Safet Plakalo

Who is Safet Plakalo?

Safet Plakalo is arguably the most prominent living Bosniak playwright and one of the few South Slavic writers of poetic dramatic orientation. His unique dramatic expression integrates the precise poetic form of a sonnet deeply into a dramatic form.

Having written his first play, Vrh, at the artistically tender age of 26, he still holds the honour of being the youngest playwright in the theatrical history of Bosnia and Herzegovina whose play was staged by a professional theatre. The success of Vrh had secured him his first commission to write a play about the 1941 anti-fascist insurgence in the Romanija region near Sarajevo. Though one of his best plays, Iza šutnje's attempt to demystify the legend of Slaviša Vajner Čiča, a Partisan leader at the heart of the events, displeased Bosnian political censors. As a result, the play was swiftly taken off the repertoires of the four out of five leading Bosnian theatres. The fifth one, in Banja Luka, never attempted to stage it.

Plakalo wrote his third play Nit in the middle of the censorship battle, but disheartened by the outcome and the "incomprehensible attitude of the Bosnian theatrical world towards home-grown dramatic literature", he temporarily gave up on writing to become a theatre critic. It was a personal tragedy that made him return to his dramatic and poetic roots with an autobiographical memento mori to his tragically killed wife, Sonja, Phoenix je sagorio uzalud. On his 36th birthday, and ten years after his first play, he finally saw another of his works premiered on a theatre stage.