Seven Kilometres North-East

Past brutalities inevitably lurk within all historic sites beloved by tourists. Every castellated beauty across Europe hides some hideous story within its dungeons and some places, like Auschwitz and Port Arthur, are even more powerfully etched with human depravity.  How does the tourist travel through this reality behind the brochures?

Kym Vercoe’s well-executed, solo show chronicles through four recent trips her fascination in  post-war Bosnia, its welcoming people, its rural simplicities and the beauty of its mountains and pastures. As she randomly hops through the familiar jokes, diary jottings and language struggles of the tourist, we see this beauty in Sean Bacon’s languid videos spread across a large back screen.  Vercoe’s adoring focus soon turns to the stunning 16^th Century bridge across the river Drina at Visegrad.

But her carefree tourist turns ardent researcher when she learns that here on this bridge in 1992 the town’s Muslim men were slaughtered, its old stones made slippery with their blood, the river clogged with their corpses.  A hotel stay seven kilometres northeast out of town turns nightmare when she discovers it was a hub of rape and murder for hundreds of women.  Discovering that some leapt to their suicide from her own second storey balcony, she cringes at the grotesque banality that here she is now hanging out her tourist smalls.

Above the screen, charming local images are projected on an innocent row of washing.  Singer Sladjana Hodzic adds Bosnian colour – and an increasing sorrow – with occasional native songs. 

Vercoe’s impressive research is no surprise, given her earlier work with version 1.0 and its own rigorous process of documentary theatre making.  And with her tomboy gusto, she evokes powerful emotional moments and empathy, which earlier version 1.0 productions have sometimes lacked. After all, we have all been glib tourists stepping quickly over blood and pain.

Vercoe’s answers to this moral dilemma are equivocal. Our engagement to the 90-minute show could be sharpened with a more dramatic, earlier revelation and suspenseful unfolding of the truth behind this beauty of Bosnia. The true horror is left to the end.

Martin Portus