Original Title: Bijele tragedije (četiri drame)
White Tragedies is a book of four plays by Borislav Vujčić (born 1957). He wrote these plays between 1989 and 1996. The Turtle’s De-robing was first published in Quorum magazine in 1989, while Croatian Nightingale was performed at the Gavella Drama Theatre in 1990. The other two plays – The Colour of Fame and Asfodel – have not yet been performed. However, they have not escaped attention. Asfodel won the 1995 Marin Držić prize for drama awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Croatia, the third time that Borislav Vujčić was declared the laureate in this prestigious Croatian drama competition.
Experiencing life as an ongoing challenge, Borislav Vujčić sees it through the prism of art and, sometimes, laces it with painfully identifiable fragments of reality. The Turtle’s De-robing was inspired by the fate of Osip Mandelstein, Croatian Nightingale speaks of Miroslav Krleža’s rarely mentioned sojourn in an asylum during the rule of the World War II regime in Croatia – the NDH – and the hero in The Colours of Fame reminds one of Rade Šerbedžija, the Croatian actor. Vujčić’s selection of pieces of reality is no coincidence – they depict the important mechanism which determine the individual’s fate, always proving once more that people learn nothing from history, but that history re-cycles fate in futile self-generation. His choice of historical eras and characters actually holds up a mirror to the present day, because Borislav Vujčić feels strongly that writing in this part of the world is the ethics of the search.