Who may place a work inside a festival?

A production does not arrive at a festival alone. The program, the institution, and the political moment become part of the way an audience sees it. In Belgrade, a dispute over Crno zlato, or Black Gold, has made that surrounding frame difficult to separate from the play.

The Belgrade Drama Theatre production, directed by Oliver Frljić from a text by Maja Pelević, follows a family whose absent son returns as Angela. Bitef’s program describes a work about identity, memory, belonging, and a family’s confrontation with change. The production lasts about one hour and forty minutes and brings a substantial company of actors and designers into that story. Read Bitef’s description and full credits.

Its scheduled September 18 performance at the 59th Bitef did not take place. Earlier that day, Frljić told Danas that Belgrade Drama Theatre had placed the production in the festival without consulting him. He objected to participating in a version of Bitef that he believed was normalizing censorship after changes to the festival’s leadership and program. Read the interview and contemporaneous report.

The cancellation followed within hours. Regular theatre performances listed for September 19 and 20 also did not proceed. The timing prompted an obvious question, but timing is not proof of cause.

Belgrade Drama Theatre later said an actress’s illness caused the cancellation and rejected a connection to Frljić’s interview. That explanation addresses the immediate performance problem, while the director’s objection concerns a different question: whether the production should have appeared inside that festival at all. We have not seen medical documentation, contracts, cancellation notices, or the correspondence among the director, theatre, and festival. Read Vreme’s account of the theatre’s explanation.

The production has not disappeared. Belgrade Drama Theatre currently lists performances on October 12 and 13, followed by touring and later repertory dates. These are scheduled events, not completed ones, and they do not resolve what happened in September. They do show why the most accurate description is narrower than removal of the work: one festival appearance and nearby regular performances were canceled amid a dispute over context, while the theatre continued to plan the production’s public life. Check the theatre’s production page and current schedule.

Authorship in theatre is shared, but it is not shapeless. A director may object to the political meaning created when a work is placed inside a particular program. A theatre may see the production as part of its repertory and make a different institutional choice. Actors and audiences live with the consequences of both.

This case does not yet supply a clean verdict. It gives us competing explanations, an interrupted encounter, and a work whose future performances may clarify how limited that interruption was.

A question to carry forward: When a theatre owns a production’s schedule but its director rejects the frame around one performance, who decides what the work’s appearance means?

Reader note: This account distinguishes Frljić’s objection, the sequence of cancellations, and the theatre’s illness explanation. It does not infer causation from timing. Future dates are schedules and will need to be checked after they occur. Production images remain link-only.

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