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In the literary production of Dražan Gunjaca drama appears by chance, sort of, like a result of the author's exercise in style, a "polishing" work intended for the improvement of his prose, but before long it starts living a life of its own, independent of Gunjaca's world of fiction, simply because it proves to be excellently suited to his aptitude for laconic, gnomic expression.
After The Balkan Roulette which brought the author the European Parliament Charter and two other prestigious literary awards (Premio Carver and Il viaggio infinito) and after The Balkan Aquarelle, still unpublished, which competes for the Onassis Foundation Drama Prize, In the Shadow of Reason is Gunjaca's third play which further develops the concept on which he has made his first two one-acters.
While the general idea of the first two plays, remotely modeled on the classic tragedy, based on the transcendental contradiction of good and evil and the existential contradiction of life and death and their mutual permeation, offers Gunjaca an opportunity to explore absurdity as a basic feature of human existence in the world, in this play the idea develops in the direction of the Kafkaesque relationship between an individual and a superior power, be it an authority or a fate.
The general mood of the play is funny, and that would indeed make it a comedy, if human lives were not at stake. This skill of Gunjaca in giving sense to senselessness through the detection of comic elements in otherwise tragic human lots of his characters lends his plays, including the present one, a certain "existential" dimension of a distanced perception of the world. His characters are always happy losers who find sense in defeat. Thus the protagonists of this play, too, are always, regardless of the changing circumstances, condemned to captivity, a kind of captivity, however, which does not depend on current circumstances, but one which is installed in the very foundations of human existence. If so, it seems that Gunjaca wants to tell us, things should not be taken all that tragically. But, of course, what we have here is a classic Copernican revolution, a radical change in the point of view, which also implies a different interpretation of reality, a kind of interpretation which the reality in the play leads from hyperrealism to surrealism.
Nevertheless, the funny mood collides with the claustrophobic impression we get while reading the play. The obsessive and incessant feeling of being enclosed, suffocated, accused of guilt, is irrational, abdominal, it gives you the creeps at the thought that all of us, albeit in lesser intensity, are experiencing, suffering, undergoing situations like that in which Gunjaca's heroes have found themselves.
Gunjaca is indisputably an exceptional dramatist. But is he a comedian or a tragedian?
Mr.sc.Srda Orbanic