Bitef

THE AGE OF SINFUL INNOCENCE The fourth full length drama by Maja Pelevic, undoubtedly thè most talented representative of the new generation of Serbian dramatists, is both an effettive synthesis of thè author's preoccupations so far and a daring step forward into new areas of topic and form. Why plural in the previous Statement? Although it is rather objectionable to give a simplified Interpretation ofthis combination of synthesis and innovation, let us try to understand it on several levels, focusing on motivations, shapes and characters in drama Me or somebody else. Whil eLer, the first play by Maja Pelevic, focuses on the issue of loneliness - everyday, cultural, even metaphysical, in her next drama Belgrade-Berlin, thè motif of adventure/searching becomes more complex and strengthened by thè introduction of cultural determinations: in the same manner the alternation of empathy and irony, as the author's key stratega touches upon an area more profound and complex than urban youth's obsessions and dilemmas. In the play TheOrangeSkin, an aspiration for an unrestricted and unconventional truth of thè body faces the global deception of our"post"civilization, so the aspiration (of the heroine) for freedom is elevated to the deadly and at the same time hilarious, but never ephemeral criticai Observation. The play Me or somebody eise, inspired by the most immanent"current reality", for Maja Pelevic becomes a playground for shaping utterly universal motifs: the relationship between freedom and slavery; relationships between (personal) right to privacy and (social) requirementfor"avaiiability of knowledge"; thè meaning of innate impulses, confronted with the messianic visión of improvement/advancement. And finally, in thè background (or in the foundations) of all previously stated: the boundaries offragilityofSelf, as the source for the freedom of Other (and most usually the vise versa as well). Fairytale-like simple - it is read:fairytale-like poetical and fairytale-iike horrible - a narrative of an eight-year-old girl's kidnapping, her decades long enslavement and by no means predictable consequences of her liberation - proposing to us, simultaneously, with almost every scene, that the Seif has "exploded" in its existentiai anxiety, enveloping (the postmodern) world; but as something far more terrifying, it suggests that the very same World has, in an implosión (of anxiety, paranoia, hysteria and loneliness) transformad, hiding inside the Whirlpool of fears and innocent ghosts of the lost, but still desperately defiant Self-who-is-somebody-Else. And maybe, for this very reason. Seif that has not lost its ability to dream out enslavement, in its search for freedom (...) Concerning the field of form, Maja Pelevic in Lerchoses to express herseif through ironical (occasionally even cynical) melodrama; her drama Belgrade-Berlin is adventurous allegory, in which the fantastic character of real dilemmas is the one that drives, but also breaks (dramatic) ¡llusión; The Orange Skin is presented to readers/ spectators as a hybrid of hilarious parabola and a nightmare-like bailad, in which fragments of the world float through rebellious arteries of rebelled physicality.The play Me or Somebody Else, on the other hand, takes the form of a kind of nihilistic symphony. Motivational structures of Individual and World collide, alternate, intertwine, emerge from each other destroying one another- and such complex networking engenders form astriumph of dynamics: She, He (the Kidnapper) and (Her) family move in the Condensed solution of the world hysteria (brought about by "thè media") and the world paranoia and narrow-mindedness (the middieclass context of the heroine's neighborhood).The structure of the drama Me or Somebody Else reveáis the author's observant, collaborating and/or manipulating Choirs both as meticulously staged"seams"of the piot, and as shady, doubly (anti)illusionist participants in this story about freedom as the required trap (...)

Svetislav Jovanov