Diary of a Serbian Housewife

For her performance in this one-woman show, the young Serbian actress Ksenija Martinovic, who has lived in Italy for many years, won the monologue section 2014 Premio Nazionale Giovani Realtà del Teatro, an annual theatre prize awarded to young actors.

Responding to an inner need, Angelka, a young woman from ex-Yugoslavia, embarks on a quest to retrace and revisit her past, reliving the memories of her life as it once was: her early childhood, Tito’s Yugoslavia, her adolescence, her coming of age in Milosovevic’s Serbia. How does one see oneself when, with eyes anew, one looks in the mirror after all these years?

Her reawakening and heightening awareness coincides with that of an entire generation, people like herself for whom adulthood had come too soon, thrust upon them long before they were ready.

For her performance in this one-woman show, the young Serbian actress Ksenija Martinovic, who has lived in Italy for many years, won the monologue section 2014 Premio Nazionale Giovani Realtà del Teatro, an annual theatre prize awarded to young actors.     

Following this award, the production received the sponsorship of CSS as part of its triennial StartART project (‘First Production’ category), awarded to young performance artists and emerging theatre companies.                    

 As she looks back on her life, we share her memories: “A cassette player; the  years spanning 1960-1990; a leaf of paper; words; the TV news; being the topic of world conversation; being a Nation; being a small child; being an adult; being Angelka; being a woman; living in a border zone - the dividing line between civility and fear -  the fear of not being recognised, the fear of being silenced;  Italy, the land of dreams, of new beginnings, new encounters, games, smells, holidays, songs, pizza, return; Italy, a house looking out on the world, a house fit for a housewife.

Only Angelka does not occupy herself with family life or domestic chores. Barely drawing breath, Angelka acts, recites, sings and dances; Angelka laughs, playing the mocking fool, she pours scorn on the worlds tired platitudes and clichés as she reads out the names of those who have lost everything and, while the West continues to batter and bomb, Angelka gazes upon the public, searching among the bodies in the darkness for a memory, the memory of a window”