Dušan Spasojevic: EXTINCTION

After his successful production of Bond’s Have I None on the 12th International Small Scene Theatre Festival (Montenegrin National Theatre, Podgorica), the director Egon Savin returns to Rijeka with another first-class performance. Extinction is a hyper-realistic vision of the dying out of a small and isolated community, characterised by precise minimalist direction and powerful acting. The action takes place in a contemporary rural environment, among a decreased and predominantly aged population of a disintegrating village in Serbia. There, the still present remnants of a rigid traditional and patriarchal consciousness merge with contemporary social problems and events. The men are either under the ground being sold at unreasonably low prices, or wrapped in dreams of a life under foreign skies, far from the reality they are glued to. The women, on the other hand, have long ago turned silent...

Dušan Spasojevic (born in 1980) wrote Extinction while studying dramaturgy at the Karic Brothers’ Art Academy. The play, possibly inspired by and reminiscent of the work of the popular British playwright Martin McDonagh, was premiered in the season when Atelier 212 celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.

Migration is the cause and extinction is the effect. Both literally and figuratively. When the characters go their own ways and the actors leave the stage, the audience is left facing an empty space. The vacant scene comes to life. That emanates a sense of awe and horror. Silence turns into sound. A country without people has no purpose of existence.
Dušan Spasojevic, from an interview in the programme booklet for the show

Two uprooted families, disintegration, life in sin, poverty, repentance and remorse, in hate, fear, and agony. Fathers and mothers bound to the earth and their graves; sons and daughters “gone nuts”; all of them dreaming of flying away, but in their bodies and souls – full of misery, sin, pain, and distress – partings, break ups, transitions, and changes are not easy and at the time – almost no longer possible. A word or two, a sip of brandy, urges and curses, wailing and moaning, bitter and disturbing, and occasionally a word of affection and smothered goodness. ... A dark and oppressive old story that Egon Savin communicates neither with extravagance nor emotional arrogance, but harshly and sternly, yet with compassion and a grain of humour… It is evident and significant that Spasojevic, being as young as he is and at the beginning of his writing career, has understood, or at least perceived, that “old things” die with difficulty and in pain, while new ones are very demanding. Thus Dušan Spasojevic and Egon Savin, unexpectedly yet not without reason and incentive, bring back the peasant and his hardly discernible drama, or as we would say today – a drama of abandoned, inflexible, rigid but still living souls, by setting them on the stage of Atelier 212.
Muharem Pervic, Politika