Safet Plakalo, Bosnian author and playwright (b. 1950)
Safet Plakalo (4 March 1950 – 19 March 2015) was a prominent Bosnian playwright, journalist, theatre critic and a founder of Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR). He was one of the few South Slavic writers of poetic dramatic orientation. His unique dramatic expression integrated the precise poetic form of a sonnet deeply into a dramatic form.
Having written his first play, Vrh (The Peak), at the age of 26, he held the honour of being the youngest playwright in the theatrical history of Bosnia and Herzegovina whose play was staged by a professional theatre. The success of Vrh had secured him his first commission to write a play about the 1941 anti-fascist insurgence in the Romanija region near Sarajevo. Though one of his best plays, Iza šutnje's (Beyond Silence) attempt to demystify the legend of Slaviša Vajner Čiča, a Partisan leader at the heart of the events, displeased Bosnian political censors. As a result, the play was swiftly taken off the repertoires of the four out of five leading Bosnian theatres. The fifth one, in Banja Luka, never attempted to stage it.
Plakalo wrote his third play Nit in the middle of the censorship battle, but disheartened by the outcome and the "incomprehensible attitude of the Bosnian theatrical world towards home-grown dramatic literature", he temporarily gave up on writing to become a theatre critic. By the end of the third decade of his life, while his daughter was still a girl, Plakalo, however, wrote three radio-plays, all three of them (Koncert za klavir i svjetlost, Preparirano proljeće and Balada o Modrinji), for children.
His doubt, however, didn't leave him and it was only at the request of his great friend and the doyen of the Bosnian theatre, actor Safet Pašalić, that he agreed to write Kulin IV (Kulin the Fourth). As destiny would have it, the great actor died not long after the work's completion, and Plakalo decided not to follow through with the production. It was a personal tragedy that made him return to his dramatic and poetic roots with an autobiographical memento mori to his killed wife, Sonja, Phoenix je sagorio uzalud (Phoenix Has Burnt In Vain). On his 36th birthday, and ten years after his first play, he finally saw another of his works premiered on a theatre stage.
What followed was his most significant drama to date, Lutkino bespuće (A Doll's Wasteland), Plakalo's 'reply' to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Nora). Lutkino bespuće earned Plakalo a reputation as the 'Ibsen of Bosnia' both at home and abroad. The play caught the eye of the Columbia University Ibsenologist, Professor Sandra Saari, and Norway's Ibsen Stage Festival, but another twist of fate put Plakalo's international plans on hold as his beloved Sarajevo came under siege in 1992.