Elijah’s Chair / Elijahova Stolica / 2010

Igor Štiks’s novel follows Richard Richter, a fifty-year-old writer who returns to Vienna after his marriage falls apart, back to the aunt who raised him after his mother died in childbirth and his father took his own life.

What starts as one man’s search for his father becomes something larger: the play uses incest not as a literal family secret but as a metaphor for ethnonationalism itself — the demand that blood only mix with the “right” blood to keep an imagined community pure.

Directed by Boris Liješević, the production premiered at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade on October 16, 2010, in co-production with Sarajevo’s MESS Festival, and went on to win the Mira Trailović Grand Prix at BITEF in 2011.