To love your country, there is no need for advertising?!

Patriotic Supermarket, directed by Dino Mustafić, a Kulturanova Association (Novi Sad), Multimedia Centre (Prishtina) and Bitef Theatre (Belgrade) co-production

By: Vanja Nikolić

We will understand each other! We are talking! are the sentences that are being cried out, just like slogans, at the end of Patriotic Supermarket. Bearing in mind the play premiered during another round of important, but unsuccessful negotiations between Belgrade and Prishtina, Serbia and Kosovo, Serbian politicians and the European Union, it is obvious the meaning of these words comes across as extremely ironic. The only ones who are not talking to each other on a global level are the Albanians and the Serbs, constantly finding themselves in the crossfire.

The play talks about them, the two peoples. And to reach a certain level of objectivity, the play had to take both sides: the binational, bilingual side and the two political poles. Patriotic Supermarket emerged from a project called Views: a meeting between Serbian and Albanian personal histories, which is a collaboration between the Kulturanova from Novi Sad and Multimedia Quedra from Prishtina. The text is also the result of a collaborative effort by Milena Bogovac from Belgrade and Jeton Neziraj from Prishtina, based on material gathered through interviews with Serbs and Albanians.

Patriotic Supermarket is a documentary play based on personal confessions of Serbs and Albanians. The authors defined the text as a postdramatic dialogue between Belgrade and Prishtina. In this way, the impossibility of a single perspective on the Kosovar issues is pointed out, but with a clear distinction drawn between the writing styles of the two authors. At the same time, Milena Bogovac and Jeton Neziraj take the opportunity to address the issue of Kosovo personally, putting themselves in the position of the interviewees, telling their personal stories.

The play is in Albanian and Serbian, the two languages are completely intermingled, with Serbian actors speaking Albanian and vice versa. With this approach, the possibility of a bilingual dialogue comes to light, while the audience is not entirely able to understand the text and needs subtitles to understand the play. Thematically, the text resembles a mini dictionary of Serbian and Albanian conflicts in Kosovo. It deals with protests, murder of the Berisha family and other killings, bombardments, exile, discrimination, fear, hatred, misunderstanding, abuse and other elements of the conflict that we are familiar with, but also the ones that we are not familiar with. To a certain degree, the issues are covered in such a way as to link them to the essentially unclear poetic imagery of the butterfly. We can track this line when we follow the mother-child relationship during the war, a situation fraught with fear, trepidation and hope, with a decisive beginning, middle and end. The rest of the text is fragmentary, clearly based on documentary material, in which the scenes are a lot more appealing, merely sharing the same idea, but are otherwise entirely disconnected from each other.

The director Dino Mustafić chooses a set without a set to accommodate these topics. A couple of supermarket trolleys are the only props that the actors are using. The same trolleys are supposed to signal the director’s point of view: the issue of Kosovo is equal to the principles of the capitalist constitution, basing a system of values solely on buying and selling. Hence, in the massacre scenes, the actors all form a queue and the gunshots are represented by trolleys slamming, which gets faster and faster and louder and louder. Or, misunderstanding and chaos are interpreted by frantic pushing of the trolleys with actors constantly crashing into each other. The most captivating scene is when a person is under trolley attack only because of their religion. However, it is not clear why the trolleys are used in every scene, apart from being an effective stage prop. It seems the application of the capitalist principles on the issue of Kosovo is too superficial. Therefore, we only have hints about what is on sale, who is selling and to whom. It may appear that the director wanted to maintain a safe distance and not get involved on an ideological level, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. Is it necessary to express a personal view in this type of play?

The most successfully directed parts are the ones which are not all about retelling of the events, but are based on dialogue. The dialogues come with sound effects produced only by the actors themselves or their trolleys that rumble, bang, break and kill. These explosive scenes offer the opportunity to see and feel everything. The best among those scenes that combine documentary, history and dialogue between fictitious characters, are the Tomahawk scene, where the issue becomes the absurd bombing of Serbia, the story of a girl who decides to move from Serbia to Kosovo, with the ironic use of the famous slogan Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. Also, there is a scene of a lecture on the topic of the Albanian, where, without any pretence or wish to sound tolerant, hatred is expressed and only breeds more hatred.

To love your country, there is no need for advertising! At the patriotic supermarket, the love of your country is a bestseller! are the opening lines of the Patriotic Supermarket. With this sort of introduction, we would expect ‘patriotic love’ and ‘supermarket commercials’ to be present in equal measure. Still, the harsh facts from the documentary offering proof of our reality cannot be equal to the harsh principles of the consumerist system of values. So far, regarding the latter, its death toll is not as high as Kosovo’s.