The Balkan question

Transplanting a British classroom drama to war-torn Sarajevo risked reopening old wounds, but during a trip to Belgrade, Mark Fisher finds a new generation moving on from past prejudices

IT'S NOT even 8am and I think I've sparked an international incident. I'm talking to Maja Izetbegovic about the part she's playing in Class Enemy. It's a pre-breakfast interview in a Belgrade hotel and I haven't quite woken up to the niceties of Balkan etiquette. Seeing as she is playing the only Serb in a play produced and set in Bosnian Sarajevo, I don't mind asking if she is Serbian in real life.

There's a look of panic across the table. The translator gets flustered. Words are exchanged. Then director Haris Pasovic steps in. "We find it very awkward when you ask that question," he explains. "It's like asking what type of sex you like."

The legacy of Yugoslavia's civil war in the 1990s – ethnic cleansing and all – means such questions stir up too many dark memories. Nobody wants to be reduced to an ethnic grouping. They just want to get along.

Even so, I feel it's worth getting an answer. When Nigel Williams' play premiered at London's Royal Court in 1978, Izetbegovic's character was a black boy in a south London school who'd been psychologically damaged after being the target of racism. Now, in Pasovic's production for his East West theatre company, she is a Serbian girl in a Sarajevo classroom whose window-breaking addiction was sparked by being treated as a second-class citizen. Maybe I'll never make a diplomat, but Izetbegovic's real-life experience would surely have some bearing on that.

Turns out she hasn't taken offence. "No, I'm not Serbian," she smiles. "But, along with Haris, I tried to build the character by going to Serbian schools. In Sarajevo there's a small part of the city that belongs to the Republic of Serbia. So I visited schools where there are only Serbian kids. The character I play doesn't even know the difference between a Serbian and a Bosnian. She doesn't know the difference between the gods or the religions."

More significant than my cultural insensitivity is the company's two-night run in Belgrade. Only a few years ago, such a visit would have been unimaginable, but now, the day after the Eurovision Song Contest, the Serbian capital seems to be going out of its way to demonstrate what a tolerant place it has become.

The new mood will be sorely tested in the weeks to come, however, by the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for war crimes.

The audience at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre laughs generously when the play's racist Bosnian student claims Serbs arrived in Sarajevo from Africa to steal Bosnian jobs. And it warmly applauds a play made freshly relevant by the privations of a war that Nigel Williams could never have anticipated.

"There has been big progress in the relationship between the countries," says Pasovic, who was born in Sarajevo but spent much of his early directing career in Belgrade before the war. "For me, it was my country. For the actors, it is another country. You have a meeting of different generations in our team with different attitudes towards Belgrade and Serbia. A couple of years ago, the younger people treated Serbia as the empire of evil. For me, it was more complex because I had wonderful years here. I came here with a show four years ago, but for these actors it is the first time. The bottom line is we are very well received and the city is not as dangerous as it used to be."

"In the play, the characters are living with their parents' war," says Izetbegovic, who was six when fighting broke out. "Their parents were wounded in the war and brought their traumas to their kids."

"The events of the play are seen through the filter of the war," agrees Pasovic. "The characters know nothing except the war and the post-war transition. A typical situation would be parents who are traumatised by the war, who have no job, who feel isolated and who cannot provide for their family. You start drinking, you start beating your wife and your kids, then the kid goes out and starts taking drugs."



Despite all this, what's remarkable is how little the show diverges from the original. Described by the Times as "frightening, frequently funny and compassionate", it was conceived amid the social turbulence of the 1970s and seems like a very British portrayal of a generation let down by society. With violence as their currency, the boys maintain a vicious pecking order while taking turns to teach the class in the absence of a teacher with sufficient morale to turn up. At stake is a battle between the ringleaders over whether there can be a positive way out of their dead end, or whether destruction is the only answer.

Pasovic manages to maintain the arc of the play with surprising fidelity. What changes are the details: the classroom is now mixed sex; they sniff glue instead of smoking; their god is Allah; they listen to hip-hop and their chosen weapons are guns. What doesn't change is the sense of alienation and the vision of an abandoned generation. In fact, where the original seems to be a play of its time, this version has a new-found urgency.

"The play did have something to do with the social and political situation in the UK at that time, but I don't think it is only about that," says Pasovic. "When you forget that layer, you have a situation in which a group of endangered people find themselves isolated and jeopardised by a predator."

Curiously, Williams' vision of a crumbling British state-school sector in 1978 is even more pertinent in modern-day Sarajevo. "We attended schools for seven days as part of our preparations for the play," says Izetbegovic, who played a key role in translating the play into believable slang. "The schools were exactly the same. I believe the character I'm playing is real and could be my neighbour."

Now this 30-year-old play is coming full circle as the East West company performs not only to Edinburgh audiences but also, as part of the EIF's Sharing the Festival programme, to teenagers in Rutherglen, Stirling and Cumbernauld. It will be fascinating to see whether young Scottish audiences identify with the characters' tangible sense of alienation. v

Class Enemy, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000), Wednesday until Saturday, 8pm; Rutherglen Town Hall, August 27; MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, September 2; Cumbernauld Theatre, September 4 www.eif.co.uk