The hurling of a salad bowl to the floor might not sound like the most dramatic of moments, but it sent a ripple of recognition through the audience at the National theatre in Pirot, south-eastern Serbia, on a mid-February evening.
The salad bowl incident took place midway through Our Son, a moving and funny play by Patrik Lazić, a young writer and director from Pula in Croatia, about the relationship between a young gay man (Amar Ćorović) and his parents (Dragana Varagić and Aleksandar Đinđić). The play takes place over the course of an emotionally fraught family dinner, in which it is very apparent the young man’s parents are still struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. They continually blame each other and themselves. Eventually things spill over. Tears are shed. Salad bowls are upended.
Though Pirot, a relatively culturally underserved town in the south of Serbia, is considered socially conservative in comparison with cosmopolitan Belgrade, the audience contained a noticeable mix of generations, including a class from the local high school who had been brought by their teacher. Though the topics explored by the play remain sensitive in Serbia, the majority of the audience responded warmly to the show. There was a sense that, for many, this play was fulfilling a need. “My friend’s family is going through the same thing,” one woman said to me afterwards.
Serbia decriminalised homosexuality in 1994 but same-sex couples cannot marry or adopt, and gay people are still sometimes subject to hostility. The 2010 Pride parade in Belgrade was violently disrupted and, while recent Pride parades have been free of incident, they are still heavily policed. Recently, the window of the Pride Information Centre in Belgrade was shattered by vandals, the latest in a string of attacks on the premises.
Our Son was commissioned in 2022 by the Serbian cultural NGO Heartefact to coincide with EuroPride, which took place in Belgrade that year. Having decided to write something “personal and honest”, Lazić decided to write a family drama about the kind of conversation he couldn’t yet have with his parents. “All of these silences in my family were written down on paper. It was like psychotherapy,” he laughs.
The play has become one of Heartefact’s most popular shows, but more than that it’s become something akin to a ritual, says Lazić. Young people often return, bringing their parents or other family members to the show. It helps that the play is funny and displays a real warmth towards its characters.
Lazić recalls a performance last year when there were a lot of older people in the audience, some of whom were crying. Afterwards, they told him their kids had bought their tickets for them. Lazić understands this need to see yourself reflected on stage and to use media to show your parents who you are. The 2009 TV movie Prayers for Bobby, about a young man whose mother cannot accept his sexuality, had a similar impact on him. However, Our Son is also a play about self-acceptance, he stresses. “It’s about an independent young man who no longer needs his parents’ acceptance.”
Heartefact was founded by Andrej Nosov in 2009 with the mission of using art to address the still unprocessed pain of the region’s past. Most of its productions are engaged with social issues. Its longest running show, Doruntina Basha’s The Finger, is about the plight of Kosovan women whose husbands and sons are still missing after the 1998-99 war, featuring Jasna Đuričić, star of the Oscar-nominated 2020 film Quo Vadis, Aida?
It wasn’t until 2022 that the company finally acquired its own permanent performance space, in a handsome apartment in the centre of Belgrade. Our Son was created especially for this space and the intimacy of the piece is amplified by being performed in an apartment with a working kitchen from which soup can be served. The setting is important, says Lazić, because it puts the audience on the same level as the characters. “You’re all in the same living room together.”
Last year Heartefact decided to tour the show more widely in Serbia, taking it “to places where people cannot see this kind of performance normally,” says Lazić. With some funding from the Swedish Institute, they travelled to Lazarevac, south of Belgrade, where it had a palpable impact on the audience. Usually when you have a post-show Q&A a handful of people will stay behind, but in Lazarevac, he says, “a big number of people wanted to stay and to talk, to compare the show with things in their own lives.”
The show is now approaching its 50th performance, testament to its popularity. It’s also been performed in Kosovo – Heartefact is one of the few Serbian companies regularly touring work there and Our Son was the first Serbian play to be performed in the Kosovan city of Gjilan since the war; at the international Dublin gay theatre festival; and the Fast Forward festival in Dresden where a youth jury of German teens selected it for an award. But, with the 300-seat theatre full almost to capacity, Pirot has been their biggest audience to date. At the end, many of the young people from the school group stayed for the Q&A, eager to talk.
Varagić feels this openness to dialogue is vital. “This topic is still taboo here in Serbia. It’s not something people talk about. I think this play opens up a space for that,” she says. “I hope the audience goes home questioning. That they take time to think about these things. This is how we lead the way to the next level of change.”
