander and Aimee Mica Komorowsky as Mirela in the play Sarajevo.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Plato’s observation is blisteringly true. War is humankind’s perpetual default mode, the most intimate sign of its intrinsic cruelty.
“History hurts,” writes American philosopher Fredric Jameson.
As for our subjection to violence or our imagined immunity — the presumption that war occurs elsewhere? The truth is, war is everywhere. Immunity is delusion. Suffering is the defining condition. Joy, or redemption, achieved only when one has travelled through a strait.
Sarajevo, a stage-play written by and starring Aimee Mica Komorowsky and directed by Kayli Elit Smith, raises these gnawing questions regarding violence, ethnic hatred, the brutalisation of women and the monstrousness of men.
Set during the Bosnian War, which started on 6 April 1992 and ended on 14 December 1995, it is an intimate examination of sexual discrimination and abuse, illicit love across an ethnic divide and a dissection of male power.
In addition to Komorowsky there are three men on stage: a South African war photographer and two Serbian soldiers of different rank. Komorowsky plays a Bosnian.
If the monstrousness of ethnic cleansing is a core theme, Sarajevo at no point allows itself to become a mouthpiece for ideological perversity.
Never dogmatic, always deeply implicated in interpersonal stresses and strains, the play allows one to enter a raw human condition and understand how vulnerability emerges, why misunderstanding is the root of dispassion and cruelty, how resolution — the predictive arc of conventional storytelling — might be obscene.
For one is not gratified at the end of Sarajevo. The fact that the rape scene occurs at the penultimate moment reinforces the fact that “history hurts”, that resolution is a fantasy in the midst of war and violence.
The male protagonists — Ivan Nedeljkovic and Alistair Moulton Black as the soldiers and Duane Behrens as the photographer — provide a strikingly varied counterpoint to the central woman protagonist.
Two desire her love, which remains unreciprocated. The other, in the throes of personal torment, becomes a rapist. This spectrum, between love and hate, fantasy and obscenity, spans a one-act play which, paradoxically, is fortifying in the middle of its brutality.
This is because the writer and director never lose sight of a raw mortality. There are no digressions, no ellipses — despite scene changes — because the director, Elit Smith, never wavers or veers away from the instinctive and immediate passions that impel the drama.
Staged in Johannesburg’s Holocaust Museum, a fitting site of mourning, the production is lean.
Composed of cardboard boxes — stacked as bombed sites, a table, seats — the composition conjures derelict building blocks as substantive as they are flimsy, for nothing is immune to destruction.
The lighting is as economical and deftly deployed. It is the soundtrack that proves to be the most potent theatrical weapon — an engulfing staggered and broken aria to the mania of war.
Amid this continuous din, the actors hold their own. One is never freed from the fact of war and the psychological damage it incurs.
Each character has their own demon, each is ensnared in the other. As Jean-Paul Sartre remarked, “Hell is others” — this is the trap which the playwright, Komorowsky, has set.
If war is all-consuming, then what of peace? Are we ever truly freed from the burden of history? Is reprieve only ever momentary?
What of Komorowsky’s script, which surely is the star of the play? It is her words, pithily direct and uninflected, wrought within and wracked by the moment in which they were conceived, in which, bodily, emotively, all of human pain and yearning seem distilled, which, when uttered by gifted actors, thrusts the audience into a shattered and shattering maw.
But then, this is a play and, as such, an artistic rendition of what is often silenced in war. If, therefore, I have emphasised the words written and then spoken, it is because, without words, even more than photographic images, we cannot know the truth about despair and hopelessness, of ongoing horror.
This is why truth and reconciliation is vital but also why they are also ever-elusive. That Komorowsky has refused to write an account, to explain, or explain away, the horror, is all the more salutary.
While the playwright-actress knows, with Margaret Atwood, that “War is what happens when language fails,” she also profoundly understands the importance of words and their utterance in and through ruined and desolate bodies. This, then, is her Sarajevo.
Sarajevo will be staged again at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre on 19 and 25 May.