John Malkovich brings a critique of romanticized war to Zagreb’s HNK stage

The new HNK2EU theatre cycle began not on the Croatian National Theatre’s new stage, but in its main building. Interest in the guest performance by Sofia’s Ivan Vazov National Theatre was so strong that the smaller venue in Adžijina would have left many people outside.

That decision proved justified. The old theatre was filled to capacity for the opening of the new season and the new international programme. The Bulgarian company arrived with George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man,” a comedy that became the Irish Nobel laureate’s first commercial success and established him as a playwright.

First performed in 1894, the play remains one of Shaw’s most frequently staged comedies. It also carries a particular resonance in the region because of its setting. Shaw initially wrote the characters and conflict around an unspecified war. After friends told him the story would be more convincing if placed in a real conflict, he chose the 1885 Serbian-Bulgarian War and the Battle of Slivnitsa.

The play also introduces professional mercenaries into the conflict. One of them is a Swiss soldier fighting for the Serbian army, a professional who loves chocolate. In Bulgaria, a 1995 production at the Vranica Drama and Puppet Theatre used the title “The Chocolate Soldier.” The Swiss soldier is eventually revealed to be the wealthy heir to a hotel chain.

At the Ivan Vazov National Theatre, John Malkovich directed the production using a translation by Stoyan Chaprazov and Rayko Chaprazov. His name added another major draw for Croatian audiences. This is Malkovich’s second production of the comedy. He first directed it in New York in 1985 at Circle in the Square, where the cast included Kevin Kline, later replaced by Malkovich himself, Glenne Headly and Raul Julia. That production ran more than 100 times.

Malkovich was drawn to Shaw’s criticism of the intensely romantic view of war and the entirely unrealistic portrayals of military heroes. Shaw places an equally, if not more, romanticized vision of love against it. The story begins in a wealthy family’s home, where a mother and daughter await the return of the father and the daughter’s fiancé, celebrated as the hero of a victorious battle. A fugitive from the battlefield, a Swiss soldier in a Serbian uniform, slips into the daughter’s room and challenges the story of the great hero who supposedly turned the battle around.