On stage a minute of heaven
The complex structure of the novel itself paradoxically offers a lightness of the reading experience but the abundance of upheavals in the story itself, on the other hand, goes beyond the limits of the literary. Hence, it should not be surprising that Cvijetic’s story gets its theatrical embodiment, where the writer, although superior to his heroes, at the same time is merged with them. The possibility of meta-textual superiority, then physical, and on the other hand, interactions with the heroes of the story, who are aware of their position concerning the writer, is a specific and authentic concept. The writer-actor is waiting for the audience on the stage, so his position on the characters he will “liberate” becomes quite clear, and at that moment the story begins. The actors come out of steel construction as multiple functional scenographic solutions through which one exits, but through it, one also enters the world of the dead, and it is constructed like crates stacked on top of each other. Hence, the joint construction has several of the same openings, so such sequencing suggests individual stories that are part of the collective. The aesthetics of the play is determined by gray, both with the scenography and the costumes, so simplicity is a good starting point for an adequate reception of the story and its gray tones. The surface on which the actors walk is brighter and creates a connection with the paper and the void: “Sometimes I just stand with the pencil over the written text. I see it, but I don’t have the will to print it on paper. Above the emptiness of the world, the nails of God’s hands turn black, after the seven-day shaping” (Cvijetić 2020:11). From here, the actors with their mise-en-scène imprint the words of the story coordinated by the writer who is located in the corner of the stage in a recognizable working environment, while on the opposite side we find the chairs on which the actors, the characters of the story that the author begins, sit as figurines. The paper on which the thematic titles of the scenes are imprinted, like chapters from a novel, is shown in the background with the projector, accompanied by the sounds of a typewriter. So, the whole play draws us into the world of the paper on which the story must be written. For sure, Cvijetic’s novel was a fertile ground for dramatization, as the numerous chapters function as open letters, testimonies, and statements, that is, monologues, with a compounded wholeness as the individual microworlds of the characters. Through the novel, we learn about the old woman, whom Captain Tošić will involuntarily kill to show the young soldiers how to shoot, from his perspective but also from the point of view of Bota, who soon after is to lose his friend Goran. Angelo visits Bota’s mother, Carmela, an event suggested to us through the monologue chapter, the dynamism of which mirrors the course of live speech, which seems to require a certain interaction. It is precisely why Cvijetic’s text grows, expands, and gives dialogic potential, skillfully used in dramatization itself. The ellipticity of the chapters as well as the rhythm of their repetition enables one to fill in the margins of the text, where playful fragments of a dramatic character occur but are at the same time upgrade. As an example, the love story between Senka, a girl of Muslim origin, and Bota, is one of the key places in the novel, so it covers the text with its emotionality, and accordingly, it is implemented wisely on the stage. We meet Senka in the play as she sings in a band with Bota, while in the novel she functions in medias res; there is no pre-history of their relationship, but Senka’s declaration of love is immersed in the Sarajevo atmosphere of anticipation of bloodshed. Senka (Shadow), as her name suggests, will be the shadow of the collective conscience, an innocent and pure victim of the war that follows as a light motive the entire play with the statement about the famous minute of the heaven, as a symbolic brake “over the emptiness of the world”. “Heaven doesn’t shoot. Heaven is not aiming. Heaven is nothing, man. Do you hear me, heaven is nothing.” (Cvijetic 2020: 20). The invocation of heavenly justice or the denial of war and death is made as a metaphor through the space of heaven whose frequency is evident in the novel. The echo of such a statement, such as “You leave by this road. And you leave by it. By this road there is no coming back. This one just is” (Cvijetić 2020: 44); “Where a man enters the night, a light break through. As if there was going to be a fire. As if someone is going to burn” (Cvijetić 2020: 12), are marked by a deep emotional charge that resonates on every page of the novel. How is such lyricism transferred to the stage?