Mrs. Minister

Boško Buha Theatre - Vuk Theatre

Mrs. Minister – conceived as an archetype, comedic mask, state of consciousness, a deformation that has no gender (it is both masculine and feminine), a travesty. Disguise is a characteristic of noble theatrical play that creates meaning and searches for truths about man, life, and society. However, the games of disguise are also a feature of political life, a part of the daily matrix of creating desirable 'images' in the market of power struggles. Both people and ideas disguise themselves. General travesty. Genre of everyday life. Greed for power cancels out reason. In the past, all roles in theatre were played by men because it was socially unacceptable for women to act. This theatrical practice is now a mirror for new puritans and petty bourgeois who find many things unacceptable, perhaps even men acting as women and women as men. The frame for the performance is Jovan Jovanović Zmaj's poem 'Serbian Politics':

'Where is Serbian politics? Is it cooked or raw? Is it modest or furious? Is it thirsty or hungry? Does it play or sing? Is it undergoing a little restoration? Is it breathing its last breath or being born? Does it consult some old witch? Is it crawling or sitting? Is it laughing or eating? Is it in the rich man's court? Or in the crow's nest? Does it have a rattle or a bell? Is it somewhere in the corner? Is it in service or in peace? Or in some monastery?'

The present time has called me to think about it through Nušić, through his sharply witty comedic pen. His characters are not harmless, and even as I laugh at them, I also fear them. They have long since spread all around me, creating a society to suit themselves, so they laugh at us today. Nušić wrote Mrs. Minister in the 1930s, in the circumstances of the development of capitalism and bourgeois class society between the two wars, and we know what the thirties produced – fascism, nationalism, and totalitarianism. Staying within the visual framework of the thirties, I wanted to emphasize the continuity of social deformations, mental traumas. I wish Nušić was not my contemporary, that cosmic dust had fallen over his world, but today his relevance hurts at the level of a sentence, a situation, and a societal diagnosis. Tatjana Mandić Rigonat

ORGANIZER/SOURCE: Boško Buha Theatre