4 by Stefanovski and a 1 act

The work of a master playwright from the Balkans, Goran Stefanovski, is anthologized here. A charged family drama, Wild Flesh, opens the collection, plotting the ideological rifts and baleful foreign intrusions that gripped Yugoslavia in the advent of World War ll.  The False Bottom follows as a work of pure subversion. In three movements set in disparate years, 1911, 1983, and 1999, a single character unsettles the powers that be, quakes the very ground — the fake premises — of the dominant order and frees the forces of life. Tattooed Souls is set in America, played out in an emigree community. Though embroiled in a new world, they bear the telling imprints of the old. Casabalkan (after Casablanca) is a gambling boat afloat in neutral waters wherein every party to the war can interact freely, a microcosm in which every element can intermingle. In the short Ex-Yu, a daughter is in pursuit of her father’s final moments. Grilling two witnesses, she attempts an orphic journey to the scene of a suicide en route to battle. These plays speak bluntly to the human condition. Though set in the recent past, they track with the pressing concerns of our time and balance on the same precarity.

GORAN STEFANOVSKI was born on 27 April 1952 in Bitola, a town then in Yugoslavia, near the border with Greece on the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe, now in North Macedonia. His father, Mirko, was a theatre director and his mother, Nada, a leading actress. Much of Goran’s childhood was spent in theaters.

During his teenage years he was heavily influenced by the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and went on to study English language and literature at the University of Skopje. However, the theater was in his blood. Goran was to spend his third year of studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) in Belgrade and have his first play performed at the age of 22. It was directed by Slobodan Unkovski, who was to become a lifetime collaborator and friend.

Goran Stefanovski wrote 23 full-length plays for the theater in all. The most widely performed internationally are Wild Flesh, Hi-Fi, Flying on the Spot, Tattooed Souls, The Black Hole, Chernodrinski Comes Back Home, Sarajevo, an Oratorio for the Theater, Hotel Europa, and The Demon of Debar Maalo.

In 1990 he spent six months as an Outstanding Artist Fulbright Scholar at Brown University, in rhode Island, and began a lifelong friendship with Professor John Emigh.

In 1991 Yugoslavia began to fall apart and descended into civil war. The constantly deteriorating situation led his English wife, Pat Marsh, to decide to make a new life for the family in Canterbury, England, from September 1992. For the next six years, Stefanovski was to commute between his homeland and the UK, continuing his teaching in Skopje.

In 1992, Chris Torch of the Jordcirkus theatre group in Stockholm commissioned Goran to write a play for the Antwerp European Capital of Culture, about Sarajevo, the Bosnian city then undergoing a brutal siege. This successful venture was followed by performance scripts for the festivals of European Capitals of Culture in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Avignon, and Bologna, all in collaboration with Chris Torch.

In September 2000 Stefanovski settled in Canterbury and taught classes in screenwriting and playwriting at the University of Kent before taking up his post at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2002, teaching screenwriting there until his death in 2018. He wrote six screenplays in all and his A Little Book of Traps (a scriptwriting tool) has been translated and published in five languages, including Chinese.

Goran Stefanovski continued writing successful plays which were translated and produced all over the world throughout the rest of his life. He died of an inoperable brain tumor in 2018 at the age of 66.

PATRICIA MARSH-STEFANOVSKA (Pat Marsh) is a linguist with a master’s degree in general linguistics. She went to Yugoslavia to take up the post of British Council lector in English at the University of Skopje in 1974. She met Goran Stefanovski after a month there andthey were married in 1976. Patricia is the author of a number of articles published in linguistic journals, especially those concerned with comparative linguistics.

As a native speaker of English, Patricia was much in demand as a translation editor from the beginning of her life in what was then the Republic of Macedonia. After she had become a competent speaker of Macedonian, she began to make her own translations of all kinds of texts, especially Goran’s plays. She returned to the U.K. with her family during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. From 1998, Goran began to write most of his plays in English, and Patricia took on the role of his language editor.

After retirement, Patricia became an author in her own right and has published works of both fiction and non-fiction. She is also an environmentalist involved in political and community action related to the climate emergency and sustainability.

SLOBODAN UNKOVSKI (b. 1948) is a theater director and retired Professor of Theater Directing and Acting at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje, North Macedonia. He was a visiting professor and Fulbright Scholar at Brooklyn College and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. He was Artist-in-residence at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the National Theater of Greece in Athens. He has directed in many places all over the world and received several awards.

Unkovski directed at least twelve theater plays, as well as dozens of TV plays and series by Goran Stefanovski. Together and with Meta Hochevar, frequently their set designer, and Angelina Atlagich, costume designer for many of this tandem’s productions, as well as with Professor Rasha Dinulovich, an expert on theater technology, they held many highly successful master classes on theater direction.

CHRIS TORCH is an independent cultural expert, project designer, and policy consultant, with extensive practical experience about audience engagement, artistic curation, and intercultural policy. He led the Artistic Unit at Timisoara 2021 — European Capital of Culture (Romania) during the StartUp Phase, February 2017–July 2019 (www.timisoara2021.ro).

In 1996, he founded Intercult (www.intercult.se), a production and resource unit focused on culture, ideas, and arts. He served as Artistic Director until February 2017. It was during his time with Intercult that multiple collaborations with the Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski were conceived and implemented, all of them with significant support from the E.U. Starting with Sarajevo (1992–1993), followed by Bacchanalia (1996), Euralien (1998), and Hotel Europe (2000-2001), this series of multi-disciplinary large-scale projects were designed and written by Stefanovski, produced and toured by Torch and his team. At the sudden death of the playwright, work had begun for another large-scale production, commissioned by two European Capitals o f Culture (Rijeka 2020 and Timisoara 2021), to be directed by the renowned Bosnian/Croatian stage director Oliver Frljic.

Torch has conceived and led other co-productions within the European Neighborhood, reflected in long-term projects: Seas, 2003-2010 (www.seas.se) and Corners, a complex partnership of cultural initiatives at the “edges of Europe,” 2011-2018 (www.cornersofeurope.org), both co-financed by E.U. Creative Europe program. He joined the artistic leadership for winning bids to become European Capitals of Culture for both Matera 2019 and Rijeka 2020. In Rijeka, he served as Program Director, until December 2016, when he was recruited to Timisoara.

Among recent tasks, he served as Senior Expert/Culture on programming the E.U. House at SXSW 2020, the influential festival of tech, ideas, culture, and society held annually in Austin, Texas. He initiated and curated a small local festival, Pisciott’Arte (www.pisciottarte.com) in a small village in southern Italy, in June/July 2021. He is presently commissioned by the Cultural Relations Platform (E.U.) to map interest by E.U.-based arrangers to present artists from South Africa and surrounding countries. He also serves as a consultant for Coimbra 2027 — one of Portugal’s candidate cities to the title of European Capital of Culture.