Anđelka Nikolić: The oldest play written by a woman is about emigration

Rehearsals of an unusual play are underway at the National Theater in Subotica. It is the first performance of the oldest printed drama in the Serbian language written by a woman, the play has about 40 participants, they speak in Serbian, Hungarian, Roma, Slovak, Bunjevac, German and Polish, and together with the National Theater, the co-producers of the play are the Village Cultural Center Markovac , Children's Theater and Roma Educational Center.

Its title is "Poor Mileva from Bosnia in our civilization in 1878", the author is Albina Podgradska, and the director is Anđelka Nikolić.

"We are following the text of the writer," Anđelka Nikolić explains the unusual production for "Vreme". The main character, says the director, is "the girl Mileva, a refugee from Bosnia, where at that time there was an uprising against the Ottomans." The civilization that is mentioned in the title, and to which he comes with his mother, after the death of other family members, is Austria-Hungary at that time - and today's Vojvodina, apparently Sombor or Subotica."

Anđelka Nikolić says that "the circumstances of their coping and attempts to integrate into the new environment are very reminiscent of the situation of today's refugees, from whichever side they come from." The environment in which Mileva and her mother end up is multi-ethnic, but class differences mark it more than national ones. Namely, there is a big gap between the class of poor and indebted citizens, and the capitalists who get rich on their plight."

"There is a lack of systemic assistance for the most vulnerable groups, which includes refugees, so their fate often depends on the goodwill and solidarity of citizens who are in a slightly better position." Humanitarian actions are, on the one hand, an indicator of humanity, but there is a fine line after which they turn into a passing trend, into something that serves more to bring respect to those who donate, than to really help those who are helped."

Anđelka Nikolić says that the main characters are women and children, so the mentioned issue is actually followed from their point of view, which is an extremely interesting point of view of Albina Podgorska's play.

"Albina Podgradska is a fascinating personality," says the director. "A teacher by profession, Slovakian by nationality, she wrote this play in 1880 at the age of eighteen, and died soon after, so she did not have the opportunity to develop her obvious dramaturgical talent." Besides being certainly well versed in the social and political conditions of her time, and familiar with theatrical conventions, Albina was a polyglot; the play is written predominantly in Serbian, but there are also scenes in Hungarian, Slovak and Romani languages, and even a few sentences in Polish. These languages ​​have a justified place in the drama, because members of the mentioned nationalities, who still live there today, communicate in them, and we rarely have the opportunity to witness their dialogue on stage."

He points out that Albina Podgradska is only one of a number of our female writers from the 19th century who were not given enough attention in the time in which she created, so that they did not have the opportunity to receive the professional assessment of contemporary or later criticism, nor to have a serious influence on the following generations. I believe that, otherwise, our literary and even theater scene would look different today, both in thematic and formal sense, that many conventions would be different, or that they would not exist."

This play can be said to be related to for the "Ekatarina Pavlović" Reading Room in the village of Markovac and its mission of researching the history of our literature.

"This small but interesting public library was founded three years ago in the village of Markovac, and is engaged in the fight for gender and other justice in the fields of culture and education. Despite my great desire to present this piece to the public, several years passed from the moment I read it for the first time, until the conditions were created to start working on the play. Our institutional theaters are obviously shying away from taking the risk of producing texts whose importance has not been confirmed by previous settings, and I believe that multilingualism, as well as an unusually large number of characters, caused mistrust."

The Hungarian and Serbian drama ensembles of the National Theatre, a group of members of the Drama Section of the Children's Theatre, a guest actor whose mother tongue is Slovak, as well as representatives of the Roma community work together to create the play. The premiere is on March 14.