Safet Plakalo

Safet Plakalo (4 March 1950 – 19 March 2015) was a Bosnian playwright and poet, theatre critic, journalist, and founder of the Sarajevo War Theatre (Sarajevski ratni teatar, SARTR). He was a prominent figure in Bosnian drama, known for his poetic and modernist theatrical works and his significant role in sustaining cultural life during the Siege of Sarajevo.

Together with Gradimir Gojer, Đorđe Mačkić and Dubravko Bibanović, Plakalo founded SARTR in 1992 as a form of artistic resistance during the war. There he also served as a longtime director and co-wrote the first wartime play of the Bosnian War—Sklonište (The Shelter). Beyond his dramatic writing, he was a respected theatre critic, poet and journalist advocating for Bosnian and Herzegovinian theatrical culture.

Career Having written his first play, Vrh (The Peak), at the age of 26, Plakalo held the honour of being the youngest playwright in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina to have a play staged by a professional theatre. The play, which premiered on 23 March 1977 at Kamerni Teatar 55 (Chambre Teatre 55), was directed by his high school friend and longtime collaborator, Dubravko Bibanović, with whom he had engaged in early artistic, activist and conceptual projects. Famously, the creative duo organised the 1969 Poetic Marathon, during which over 250 Yugoslav poets gathered to continuously recite poetry for several days and nights across various locations in Sarajevo.

The success of Vrh had secured Plakalo his first commission to write a play about the 1941 anti-fascist insurgence in the Romanija region near Sarajevo.

In the article “Feniks (ni)je sagorio uzalud”, Muhamed Dželilović writes that Plakalo's "earliest plays—especially Vrh and Phoenix Burned in Vain—introduced a pronounced lyrical-reflective and intimate discourse into Bosnian and Herzegovinian drama". In doing so, he shaped an original dramatic model that uniquely connected "modernist symbolism with poetic drama". But Plakalo's international plans had to be put on hold as Sarajevo came under siege in 1992.

Theatre against death The original wartime poster for the play “Sklonište” can be seen at the Historical Museum of Sarajevo, where it forms part of the permanent exhibition on the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996). In the city paralysed by war, Plakalo and three of his close friends and collaborators, Gradimir Gojer, Đorđe Mačkić and Dubravko Bibanović, decided to form Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR) as a form of spiritual resistance to the madness of war. Together with Bibanović, Plakalo embarked on writing Sarajevo's first wartime play Sklonište (The Shelter), using the genre of grotesque to approach the tragedy that unfolded around them. The play premiered on 6 September 1992. often under candlelight. The theatre's ensemble did the same for its audience, taking the performance to the front line on more than one occasion and giving some 200 performances during Sarajevo's four years under siege.

In 1994, at the height of the siege, Plakalo wrote a letter to his friend Stein Wing, director of the National Theatre of Norway, and with support from Václav Havel, Ingmar Bergman, Ellen Horn and Bibi Andersson, the troupe made its way through Sarajevo's only lifeline, the famous Tunnel, to make its first international appearance at the Ibsen Stage Festival in Oslo.

The Memoirs of Mina Hauzen, a play spun off by Plakalo from the immensely popular Munchausenesque character of Mina Hauzen from Sklonište, was SARTR's first post-war production. However, despite their immense popularity, neither Sklonište, nor The Memoirs had a lasting effect on Plakalo's dramatic orientation. As the world around him returned to an uneasy peace, Plakalo returned to the theatre of human intimacy, penning an hommage to his mother in a play about Prophet Muhammad's daughter, Fatima. The most complex of his plays, Hazreti Fatima (Fatima the Gracious), marks Plakalo's return to another interest – poetic drama. His fascination with the fundamental philosophical issues of human existence resurfaced in the 2012 play U traganju za bojom kestena (In search of the colour of chestnut), another homage—this time to the great American poet Sylvia Plath. The play achieved great critical acclaim in the 2012 production by the Mostar Youth Theatre, directed by Stevan Bodroža, becoming the most awarded production in the theatre’s history.

Plakalo was a long-time journalist for Sarajevo’s Radio 202, Večernje novine, and Oslobođenje.

Death On the edge of the poster for his first wartime play, Sklonište, Safet Plakalo wrote: "All of this happened by chance. Yet chance is a human duty." Reflecting on the role of art in the war, he later wrote a fitting epitaph for himself:

"Art in all its forms, including theatre, is powerless before the forces of evil, but it is powerful in that it can stir within the human soul an emotional charge that steels a person’s resistance to evil."

Plakalo died in Sarajevo on 19 March 2015 and was posthumously awarded the Plaque of the Canton of Sarajevo in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the promotion and development of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the field of culture and the arts.