„Writing the Truth Instead of History”: Resistance to Ideology in some Croatian Plays in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

In this paper the authoress refers to examples from the period between the 60s and the beginning of the 90s of the 20th century in Croatia which best illustrate not only the playwriting but also the lethalness of the act through mostly political drama typical of the period in question. At the time, the theatre was more often than not „the only space in which people were allowed to think and talk politically” (B. Senker). The paper discusses the following dramas: Perković’s Closed Afternoon (1966), Šoljan’s Diocletian’s Palace (1969), Kušan’s The End of Freedom (1971), Marović’s Antigona, the Queen of Thebes, and Themistocles (both from the early 1980s), and Brešan’s Julius Caesar (1994; publ. 1997). Dramatic literature and the theatre of these decades did not only reflect the happenings in Croatia within the former Yugoslav state; many of the above and other authors paid for their courage to write these texts with being passed over in silence, and with intellectual, political and existential harassment.