Silence and flint

In the drama Princess Xenia of Montenegro Radmile Vojvodić from 1994 and 2024, the hands coincided. Noon and midnight. A wound and a word. Bile and honey. Wave and flame. Spasm and tranquility. A roar and a sight. Ice and fire. Flint and silence. Love and death. Katun and Mediterranean. Fateful and chivalrous.

The open veins of the biographies of the members of the Petrović family speak of their terrible loneliness. In the five years of exile (1916–1921), hopes and expectations were exhausted and poverty overwhelmed them. With no money in the cash register and under a mortgage over the burial place of Princess Xenia in Villa Krinova. Next to the grave of Princess Vera.

In the Petrović home, everyone feels the swing of the guillotine. The guillotine as the fate of exile. In the Petrović home, one sometimes lives as if in a corpse. Loneliness in the Petrović home is a terrible presence of absence. It is the sound of a lost flute in a dark forest.

The sound of the guillotine did not scare King Nikola, Queen Milena, Princess Ksenia, Crown Prince Danilo, or Princess Vera. No dead grandchildren, no ancestors. How the music of maestro Žarko Mirković goes along with these lyrics and melancholy. And the sounds of Drenpolja from Balkan Empresses.

Dignity conquers all. Princess Xenia is determined to endure everything that fate has assigned her: "Daddy, nothing is difficult for me...". If the match strikes, everything will go up. Princess Xenia is precise in every thought. Margaret Atwood says this in a poem: "Looking clearly, without wavering/ Without turning your head to the side/ It hurts when the blindfold comes off/ Two feet from the sun/ What do you see then?/ A blade over the eyeball".

Princess Xenia would take off her blindfold and get one inch away from the sun and say to him... As she said to Nikola Pašić and King Alexander, the son of her sister Zorka: "Twenty thousand Montenegrins have taken up arms. They demand the annulment of unconstitutional parliamentary decisions in Podgorica and free elections. Nikšić, Podgorica, Danilovgrad, Kolašin are no longer under Serbian rule, and Cetinje is under siege. As far as I'm concerned, it's as clear as day to me... only the armed resistance of Montenegrins can spoil Serbia's plans to gradually get recognition of the annexation of Montenegro. Well, the gauntlet has been thrown to you".

A performance Princess Xenia of Montenegro in 1994 was an important incentive to achieve what will happen at the beginning of the 21st century during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia. For Montenegro to be an independent state again. Here, for the last four years, the miserable and false government in Belgrade, which, here, is failing, and its right-wing followers here, again show their ambition to make Montenegro a Serbian district. That's why it's new Princess Xenia (with prologue and epilogue) in the Montenegrin National Theater and the Royal Theater Zetski dom brana - a remake that says That Montenegro is eternal. I am writing this from the nerves of a Spanish fighter and a fighter of the Fifth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade. Don't forget, my dear, that there are (for) always young men and women in Montenegro eyes of iron as in Batrić Perović. And Ljub Čupić's smile. This performance enters the rhythm of student protests in Podgorica and Belgrade. I saw Princess Xenia on Saturday evening, January 25, among the first rows of students. Because fate never gives peace. Because only silence speaks intelligibly. And readiness to fight.

GREAT VARJA ​​ĐUKIĆ

The aging Ksenia is plagued by insomnia. Insomnia and poverty. Princess Ksenia is still on the wings in her eighties.

More than thirty years ago, Varja Đukić played Marina Cvetajeva with Borka Pavićević at the Center for Cultural Decontamination. Decontamination from the primitive SNS authorities in Belgrade and Podgorica is needed more than ever. They spread the word, so they want to paint the first book printed in Obod Crnojević's printing house with chauvinistic, shameful paint. The greasy SPC fingers of Porfirio and Ioanniki remained on that forgery.

I'm returning to the joy of the game. Princess Xenia. And why? Because we all have to stick to what Princess Xenia herself said, in a polemic with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Government in exile, Dr. Šoč: "... I do not allow myself what I despise in others. And there is nothing I ignore, more than not having my own attitude". Here's how Princess Ksenia takes stock of the sad tea party from the family quarantine: "A winter like this one on the 18th and 19th in France is unheard of. Maybe the snow... wouldn't have fallen in these parts if we hadn't come to them".

This melancholic-climatic crescendo has elements of wit. Or so it seems to me in this crazy head. With such nirvana in her voice and eyes, the young Ksenija, Ana Vučković, said that. Only someone who combines sadness and longing can do that. It cannot be described in words. Maybe with an etude by Sergei Rachmaninov. If he wrote etudes.

In the princess's chest is a pomegranate as a gift. Ana Vučković's father gave his daughter the first name Ksenija and guessed that she would play Princess Ksenija in Zetski dom. At the premiere Xenia In the winter of 1994, Radmila Vojvodić wore an embroidered Montenegrin shirt given to her by her mother Ana Vučković. Her daughter. He is a rare gift on the Yugoslav theater scene. Princess Xenia knew that it was necessary to fight for freedom from the ruins. She never gives up. The poetry of the motherland never dies. Princess Xenia is a flame and a figure.

Varja Đukić played the young Ksenija in 1994 in Cetinje, and today she plays Her Majesty Ksenija in the eighties. This has rarely happened in the history of theatre. Varja Đukić played both that time and the three decades between the two performances. That time is told in a documentary and personal way in the prologue of the play: "Because it's strange how that time never passes... intimate history is the only reliable history... we can never get away from those unfortunate nineties, nor from that 1918. The Balkan anxiety that you can cut with a knife... You can even say that that play meant more than theater... It's no longer true what someone really does or has done, but what others say they do or have done... so from that supermarket the past is constantly sold and bought as needed... All pissing on nettles both in the state and in the theater…” The prologue shed new light on the new play. Shadow and light. And only the epilogue...

Marija Kalabić's scenography is between Dragisa Brašovan and Đorđe de Kirik... Monumental passages, light, snow, open umbrellas in the background, all of this contributes to the fantastic nuance of the play. The scene takes off with the sounds of Žarko Mirković's magical music. The scenography and costume of Boris Cakshiran, who was also the costume designer in the first version, rhyme Xenia. The color of the costume creates harmony with the scenography in which the artistry of the painter Giuseppe de Ribera prevails.

Varja Đukić played both the past and the present and to what happened in Cetinje. How much nostalgia and love for the homeland is in her game. What a treasure she stored in her almost empty closet. There are her photos. She left at a young age. "Cetinje, Ivan's beds, Rijeka, Lake Skadar, Bar and Ulcinj... there are all the needs and pressures of this poor princess. Montenegro, Cetinje, where was that under heaven's cap? Under which star? Here they are. With me.”

Princess Xenia is a melodrama. It is a controlled tear at the edge of the eyelash. There is also wit. Well, as King Nikola says to his son Danilo: "What a sheep sees lying down is not far away."

Varja Đukić is one of the best Yugoslav actresses. From Rahela Ferrari, Milena Dravić, Milena Zupančić to Mira Karanović, Mirjana Joković. In the conversation with Mr. Vukmanović, the splendor of her gift was evident. Old man's charm, moments of neurosis due to scarcity and vain hope that he can return to Montenegro. To anger due to the reluctance of the new government to grant it an appanage. And in hood side Varja Đukić was Princess Ksenija in all her glory and dignity.

She was excellently played by the English actor of the Montenegrin theater Dejan Ivanić. How he played that nuance between duty and transitioning into a noble feeling towards the aged princess... He was her equal in stage charm as well. And that charm came from simplicity and wit.

photo: duško milianić

SHADOW OF DEATH

The mirror is a sign of fantasy. They are almost always on stage. two Princess Xenia. Pupil to pupil in the mirror. Sometimes even in a broken mirror. As is Princess Xenia the mirror and the mirror of Montenegro. The rehearsals evoked linguistic nostalgia in me and reminded me of the richness of our language in drama Princess Xenia: "Shoot off, anachema, excommunicated, taste, godly, našienci, srmazavica, leprosy, streknula, I come out, I freeze, tranja, uražio, loss..."

Rehearsal is the essence of theater. Rehearsal is a mirror of partnership and friendship. It is a mirror of the conspiracy of the acting ensemble.

In exile, thirst snarls in a rusty faucet. Despite this, young Ksenia does not give up her attitude and pride. Although he knows better than anyone that everything is in vain: "All we have left is to find ourselves outside the law and on the street...". Only an aristocrat fights for a lost cause. Ksenia is constantly in the film forgotten ancestors. And constantly in the attitude of a swordsman, that's why he says to his brother, the heir to the throne: "Danilo, learn for once, he who perseveres is also the master." Princess Xenia, Ana Vučković, knows well that freedom is blood-colored. And that every other color is false. Blood is the color of the Thirteenth of July. In front of which the impure will disappear and this wickedness of those who live in Montenegro, and want Montenegro to be a Serbian region. That heathen is already weak, and soon she will be heading for the mouse holes. Young Xenia, who wrote with King Nikola, also reminds them of that Proclamation: "In order to be able to justify in front of the world, like Pilate, this god-hating and unremembered crime in history, and to slander the Montenegrin people, she falsified the will of the people, because the Great National Assembly does not exist as an institution according to our Constitution, let alone that it is competent to decide the fate of Montenegro. It is the wish of every Montenegrin to join the Yugoslav unity, on equal footing with Serbia, and no other way".

The shadow of the death of King Nikola is present from the first scenes. The ruler is absolutely aware of his position in exile. But in flashes of lucidity he shows the former determination of the winner from Vučje dol. The moonlight roars in King Nikola's head like a walking speck. Like a hieroglyph for a scream: "If only I could see the shore of Lovćen, at least from someone's boat from the open sea to cheer him up, so that he would die right away, in that moment, in the middle of the raging Adriatic".

How many memories and futile shine in the eyes of Izudin Bajrović. How much discipline not to go into pathos and to keep it pure emotion. And what an unmistakable sense of rhythm.

(Continued in the next issue)