THEME: Friendship and politics
N° OF CHARACTERS: 6 (1 male and 5 female)
N° OF ACTS: 2
SETTING: Zagreb
TIME: 1990, 1991
WRITTEN IN: 1999

SUMMARY:
Vjera is a bank clerk who yearns for a sincere realtionship with her husband Zvonko (a corrupt building inspector) and with her girlfriends. Zvonko, preoccupied with conjecture about the war, has no time for his private life. Vjera's friends - Jagoda (a biologist friend from her student days), Nera (a translator), Darija (who works in a travel agency), - are unable to communicate with Vjera in a peacetime way, since they are shaken by the feverish angst which threatens their social and moral stability. Vjera grows unhappier by the day and is lonely as well as being completely disoriented politically. In this state of mind, she starts to spend time with her neighbour Mira (who is a salesperson and homemaker). When Mira, too, lets her down, Vjera's accumulated anger explodes and - despite her own principles and ideals - she kills her neighbour during one of the air-raid alerts.

The play was premiered on November 3 2001 at the m.b.H. Theatre in Vienna. It won second prize in the competition for theatre texts with contemporary themes by writers of the former Yugoslavia, organised by the m.b.H. Theatre. The play has been translated into German (by Klaus Detlef Olof).

ZORICA RADAKOVIC (Sinj, 1963) completed her studies of Yugoslavian Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1988. She is a member of the Croatian Writers Association and the Croatian PEN Club. She lives in Zagreb where she works as a free-lance artist-writer. Five of her books, mainly of poetry, have been published. She also writes prose, criticism, essays, radio play adaptations and radio plays. To date, her plays Training (Student Experimental Theatre - SEK, Zagreb, 1988) and Die Nachbarin/Neighbour (m.b.H. Theatre, Vienna, 2001) have been performed.