Ironic treatment of Bosnian terror
Clark in Sarajevo
By Catherine Zimdahl
Directed by Ros Horin
Stables Theatre, Sydney
Until May 17
Review by Brendan Doyle
When people start pointing guns at each other, I usually want to go home. Even when the people are actors and the guns don't fire real bullets. It's all at very close range in the tiny Stables Theatre in this production of Australian playwright Catherine Zimdahl's first full-length play, about the siege of Sarajevo.
How to deal with real-life horror, especially the horror of war, in the theatre has always been tricky. Shakespeare managed it well in Macbeth, where he created some of the strongest characters in world drama to act out an archetypal story of greed, power and cruelty.
Zimdahl, like a lot of modern writers, seems to assume that her audience, lacking imagination, need to be shown people pointing guns at heads to realise that, "Hey, war is really nasty".
As her central character, she created Clark Cant, a naive US journalist who somehow missed out on reporting Vietnam, the Gulf War and Lebanon, who has come to Sarajevo to write the report of his life. The aptly named Cant is full of ready-made clichés about what he witnesses on the streets of the city.
Cant, a figure of ridicule from the beginning of the play, is a cardboard cutout made to represent all that is unfeeling and hypocritical about "the west" in its response to the Bosnian conflict.
"That's Cant without an apostrophe", he tells his hosts in the destroyed city. The feeling of a city under siege is impressively created. Plastic sheeting, flimsy wooden frames, ropes and battered suitcases give the set a feeling of utter fragility, like that of the people's lives here. Sounds of sniper fire and flickering light add to the atmosphere of constant danger.
The six actors' performances are a tour de force. Between them they play dozens of characters, all victims and perpetrators of the tragedy.
Jeanette Cronin is memorable as Lala, who is reduced to selling her soul to survive another day. So too is Paula Arundell, who plays a suffering Muslim woman who's lost close family members. I would have liked to see these characters developed to a greater extent. Instead, they remain no more than fleeting images in Cant's experience of the war.
Jamie Jackson is impressive as the journalist who is soon out of his depth in this maelstrom of mindless cruelty which, of course, he can't do anything about.
By the end of the play, Clark is almost human, touching in his despair and impotence. Only then did the play finally become dramatically interesting. A pity, because while it is very watchable and theatrically impressive, it didn't engage my emotions in the way that strongly drawn characters can do.
This is not to belittle Zimdahl's achievement in dealing with such a painful subject. The style she has chosen may appeal to many.
I was disappointed that the Griffin Theatre Company seems to be making a political statement by raising ticket prices. Full price for this show is $33. The Stables used to be one of the few theatres in Sydney that was affordable.