REVIEW OF SUICIDE AS A (SOCIAL) FACT

Review by Matea Fajković

Suicide as a (Social) Fact, by Ana Janković, is an ambitious work that sets out to confront one of society’s most urgent and painful issues. Its opening act offered a hauntingly realistic portrayal of despair and disinterest, delivered with restraint and insight. Yet the second half of the play abandoned this subtlety for chaotic spectacle, piling abstraction upon abstraction until the subject of suicide was nearly lost. While the courage to tackle such a theme is commendable and necessary, the execution left the audience more alienated than awakened.

The first part of the play was, without exaggeration, extraordinary. With minimal dialogue, a lack of facial expression, and no reliance on dramatic monologues, it managed to show what depression so often looks like in reality. On stage, we saw a young woman going through her nightly routine: quietly arranging roses in a vase, smoking while scrolling through TikTok, preparing dinner with indifference and eating it, then sitting in the living room to watch pornography with a monotonous expression and a cigar in her mouth, switching it off, then turning to a documentary about Australia, brushing her teeth, and so on.

The monotony was deliberate and powerful, showing a life drained of meaning. Dialogue appeared only through fragments of social media voices, creating the sense of a life surrounded by noise yet devoid of connection. The silence broke when the actress (Iva Ilinčić) finally spoke. She revealed that the character she is playing, at the end of her routine, went to the bathroom, took a bottle of Xanax pills, came to the living room, lined up twenty of them in two rows, took a bottle of wine and drank them all one by one. She then described how slow a death by Xanax actually is, how it takes many hours for the body to shut down, and which parts of it fail first. The person is literally dying slowly, she explained, echoing not only the reality of the overdose but also the truth that suicidal people are already “dying slowly” long before any physical attempts.

The act closed with her describing how, after death, the body decays and leaves only bones, which eventually turn to dust, while taking a small bucket filled with it and then pouring it all over the floor. This hauntingly simple gesture demonstrated the production’s capacity for honesty, restraint, and deep emotional insight. It set the stage for what could have been a masterpiece.

The second part of the play, however, shifted into an entirely different register. A man in a glittering red tuxedo appeared at the piano, followed by the actress dressed in a golden jacket, heels, and a short pink wig. The restrained realism of the first part gave way to a surreal circus of flashing lights, chainsaws, clown-like costumes, and chaotic monologues. At one point, in the beginning of this second part, Iva starts unpacking a handbag, putting stuff from it on the piano—one of them being a framed picture of Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and an iron that had hard flashing lights, which she started to flicker on and off, while pointing them towards the audience. The effect was overwhelming, so much so that I had to close my eyes to ward off a migraine. Without any warning beforehand, such choices risk excluding or endangering audience members sensitive to light, including those with epilepsy. It is important to note that this responsibility, of warning the audience, should also have been taken on by the theatre in which the play was performed.

Iva’s performance reflected the shift with striking intensity. In the first part of the play, she embodied hyper-naturalism; with her minimal gestures and flat affect, she managed to capture the exhaustion of depression and the weight it carries with unsettling precision. In the second part, however, she transformed into something exaggerated, flamboyant, and grotesque. While this demonstrated her range as a performer, the suddenness of the transformation contributed to the sense of rupture, and instead of it feeling like a natural progression of the story, it heightened the impression of two unrelated performances stitched together.

This shift from the first to the second act was clearly deliberate. Stand-up bits, songs, taunts, grimaces, and text projected onto a screen all sought to show a society obsessed with consumption and unable to stop. At one point, the actress even declared that the audience had not come to sit in silence—that what they wanted was drama, entertainment, a show. The intention was clear enough, but in practice, it felt more like the production was blaming its own audience for “wanting it” and instead of exposing the social mechanisms behind suicide, the performance itself became a spectacle, mirroring the very thing it sought to condemn.

As the act progressed, it grew increasingly fragmented. Dostoyevsky’s portrait rang with a phone call, leading into monologues from his novels. Patriotic songs about Tito and Yugoslavia were sung. Autobiographical stories from the cast and crew about unemployment were performed in the style of awkward stand-up comedy. At one point, the director, Ana, started saying, “This is my final show. After it I will kill myself.” Later, the actors sang California Dreamin’ by The Mamas & Papas, with the explanation that this was a song used in Igor Vuk Torbica’s play Hinkemann. What they failed to clarify was that this was Torbica’s final production before his suicide at age thirty-three, the same age that Ana Janković is now, and the line she kept saying earlier was a reference to that as well. This is something they assumed their audience would know, which didn’t turn out to be the case with most people in it.

The dramaturg, Anja Bilanović, also appeared on stage during the second part of the play. Like Ana, she wore a clown-like costume, with heavy make-up, a short blue wig, and a sleek black suit. Her presence blurred the line between author, dramaturg, and performer, yet the role she played within the performance was somewhat ambiguous. She was introduced to the stage through a joke about her professional path (that after completing her studies in dramaturgy she had “found work” in the theatre, selling tickets). Later, as the play progressed, she often moved into the background, assisting with props (such as holding a large Serbian flag during one of Iva’s monologues) and serving as a silent stage presence. It was not entirely clear whether this was intended to serve as a commentary on the often-overlooked position of dramaturgs within theatre, or whether it resulted from weaker planning of character functions in the overall structure of the performance.

And despite the title’s emphasis on “social fact,” the focus in the second part became oddly narrow, circling Serbian political history and theatre-community struggles rather than the wider issue of suicide. The subject was reframed as a national problem instead of a universal one, diluting the urgency and reach of the theme. What remained was a patchwork of spectacle, leaving no clear conclusion.

As someone who was the person from the first part of the play, this shift felt not only alienating but enraging. The subject of suicide, so carefully and sensitively handled at first, was drowned in spectacle, mockery, and self-indulgence. Perhaps this critique of the second part is too harsh, because the theme hits a little too close to home; it is difficult to separate artistic judgment from lived experience when the subject matter is so personal. Even so, the effect remains the same. The communication between author and audience was fractured. Without the verbal explanations given on stage and the written description on Bitef’s website, the second act would be nearly incomprehensible. For many, it amounted to chaos for chaos’s sake. For vulnerable viewers, such an approach risks not only confusion but real harm.

The first act proved that intimacy and subtlety can carry this theme with honesty and force. The second act, however, would have benefited from greater clarity and focus. Abstraction can be powerful, but only when tethered to the central theme rather than scattered across politics, autobiography, and spectacle. Suicide is not only a Serbian issue, nor should it be reduced to a national context. Its reality crosses borders, generations, and communities, and it deserves treatment that reflects that universality.

All in all, the ambition behind Suicide as a (Social) Fact is undeniable, and the willingness to confront such a painful subject is commendable. Yet in its current form, the play risks leaving audiences confused rather than transformed, alienated rather than awakened. Perhaps the harshness of this critique comes from how close the theme cuts to lived experience. Even so, discomfort on its own does not make for effective theatre; provocation must still serve the subject. In this production, the subject of suicide was ultimately overshadowed by spectacle and abstraction. Theatre has the power to shape conversations about what is often left unspoken. To do so, however, it must trust the power of intimacy, clarity, and respect—qualities that Suicide as a (Social) Fact possessed in its beginning but ultimately failed to sustain.