Which drama, in general, should/can/must be labelled as “historical”? That which takes place in some period that is not present/contemporary or is related to characters (dramatis personae) whose personality is authentic/witnessed historically? That which insists on spiritually “reviving” personalities and/or events from the past? Should dramaturgy deal with such obscure tasks? Could, in general, history and dramaturgy have totally identical goals – to witness to/affirm a historical truth? May we equalize historical and dramatic truth? Their tragic non-differentiation has always been, and remains today “the germ of all misunderstandings of realism in/of the theater performance” (Pavis, 2004:277). Luckily, every good playwright manages to neutralize this misunderstanding in an utterly simple manner: by treating the historical facts (events and personalities) as primary material, totally identical/equal with material of any other kind.
Choosing such an “unburdened”, utterly relaxed, and thus also quite creative attitude, the writer frees himself in advance from the eventual intent – in fact, utterly dangerous to his own self! – of witnessing or “illustrating” historic events or personalities in his works. Anyone who follows, even from time to time, recently-published works in history/historiography can confirm that today even historical science treats its own subject – history-as-such – almost in an equally “unburdened” manner. Even though the representatives of the “old school” of historians – those who treat history as a sacral holy magistra vitae! – have still not laid down their arms, the trend that was systematically being developed in the seventies in several European countries (France, England, Italy…) continuously imposes an essentially different approach in the practice of the craft of historiography. This influential trend that is usually named Scola Annales4F or, simply, new history (the Italians indicatively translate it as microstoria), introduces but also makes pragmatic the key idea: that historical processes cannot be interpreted within the frameworks of limited patterns, moulds or concepts (especially when these patterns/concepts are coloured with ideology, politics, doctrines… and almost never show themselves as such); that the past and the present represent complex occurrences that cannot be perceived only through research of those exclusive (important, great, “crucial”, representative, fatal…) events, facts and personalities – battles, wars, slaughters, political crashes…; that history should deal not only with the extreme, but also with the banal/trivial aspects of human lives…
Seen from the aspect of literary theory, such an eminent post modernistic turn-around (from “high”/”elite” to “low”/”popular” historicism), that quite dramatically marked, but also stirred the historical science of the 20th century, maybe could also be called a turning from big to small narrations. Be it as it may, in the last decades we have frequently seen the appearance of extremely intriguing books, with titles such as A History of Private Lives (vols. I-IV, ed. Georges Duby, Harvard University Press, 1998), An Intimate History of Mankind (Theodore Zeldin, 1994) and so on.
In order to practise this new history in a meritorious and adequate manner, historians should first become used to looking at their subject (the past) from some different perspective, and then enrich their craft with new methodological paradigms, new epistemological approaches, new “raw materials” of different origin, new research procedures… But also – and most importantly! – to redirecting every science towards a new and wider thematic that will additionally (and continuously) be expanded, aiming to become without limits.
For the historism/historicism of the 20th century, including at the current moment the very popular New Historicism that also seriously touches/intrigues literary science, giving it a new impulse, it is precisely the multiplicity/polysemy of the material (but not the exclusiveness/uniqueness of the event or the personality) that should be the subject of scientific interest.
Applied to the example of the drama Darkness, this maxim should mean that the concrete historical event of the year 1921 (the assassination of Gjorče Petrov) is no longer treated/understood/interpreted as the topic/motive for which Čašule makes his play, but – on the contrary – that Čašule’s play, written forty years after the concrete historical event, should be treated not only as an authentic (“independent”) literary/theatrical art work, but also as material that could be useful to historians in understanding/interpreting a political assassination of the past!
Or, more simply:
Writing the play that chooses as its formal grounds (“pre-text”, hypo-text), even as its leit-motiv, one concrete historic event, Čašule does not choose to write a historical drama (a “costume play”). On the contrary, his drama practically does not deal with the encompassed historic event, except “by the way” – in fact: tangentially! – it plays with its facts. The text of Čašule is an absolute meta-fiction, where the historical context serves only as a good starting-point (referential frame, point of attack) for the opening of some important, but still controversial, not-especially-pleasant (black!) issues that “touch” the key dramatic motif: the identity of the people without space that tries to anchor itself not only in the territorial, but also in every possible sense. This complex historical process of anchoring, a process through which the European nations had passed long before, but the Macedonian only managed to go through in the middle of the twentieth century, brings unavoidably serious risks. These risks are understood in advance. The play of Čašule strives (and manages) to effectively make these risks thematic, naming them with a collective attribution, made precise with the stigmatic noun written as its title: Darkness.
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4. According to the French magazine Annales, which in the middle of the 20th century started systematically to affirm this approach to history.