The play is based on the real historical encounter between two married couples: Tito and Jovanka Broz with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. This meeting took place on the Brijuni Islands in the seventies of the last century. Information about the meeting itself and the time spent together by the married couples is available through very scarce written and video traces in Yugoslav media, biographical writings about the lives of the four historical figures, and in the form of short snippets from Richard Burton’s diaries. All these materials served as inspiration and material for the play.

The filming of the movie “Sutjeska” was the primary reason for this meeting, and that is what we know historically about the meeting itself. Everything else is the fruit of our imagination.

The very imagination and exploration of possible events and relationships between these four prominent figures during a historical encounter is the theme of the play.

What are all the roles that these four people play? What does it mean to play multiple roles in relationships with different people? What are our individual and collective identities, personal interests, and social merits?

Dramaturg’s Word

Once Upon a Time on… explores the possibilities of relationships between four people, reflects on the psychologies and relationships of two different married couples, their romantic relationships, the cruelty of vanity, the power of emotions, destructiveness, possessiveness, etc. The play examines the power positions of the two couples, the power plays between the men and their wives, between two men who display their greatness in different social contexts, between women who display the strength and greatness of their husbands in public spaces, between actresses and actors, the economic power between statesmen and warriors… What are all the roles that these four people play? They are sons, daughters, lovers, workers, actors, actresses, famous people, people within a context that they determine and build, and a context that brands them.

Every individual in society, in their life, performs a multitude of identities that are constructed within different contexts, and all these identities together make up an authentic person.

Dimitrije Kokanov