Heartefact Fund is a young company based in Serbia. Normally, the company performs in an apartment in Belgrade, ensuring audiences feel an intimacy and closeness to the productions and actors that they don’t get in more formal theater spaces.
As part of the Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase 2024, they brought a production of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, a memory play about historical child sexual abuse, to the Tulla Cultural Centre in Tirana.
The Tulla venue gives a sense of what Tirana’s underground scene might look like. Part bar, open cabaret area, and record store, it should be down a long alley somewhere or in someone’s basement. If this was in England, it probably would be. It means the whole feel of Tulla lends the play a certain sense of risk, it makes it feel that it’s right out in the open, rather than hidden away in a dark theatre. The room Heartefact chose to stage the play, just off from the open plan record store, also succeeded in lending the production a feeling of taking up space and appropriating it for cultural discourse – which in a sense, is what this play does for women – and men. The playing stage was also designed to be small by the designer Zorana Petrov. It was only a few feet, and the actors, just Marta Bogosavljević as Li’l Bit, the abused child, and Svetozar Cvetković as her Uncle Peck, her abuser, sat in amongst the audience on the front rows. For the audience members sitting right next to them, it was a challenging and probably, at times, uncomfortable experience. Especially as Bogosavljević did not shy away from giving the audience eye contact and breaking the 4th wall – which I think, in a memory play – is allowed, and indeed, maybe part of the conceit.
It is also true that I have never seen a show by this wonderful company and not been mesmerized by the acting – see Our Son review in 2022 and A Short History of Burgers in 2023. How I Learned to Drive directed by Tara Manić did not disappoint. Bogosavljević imbibes Li’l Bit with a swagger which doesn’t do quite enough to hide her crumbling innocence and the confusion of the little girl underneath. In contrast, Cvetković’s Uncle Peck oozes a sense of the elder statesman, which is shot through with the knowledge that though what he’s doing to Li’l Bit is wrong, he can’t help himself, and is completely prey to his feelings. Perhaps, what’s more, he even guiltily enjoys this. And the devil is in the detail in the actors’ faces. It was memsering to watch a slight shiver running through the skin on Cvetković’s cheek and a sudden knowing flick of the eye from Bogosavljević – like watching moving Lucian Freud paintings. Indeed, watching Bogosavljević as Li’l Bit in particular is like watching someone clinging with all their might onto the edge of a cliff which is falling away anyway. And below is only a roaring, violent sea.
The first staging premiered in 1997 and Heartefact’s production comes a few years after a Serbian serial rapist was released from jail and allowed to give a press interview in a pro-government tabloid in 2022. In the interview, he detailed how women should respond if he attacked them. This sparked a protest movement in the country led by Women’s Solidarity, who claim that Serbian social institutions don’t hold such criminals to account and blame women instead for the violence they suffer. Is there a sense of this from Uncle Peck here? There are silences and pauses from Cvetković’s Uncle which could sometimes imply that the Uncle doesn’t feel he is to blame. However, Manić tells me that after seeing the show, male audience members have come up to her to say they feel “responsible” for not reacting to what is happening in front of them. If Cvetković had not portrayed Uncle Peck’s disconnect from his moral sensibilities so well, would they have felt this?
The play is also about how the family structure, the biggest institution of all, easily facilitates the abuse of children. The most horrific part of the play is towards the end, where we see exactly how Uncle Peck begins to groom Li’l Bit – in fact not so much groom but commit a spiritual murder. The best way I can describe the feeling watching this gives is to compare it to an experience I recently had. A few days ago I managed to foil an attempted assault on me by two men. As the situation unfolded, everything quite literally slowed down and it was in those elongated seconds that I felt a terror like no other. It’s the feeling which comes when something out of the blue, with the potential to be horrifically violent, is being committed against you by others and there is nothing you can do. It is the same feeling that this scene elicits when Uncle Peck molests Li’l Bit for the first time and takes away her agency and her choice. It is made clear in this production that Li’l Bit is made to feel something against her will, something that will change the course of her life forever and over which she has no agency. The worst of it, of course, is that Li’l Bit is at an age and time in her life where she does not have the language to help her understand what is happening. This scene is played in the audience’s faces, almost on their laps. Would the impact have been as much if the scene had been played on a bigger stage in a more formal environment? Probably not. Closer physical proximity is perhaps unfortunately the only way, sometimes, to make things more shocking, more real, more believable to people and to bring it home to audiences that this is something that has the potential to happen in their front room, to people they know, rather than just actors on a stage in a safe theatre and within the realms of the imagination.
This then has an impact on the later scene when Li’l Bit imagines that Uncle Peck suffered abuse himself as a child – which Manić also tells me is implied in the fishing monologue. Normally the fishing scene is played as if Uncle Peck is abusing another child and it is narrated by a chorus. But Manić tells me she wanted the meaning of this scene to be ambiguous, and the scene is narrated by Li’l Bit. The lack of emotion on Cvetković’s face in both these scenes – the fishing monologue and his imagined historical child abuse – implies that shame and silence around abuse does not just belong to the world of female victims.
In a more general context, there are things the play can contribute to the MeToo movement. In a recent interview, Vogel commented that “the impact of trauma and memory is more pertinent now than it was.” Perhaps we have a greater understanding now of why people become adults before they are able to come forward and open up about the abuse they suffered as a child. This must also be the reason why Bogosavljević successfully gives a sense of the older woman in a child’s body – not just because Vogel has her as a thirty-year-old something at certain points in the retelling of her story, but because of what child abuse does to someone’s life and to their identity – which is it that it can keep the child-in-the-adult in a constant state of anxiety, distrust and distress – which can come across to others as immaturity and even infantilism.
Heartefact tells me that in recent years colleagues in Belgrade have come forward about their own experiences of rape and pedophilia. However, there are no big theatres in Serbia planning to stage Vogel’s play anytime soon. Heartefact though is taking the play on a tour of regional venues. Manić adds that they wanted the show to explore the possible reasons for the abuse of Li’l Bit. The production does this successfully and even more successfully, highlights how to break this chain of abuse. Li’l Bit could easily go on to abuse someone herself, even if only by being unable to establish clear boundaries for herself. Bogosavljević could potray her ending the play in a confused state. But there is no such worry here and Bogosavljević implies a clear severing from the past. But it can only come with trying to understand what happened to Uncle Peck. And that’s another message in the play and this production. Without understanding, without actually believing that people can act differently to how they have in the past, which is halfway to forgiveness, the chains of abuse can’t be broken, lives restarted and the past left behind – where it belongs.
How I Learned To Drive was at The Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase in Turina, Albania.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Verity Healey.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
