Bitef

CRITICAL CONFRONTATION WITH THE ARCHETYPE OF FAIRYTALES The first two plays written by Milena Markovic Pavillions and Tracks, show the characteristics which testify of the maturing of an autonomous mode in the landscape of the New Serbian drama. The most important characteristics are certainly the rejection of the world set by ideological rules (through the intimate confessions about spleen, anger and the overall confusion of the urban youth) and the transfer of the characters from (most commonly psychological) levels of the representation to the world of the circumstantial, sensory being. The author's third play: The Doll Ship (2005) expands this inovative charge, entering the critical and the eruditely based confrontation with the archetypes of the fairy tale; the author shows that the focusing on the rhetorical inheritance (variation, paraphrase, pastiche or commentator's destructuralization of the motifs, plots and functions in the play) does not in any case exclude neither further stylistic/linguistic research, nor the articulations of the new type of the postmodern theatrical illusion. However, the dominant strategy of this play can be discovered in the development of the relations between the matrix of the story (to which the plot points) and the absolute request of the Heroine to discover herself. From that urge, a new drama age marked by allegory was born. On the plot structure level, the multi-formed and multi-named heroine is, at least in the first seven varieties of the archetype of the fairy tale, at the beginning set as a seemingly passive figure with a strictly given function. If each of the marked narratives would be shaped all the way, we would find ourselves standing in front of a relatively simple case of experimental maturing of the modernist drama subject, by the means of (certainly "ritual") initiation. Milena Markovic, however, in each of these varieties disrupts the logical order of the plot, as well as the symbolical hierarchy of meanings; the story stops, bends, it comments, turns into meta-theme, or redoubles. And, last but not least, it changes the archetypical, and most commonly, the passive, augury of the female protagonist. With this act, the initiation is gradually transformed into it's own opposite, and the closed time chain of the archetypical story becomes a place of the fragmentary embodiment of one (potentially) absolute Desire, or more precisely, the always unique and never enough possesed moment: FROG So, who was your first love then? THUMBELINA A few of them... FROG Did you suffer? THUMBELINA N 0... FROG How come? THUMBELINA Dopey was there. FROG And the boat?THUMBELINA My father made the boat. He'd make a boat every year and put the old toys in it, once it was a teddy without an eye, then a doll without her head, them some panths that were so old that you could see right through them, and lots of other stuff. I couldn bear parting with those things, so he'd make a boat, put the things in it and say that the teddy bear is going to his mama bear somewhere far away, and that the doll is going to see the doll prince who would then put her head back on and it was a real ceremony...

THE DOLL SHIP