As time goes by: Tomi Janežič's 1981

On a superbly-acted, multi-generational family saga from a renowned Slovenian director.

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1981, Novi Sad Theatre. Photo: Guido Mencari

Tomi Janežič is not a director known for his brevity. My first experience of one of his works was no title yet, a vast 10-hour performance based on a text by Simona Semenič, which I saw at the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana.  He is also well known in the region for a similarly chunky production of The Seagull for the Serbian National Theatre, which was composed of four stylistically distinct parts.

At four and-hours long, 1981 is relatively compact by his standards. It is, however, part of a much larger project, his ambitious dodecalogy, a series of twelve performances, which will form part of the programme of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorizia next year. Created in theatres across Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovenia, the project spans the years 1972-1981 and is inspired by his childhood, growing up in 1970s Nova Gorica, a city on the edge of what was then Yugoslavia, on the border with Italy.

The project kicked off last year in Timișoara, Romania, with 1978 –  sadly I missed it but here’s a great English language review of the performance – and all twelve pieces will be presented in Nova Gorica next year as part of GO!2025.

In much of his work Janežič, who is also a psychodrama psychotherapist, weaves together personal material provided by the actors with whom he is working. This is the case here. 1981 takes the form of a multi-generational saga of a Hungarian-Serbian family in Novi Sad. The performance takes places in the studio space at Újvidéki Színház, the Hungarian theatre in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city which is located in Vojvodina, an autonomous province in the north of Serbia with a large Hungarian minority.  The actors perform in a mixture of Hungarian and Serbian, the languages often overlapping. The bench seating in the theatre is some of the most unforgiving I’ve encountered – a literal pain in the arse – but I’d happily have endured more, I was so caught up in the performance.

The performance takes a kind of patchwork approach, weaving together different stories into one richly textured whole.  It eschews the more exuberant approach of some of Janežič’s previous work. no title yet featured actors smeared in cream cake, a section where the cast hurtled around the theatre, running at full pelt like kids on school sports day, and a genuinely gasp-inducing moment in which Janežič got very hands-on with one of his performers. Here the focus is on intimacy, of watching some of the best actors in the region – including Jasna Đuričić, star of the Oscar-nominated Quo Vadis Aida – in close quarters.

Playing the long game: Tomi Janežič's no title yet, endurance theatre and ways of staging violation

We enter the space via the backstage area where we can see props that will take on a later significance – a frying pan, a wheelchair – and rails of clothing.  The doors of the studio have been left open, letting us see into a second room with windows to the street. One of these windows is occasionally opened allowing the sound of passing cars to seep in and passers-by a glimpse of the performance. One curious woman stops in her tracks and peers in at us. The house lights remain up throughout. The actors sometimes address the audience directly, narrating events, and they sometimes enact scenes between the characters. The characters, who are played by the Újvidéki Színház ensemble plus three guest performers: Đuričić, Boris Isaković, and Aron Balaž, are all named for the actors who play them. Shoddy-looking wigs are used to help distinguish between different characters and time periods, which sometimes fall off mid-scene.

Family stories can take on an air of the mythic over time. My great-great-grandmother is said to have chased her philandering husband down the street with an axe. She narrowly survived the bombardment of Belgrade in the Second World War thanks to a ghostly intervention and had ten children only one of whom survived. (Moving to London in her 80s was too much for her and she was never able to adjust to life in a new country, succumbing to dementia). In 1981, it feels like a series of family legends are being recounted to us, the actors’ family memories and myths stitched together.