Theatre Control Policy or Why After Goran Stefanovski and Dejan Dukovski, No One Is Known Outside the Borders of the Macedonian Theatre? (2010–2021)

Abstract

Introduction To capture the dramatic situation in/of the contemporary drama theatre in Macedonia, I will try to draw certain characteristics of the state of the theatre by referring to several political and social conditions with us, that erode the spirit and matter of everyday life: • hyper-corruption, local imperialism in every pore of society, political party terrorism, consistently poor policy of artificial status quo in transition, a deeply corrupted legal system and captive state, education in a bitter crisis, tortured and abused culture, rotten health, violent stoning with regular changes to the constitutional name, crime-local feudal capitalism combined with laziness, brutal opportunism, and overnight constructed professional identities; constant and accelerated economic brain drain, radical nepotism, elephant valley in every institutional sector; treating the public budget and public institutions as if they were the private property of several government figures in managerial positions; • corrupted and irrelevant mainstream media working for the interests of the political party opposition and position – through a low level of editorial ethics and extremely poor quality media programme; we are a country burdened by daily financial and institutional scandals and social damages for which no one takes the responsibility – nor are they punished for the damage they inflict; • the local Don Quixote – the Macedonian Center ITI/PRODUKCIJA, through which we promote domestic contemporary plays as literary works; Macedonian playwrights who are not part of the establishment; dramatists, who are deliberately not staged in theatres, with the exception of the incidental (sudden) goodwill of a particular theatrical institution – which usually does not know how to carry out successful local and international promotional strategies afterwards.