WORKERS DIE SINGING

Workers Die Singing, directed by: Anđelka Nikolić, produced by: Hartefakt & The Bitef Theater

By: Nikola Skočajić

Olga Dimitirjević’s play Workers Die Singing, was awarded for its socially engaged text by the Hartefakt Fund Competition 2010. When the play was published, its downside was that, although it did not idealise the working class, it did not treat the transition as a problem, i.e. that it was too didactic in its presentation. Workers in an unnamed factory, in an unnamed place put up with the consequences of privatisation and are forced to go on strike that will soon become a radical one. Since they will soon start chopping off their fingers, it is clear which country is to blame. They do not start a hunger strike for better work conditions, but for the basic work conditions. 

The badly implemented privatisation is a stigma that keeps repeating in various contexts, but every time with the same meaning – the downsides are seen in the implementation of  privatisation, not in the privatisation itself. The text has natural potential to function in public space, and the play is set, in more ways than one, against the public opinion. Olga Dimitrijević says it herself in the programme of the play – it is a criticism of privatisation in general. This play also has a form different from the contemporary Serbian and regional playwrighting, creating an independent and authentic play, even when compared to plays by Milan Marković: Long Live, Live Our Work, and Petar Mihajlović The Workers’ Chronicles, that are well known, if not the only examples on this topic. Olga Dimitrijević’s play is almost completely made of dissonant rhymes, songs and a type of stichomythia. The dialogues and the songs are full of references on turbo-folk lyrics, without creating any cynicism, but are implemented in the characters’ lines and depending on the context, are revalued and become shocking. Although the text can be classified as engaged, the author does not take a privileged position of an educator. She does not allow her own voice to stand out of the characters’ voices – they are constantly intertwined and that is the greatest quality of the text.

The play Workers Die Singing, directed by Anđelka Nikolić and produced by Hartefakt and The Bitef Theatre, does not give up on that which the text criticises – but, while implementing the text, it manages to speak to the theatre conventions as well. While the audience enters, the actors are already on stage, in full light and wearing their own clothes. The costumes have been hanged on hangers and left on one side of the stage, as well as everything else that is to be used later: plastic crates and a mattress symbolising the factory on strike and a suitcase of the singer Milica who will change sides on time. The stage and the costumes are created by Maja Mirković. The stage is empty and the actors, after a long observation of the audience from the edge of the stage, shift to the controlled backstage. The working lights remain till the end and the actors’ position as workers becomes clear.

The entire text of the play is pre-recorded so that the actors use it as playback while acting. We are deprived of the natural voice in the theatre, that sets the rhythm for the actors, but they are given an opportunity not to act in accordance with their lines and to comment on their own position. Sometimes the voice will be persistent in its intensity, but the actor’s body will lose its strength while trying to create the voice, and the connection is also created by the playback, as the convention of performing in turbo-folk. There is also an effect of absolute control – the High Representative of the City Government, as well as Aleksić, the owner of the factory, are strategically set diagonally, so as to gain a complete overview. The whole procedure reminds of an implementation of the panopticon concept by Jeremy Bantam, in which prisoners of a certain institution, when free to move inside the structure, are observed without knowing it. In such an atmosphere and with clear subordination of the events, the play justifies the impossibility of the text to resist the expected flow of events from the newspaper chronicles.

In accordance with the newspaper chronicle, the characters Zoran/Goran (Milan Kovačević, Igor Borojević), Milica/Danica (Marija Bergam, Marija Milenković) and others (Đorđe Branković, Milan Marić, Nina Lazarević) are stripped to basic types, with a clear aim to show their ideological convictions. In this stylised play (with ever-present choreography by Dalija Aćin), there is no room for psychology or humour. Anđelka Nikolić succeeded not to show the high emotional declamation of such characters as comical, which is a major success of this play. The actors-workers will speak as one until the differences start to surface; who will die, who will chop off a finger and who will not do such a thing. Nothing funny. The audience laughs only when it recognises a lyric of a turbo-folk song, but not when it does not.

In comparison to the first level of control Aleksić (Marko Gvero), the High Representative of the City Government (Aleksandar Đinđić), who also mentors Aleksić, seems a lot more important. He represents the most plastic version of power behind the shifted panopticon. The author and the director use this character to strip down the contemporary techniques of manipulation. The Boss realises that it is not enough just to be the boss any more, now he must act with style.  At the beginning he says to Aleksić: if you had listened to me and given them crumbs, this would not have happened (…) this can not go on, the times have changed, now we must do things with style, you turn out to be the villain, no more thugs, call off the thugs.  This is answered by one of the workers, when at the end he states as long as he is alive. It seems enough, to let someone stay alive. The obvious outcome (someone’s finger and then someone’s life) this play insists on, make it one of the most challenging in our repertoire; although the domestic repertoire hardly ever tries to parry it.

The only problems of the play are the treatment of the singer Milica and the music by Draško Adžić preformed by the Hor Majki (the Choir of Mothers). Although the cast managed to take over the discourse of the turbo-folk without a distance, the singer is sacrificed to the image. Marija Bergam did a good job (as well as the entire cast with this difficult task), her character stays a caricature even when she leaves Aleksić and literally becomes a part of the Hor Majki (one of the singers leaves the stage and Milica takes her place). In a similar way that turbo-folk is marked as a mockery in the character of Milica, the notes by Draško Adžić for four voices of Mothers are stepping away from the ‘’aesthetics’’ and ingratiating to the musical ‘’quality’’ of some established, acceptable ethno sound. Even the fact that the Mother’s songs are separate material does not justify that they are only part of the composer’s discourse.

On the other hand, the exceptional conceptual solutions, the meticulous backstage and a really huge input by the actors make this play, at this moment, a unique one in the repertoire; not only for its aesthetic achievements that are out of the frame of what Serbian theatre is used to, but also due to its obvious social importance.