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ToolsPrelec, Alma (2024) Travelling players, travelling Civil Wars : theatrical exchange between Spain and the former Yugoslavia. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Abstract
This thesis explores the theatrical enactment of civil war beyond its original context, taking Spain and the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) as regional case studies. I propose the concept of the 'travelling player' as a way of theorizing the director, actor, or character who facilitates memory's movement across borders and time periods. Drawing from the 'traveling turn' in Memory Studies - frameworks that accentuate links between memory and movement - I discuss a range of productions from the 1990s onwards. In each, travel is revealed to play a paramount role in triggering comparative - though not necessarily competitive - approaches to memory. The opening chapter defends the proposed concept through its logical inverse : paralysis. Through a focus on Yugoslav engagement with statis in Spanish Golden Age plays, I show abandoned voyages to be indicative of an attitude towards the past that negates the possibility of progress. Chapter II uncovers a series of productions on the Spanish Civil War in 1990s Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, situating these within a long history of commemoration of Yugoslav International Brigade veterans. Turning to Catalan and Valencian stages, Chapter III compares productions featuring Bosnian artistic directors : reding these as staged travelogues, I show that the productions' treatment of space represents a paradigm shift within Spain's theatrical output on the Yugoslav wars. The final chapter explores how travelling characters can destabilase the perpetrator/ victim divide, with focus on productions comparing legacies of the Spanish and Croatian ultraright.
Many of the productions discussed here have not yet been on the subject of academic study. Employing a hybrid methodology that includes archival work, oral history interviews, on-site visits, and close reding, this thesis offers a the theoretical intervention alongside a novel corpus of study , Following Hermes, the messenger -god, the travelling player is shown to be a conduit for memory out-of-context, uniquely positioned to employ distant histories to address urgent, local issues.
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