Belgrade. The second wave of the epidemic. Brand new anti-epidemic measures. Another lockdown. Everyone is more or less crazy. Huge fear is replaced with huge madness. Someone said yesterday: ‘If the year 2020 had to choose to be a country it would choose to be Serbia.’ Tiny big truth that makes us laugh.

Every night there are protests in front of the parliament. Two groups are protesting. The first group is made up of non-violent youth that is sitting on the street, wearing masks, singing songs, holding hands, and shouting: Sit down, don’t get turned around! Another group of protestors is violent, they are starting brawls, flipping trash cans, and fighting the police. The first ones are ‘students’ and the others are ‘right-wingers’. Everyone is furious because of the president, government and prime minister. Their only difference is their approach. It’s like that in almost every town in Serbia. It is burning, so to say.

The risk they are taking is huge. Hospitals are already full. The health system is hanging by a thread. Madness and fury have replaced desperation.

How did it come to this? This chaos that has probably come before an even larger cataclysm.

At the beginning of the pandemic before the first measures were taken, the head of state assembled a group of medical experts. They talked to us with smiles on their faces. They were making jokes. They called corona the funniest virus in the world. Educated medical doctors were advising us to go shopping in Milan because the prices must have fallen. It happened at the same moment that 100 people per day were dying in Italy. Our medical experts, our president, and our prime minister were laughing their asses off. The nation got encouragement and enlightenment from watching their small screens. Corona wouldn’t come against the Serbs.

A few days after that, the new press conference was broadcast. Same participants, this time they were pale in the face. They explained to us that they never said that the virus is the funniest. Au contraire. It is deadly. But only for old people. It kills only pensioners, for the rest of us it is harmless. But we are deadly to pensioners so we were advised not to come close to them. The president clasped his hands and begged: dear old citizens, I beg you not to overcrowd our cemeteries! Stay away from your families, put yourselves in isolation!

Then he almost cried. And then he named all the cemeteries he could remember and begged pensioners not to overcrowd our cemeteries.

The pensioners, who are mainly his voters, and who mainly love the president more than God because they can listen to him on almost every channel available, are obedient people. They got scared just like little kids would do. They threw their kids out of their homes, bought Domestos and pure alcohol and started to shoot with it all over their habitations.

The state of emergency started. Police curfew. Isolation. The most restrictive anti-pandemic measures in Europe. For Easter it was lockdown, we were far away from our older people, to whom we are deadly. Everyone was alone. It was eery. That’s also how it was for Labour Day. Four days into lockdown. Our parents have changed. I called a psychiatrist on the phone, to ask her what to do with my mom who was sinking into a clinical depression. Amongst the other things she said to me: if I’ve treated five thousand patients in my life, I’ve been called by six thousand of them just around these days. Anyone who was already mentally challenged was triggered to go mad from fear. The country of manic pensioners in lockdown.

Every night at 8 o’clock there was organized applause for the health workers. After that there was a little pause and after that people were banging on their frying pans and blowing their whistles against the authorities and their horrifying measures. Information from health centres started to leak out and they were showing that the numbers shown for the deaths from corona were rigged and that the situation was much worse than we were told. The nation was in lockdown for over 60 days and people were on the brink of a nervous breakdown. But not all of them. At half-past eight members of the ruling party were climbing up on the rooftops of buildings and letting ‘March on the Drina’ thunder out of expensive sound systems. To honour their president – and against people rebelling.

In the end you couldn’t distinguish when the applause ended, when the banging of frying pans started and when you could hear ‘March on the Drina’. Everyone applauded, banged and shouted from 8 to 9 o’clock according to their fancy. I stopped going out on my balcony. My twelve-year-old son was pretending to be asleep, far back from our windows.

Total theatre. The script for making terrified citizens go into a frenzy in their isolation. 

Elections were approaching. In the country where the absolutely dominant ruling party walks hand in hand with the president in office; in a country where the opposition is covered in tar and feathers and has long been banished from all media, brought to naught, disgraced and beaten. A large part of the opposition started a boycott before the pandemic. Then the president lowered the quota for parliamentary entry and then some minor parties went berserk to enter it. The race could begin! Another one, gloomy, theatrical, amateur, crawling, full of melodrama and mimicry, overwhelming. For gourmands of theatrical mimes or humorous sketches. With the horrible motivation of pulling the long face of power. A provincial school for amateur acting. Woe to us, stranded professionals without engagement while others squander theatrical tools without any moral safety brake.

Just before the election took place, one month before, it happened. The epidemic slowed down. Full speed. Every night our president, the prime minister, and the team of medical experts with larger smiles on their faces were informing us that we were prevailing over the virus at the speed of lightning! And then there was the day when they informed us that the virus was beaten and the team of medical experts were taking their vacations. And that we were free! This incredible reversal warmed our hearts! We ran to each other for a long-awaited embrace. Belgrade’s football derby was allowed with a full stadium. Concerts, cafes, night clubs... everything was open. There was election fever everywhere. They gathered people together, agitated. That didn’t matter, we all know politics is a whore, but the thing that mattered most was that we were free! Theatre could live again. All the summer stages were opened at the snap of a finger. I acted in one of my favourite anti-regime performances in front of a full house of eager Belgradians. I travelled to Kragujevac, a beautiful town located 200kms south of Belgrade. The performance that I directed was taking place in front of a full house as well. Everything seemed like life was starting again. That Serbia was blooming its way out of the forgotten shutdown.

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