Fedrina ljubav (Phaedra's Love)

IIva Milosevic, who directed the play, manages to point out, to emphasise, to give her director's support to the text and put a question: What can be the limit to the human need for freedom, and what it can bring us when we finally realise it?

- Zeljko Jovanovic, Blic

The works of English playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) deal with themes such as redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture - both psychological and physical - and death. Their poetic intensity - expressed through a pared-down language - exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action, turned Kane into a theatrical figure of reference.

Her particular style and ideas, inspired by expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy, attracted the interest of Serbia's Iva Milosevic (who has directed works such as Shopping and Fucking, by Mark Ravenhill, Odon von Horvath's Kasimir and Karoline, and Bash, by Neil LaBute). Milosevic says of Fedrina ljubav (Phaedra's Love): "I think both Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane believed that genuine emotion has come to be extremely exclusive and that the obscene does not ensue from the sphere of the sexual, but rather from the discomfort caused by baring others' suffering or loneliness. This is what is obscene, this is what makes us feel uncomfortable, the two of them pose the question of what it is that we do at such moments, how we react."

Fedrina ljubav (Phaedra's Love) was first performed in February 2008 in Belgrade and is a production of the Jugoslovensko Dramsko Pozoriste (Yugoslav Drama Theatre), in co-operation with the International Theatre Festival MESS, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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