The literary program of the 35th edition of the "Grad Teatar" festival in Budva continued on July 31 at Poets' Square, and the guest of the evening was Aleksandar Radunović, who presented his book "Dramas - Family Cycle".
The moderator of the evening, playwright Vasko Raičević, said that the book consists of three dramatic texts: Butterfly, Investigation and Night, and that all three texts also have their own theatrical life, considering that the drama Butterfly was performed in Cetinje, produced by the Zetski dom and directed by Andraš. Urbana, Investigation was staged on the stage of CNP directed by Stefan Sabljić, while Night directed by Andrej Cvetanovski was performed on the stage of Zetski dom.
Radunović, as stated in the organizer's report from the promotion, emphasized that a dramatic text is one thing, and a theatrical performance is something completely different.
"Directors and actors take that text and adapt it to their own vision, but I think that the grain of meaning that the writer brought into it must remain, otherwise the matter is completely lost. I had both bad and good experiences. My two texts are so completely ruined, I think those people who posted them really ruined them. They wanted to fix those texts, to write them, and that was very bad. I'm talking about plays based on the texts Noć and Istraga. I am satisfied with Leptira, two very good plays were staged based on that text," said Radunović.
Death, faith and religion are topics that interest Radunović while writing dramatic texts.
"All those eternal things that are often a means of manipulation. All these discourses with the question of what happens after death serve to keep us in fear. If you are bad in this life, it will be one way or another, and you will be met by someone who will punish you and the like. And the majority of people believe in it because people are like that, the crazier the story, the more people will believe it. The problem with faith is that people take these things literally. If you think that the Bible is a book that says something that really happened, I think you are in serious trouble. It is a metaphor, an allegory, a book, a fiction. If you are looking for a basis in real life, if you think that now someone is raising people from the dead, I think you have completely missed the point. That's why I'm interested in those topics, especially death, which is a big topic. If we don't deal with the issue of death and access to that phenomenon, then we don't deal with life either," stressed Radunović.
He added that God is always a matter of human perception, and that we are able to know him or not know him as much as we are able to understand that he depends on our consciousness.
"People are not aware of what they can be forced to do if they unquestioningly trust any human authority," he pointed out.
Radunović's texts are connected by another thread, which is family.
"The family has always been a source of problems. If the people who lead us had problems in the family, the whole society will have a problem with them. A large number of people were important to this planet at one point, like Hitler or Stalin, and they came from completely dysfunctional families. Many lives have also been ruined by the misguided ambitions of parents. History is written by people from bad families, from families that are colored by pathologies that are always ready to go further, even through blood and corpses to reach something. It all comes from the family. The family is the source of all the pathologies that a society lives and that is why I dealt with the family, because it is always an inspiring place for drama."
Raičević noticed that the female characters in Radunović's works are equal to the male characters in every respect.
"I think that women are a better part of humanity, smarter, more noble and I would prefer if we had a matriarchy. I really think women do better than men. On the other hand, we wouldn't have survived all this period of our existence if we hadn't destroyed everything in our way. In this sense, men and women are the same. When we feel that urge or danger or anything that can threaten us, we are ruthless. The only difference between women and men is in hormones, but our essence is the same. When a woman feels that her family is threatened, there is no man she can compare herself to. There is a historical injustice against women. Always the greatest villains in literature, but also in life, are justified by the fact that it was always a woman who was behind that villain and she made him do something bad. We have examples in many literary works that the woman is this evil force, since the Bible. But we also have artists like Ibsen and Bergman who treat female characters in a wonderful way. Many more men understood women better than some women understood other women," said Radunović.
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