Herscht 07769 Warns That Fascism Has Already Arrived
Four sold-out performances of Ivica Buljan's play in an abandoned substation in Dujmovača delighted audiences and opened eyes to the growing fascism that is not just fiction.
Four sold-out performances of Ivica Buljan's play in an abandoned substation in Dujmovača delighted audiences and opened eyes to the growing fascism that is not just fiction.
This year's Split Summer Festival has produced a play that critics and audiences alike unanimously call an absolute miracle. It is Herscht 07769, a theatrical adaptation of the novel by Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai, directed by Ivica Buljan. All four performances in the abandoned substation in Dujmovača were sold out, with audiences making a pilgrimage to the industrial zone on Stara Solinska Road, a place the average Split resident avoids at all costs.
The play was born in the limbo between the old and new visions of the Split Summer Festival, in the year following the dismissal of artistic director Bilandžić, and after Culture Minister Nina Obuljen Koržinek stated on the opening day of last year's festival that "the Split Summer Festival is not up to par." However, Buljan continued where he left off with last year's Lisica (The Fox), based on Dubravka Ugrešić's novel, and created something unforgettable.
The stage behind the old substation provided an exceptionally cinematic, post-industrial, and dystopian setting, located right next to the railway tracks where trains passed and crickets chirped during the performance. Buljan placed Kana, a fictional town in the German state of Thuringia, part of the former GDR where the far right is currently enjoying significant success.
In Ivan Penović's dramatization, the novel is faithfully staged as an onslaught of anxiety, anger, and fear. Over four hours, which according to audience accounts literally fly by, the life of a provincial town unfolds: gossip, a math teacher (Goran Marković) working on his own, neo-Nazi thugs led by Boss, a Bach orchestra trying to assemble, an immigrant couple running a gas station and café, and the titular hero Herscht obsessed with the end of civilization.
"Herscht 07769 is not a warning play about what awaits us, but an eye-opener to what has already arrived," reads a review in Telegram. The manipulation of fears, the vulnerability of the weak and immigrants, the obsession with the nation and its symbols, and the community's fear of confronting local neo-Nazis-all of this, unfortunately, is equally applicable to today's Split.
Boss is masterfully played by Slovenian actor Marko Mandić, in a performance reminiscent of Hitler in Downfall. Stipe Jelaska takes on the title role of Herscht in yet another major performance at his home theater. Mijo Jurišić, as Mr. Ringer, delivers a crucial monologue warning about the fascism that comes while we dismiss it as the entertainment of fanatics. Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov emerges from the darkness with a dystopian monologue about the peaks and imminent downfall of humanity, also playing the silent chancellor.
During the fifteen-minute intermission, something unusual happens-the actors mingle with the audience, eating and drinking together, and then engage in a tug-of-war with the director. The rest of the ensemble includes Boss's thugs Vicko Bilandžić, Elvis Bošnjak, Luka Čerjan, and Katarina Romac, the migrant couple played by Andrea Mladinić and Robert Waltl, and numerous smaller roles that rounded out this massive theatrical undertaking.
The play ends with the righteous killing spree of the confused Herscht, who fell apart and abandoned his daydreams of the apocalypse and contacting Angela Merkel when he faced the real consequences of the fascism of those closest to him, which he had turned a blind eye to. "It would be an unforgivable shame if these four performances were the only ones," the review concludes, with hope that the play will return next summer.
