'Projekt Handke' tackles the fragile balance between freedom of speech and social responsibility in theatre. A guest performance by Qendra Multimedia (Kosovo), hosted at SNG Nova Gorica on 8 June.
"A pan-European theatre team of creators from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Italy, Macedonia, Germany, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo and elsewhere play out the fragile balance between freedom of speech and social responsibility in theatre through the perspective of controversial Nobel laureate Peter Handke.
The play Projekt Handke (Is justice for Peter's stupidity) painfully and relentlessly cuts through the circle of lies that Handke publicly expressed and showed in his books, thereby cutting deeply into the core of the truth about the war in the former Yugoslavia.
A vivisection of Handke's verbal escapades, including espousing a scorched-earth ideology and eulogizing apparently militant poets and filmmakers turned genocidal project-makers, culminated in his statements during the funeral of the Serbian politician and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, when he asserted in front of the bloodthirsty crowd that he did not know the truth and that he was therefore close to Milosevic and Serbia, and he finally broke the bottom of the barrel by comparing the suffering of the Serbs to the suffering Jews during Nazism.
The sharp satirical writing of Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj reminds us that we are all responsible for the social reality in which we live. Along with this message, the colourful mosaic of national and cultural identities of the co-creators is also revealed in the context of a dynamic theatrical dialectic, which strengthens the authenticity of the performance."
