Manipulation of Voyeurs

I hate the Truth, directed by Oliver Frljić and produced by Theatre &TD

Written by Sandro Siljan

That’s Not the Way it Happened! Oliver Frljić Hates the Truth, produced by Theatre &TD, premiered in May 2011 in SEK, a small, claustrophobic space at Zagreb Student Centre. It is a project that deals with the issue of theatrical self-representation of Oliver Frljić’s childhood in the form of a bourgeois tragedy, where he is both the author of the text and the director.

During this theatrical confession, the audience sits around the room, forming an arena. As usually in a bourgeois tragedy dealing with family relations, there is a table with four chairs in the middle, next to which there is a bed offering the audience the opportunity to have a peek at another intimate family landmark. There are no theatre lights; the only light comes from the chandelier hanging above the table and several lamp-shades along the walls. The set and the lighting add to the feeling that we are in Frljić’s own apartment, which only points out the breach of intimacy, explicitly positioning the audience as voyeurs, characteristic of bourgeois tragedy. Surrounded by the watchful eyes of the audience/voyuers, four excellent actors go through the scenes from the history of the Frljić family, from the day Oliver’s parents met to the day Oliver leaves his family home at the age of sixteen.

The stage is domineered by Ivana Roščić as Oliver’s mother Slađana, a Serb from Leskovac who works as head nurse at Travnik hospital. In his autobiographical reconstruction, Frljić portrays his mother as a chain-smoking provincial sadist, disparaging her children, which becomes glaringly obvious on two ocassions. His father Dragan, played convincingly by Rakan Rushaidat, is presented as a person who lacks the courage to confront the problems of his family and who is not keen on expressing feelings to his wife and children. Like the mother, he will also not hesitate to lay a hand on his son, while creating a lot of psychological pressure by saying that his biggest disappointment in life would be if his son turned out to be gay or his daughter married a black man. There is also Oliver’s quiet sister Marina, played sometimes in a minimalist fashion, sometimes with gusto, by Iva Visković. Filip Križan plays the young Oliver Frljić, and the author gives us a spiteful and truth-loving young man who is growing up under averse circumstances.

According to the play’s description and announcements available in the media, in preparations for the play, the cast spent a month with Frljić’s family who live in Forth Worth, Texas. In this part of the process, Oliver’s parents allegedly had a chance to watch the rehearsals and thus confront the representation of themselves, while the actors used an almost anthropological method to study the persons they were about to play. Frljić takes a step further and uses this media spin as a document for metatheatrical scenes where the actors and the referents comment on the way the characters are represented. In this way, a lie from the real world becomes an argument aimed at proving the fictitious truthfulness.

In that regard, the actors take on several positions during the play, although they never, not even when they are quoting themselves, leave the framework of acting as a representation of someone else. They are, depending on a situation, playing parts according to the text written by Frljić, playing the members of the Frljić family who are allegedly participating in the representation of their own history and, in the end, act as themselves by quoting the material from the process of creating the play. For example: Rushaidat plays Oliver’s father according to the author’s script, and also plays Oliver’s father as he is today, a man witnessing a representation of his own history (You’ll not be making a monster out of me in front of these people), while also playing himself as an actor in the process of making a play (Why did you choose me to play your father?! He is a living, breathing man, not a literary character! You’ve oversimplified everything! He may be a more complex character. I don’t believe he’s just repeating everything so passively!)

This metatheatrical device is the main and, actually, the only source of tension in the play. In the moment when theatre functions as a means of creating an illusion for the viewers to identify themselves with the characters and judge their behaviour, the characters themselves point out the falsity of the author’s representation by quoting the opinions of their referents and performers. The audience can therefore recognize themselves as victims of manipulation by the author, so the belief in constancy and logic is replaced by doubting different truths and mechanisms of naturalistic representation. The viewers become aware of their passive voyeurism characteristic of bourgeois tragedy. In the same vein, the seating arrangement of a boxing arena also allows them to watch the others in the audience. The viewer loses the comfortable anonymity provided by the dark of the theatre, and their exposed viewership also becomes the subject of the play.

With this play, Frljić delves into many important issues that belong to the tradition of the bourgeois tragedy such as family, adultery, violence against children, mixed marriages, racism and homosexualism. He does not go very deep, he is happy to conclude that theatre does not tell the truth, that theatre lies. Although this is something that has been common knowledge ever since Pirandello, it seems to be a fact that escapes many on our theatre scene. There is only hope that in future, when our theatre will be dealing with the representation of collective identity and history in one of its rich and lavish productions, it will be aware of that manipulatory position the same way Frljić is aware of it while interpreting personal history and identity.