Who the fuck started all of this (Hurtling stillness) explores the consequences of the Balkan war from the point of view of the Macedonian Dejan Dukovski, one of the most acclaimed European playwrights, a writer of works which have become acclaimed films (for example Caberet Balkan, which he wrote when he was only 24, and which won the critics award at the 1998 Venice Film Festival) and a first-hand witness of war. The young Norwegian playwright Agate Øksendal Kaupanghas re-written the piece, developing themes which were already present in the original: post-traumatic syndrome, sexual violence, the abuse of power, racism and the refugee crisis.
A paradigm of the new style Balkan black humour, the work takes on suspended situations which are made up of silences and things unsaid, surrounding stories of love which are synonymous of violence, brutalised, dirtied and offended. The characters, represented in seven rounds in a dreamlike and grotesque atmosphere, are all scoundrels who don’t even seek rendition any more, but perhaps simply an affirmation of their way of life. Through these encounters/clashes between a clown and a ballerina, Doctor Fallus and a bill collector, closing with a nun and a caged demon, Dukovski defines the outlines of this little loveless world where every story is a circular repetition of events and feelings, with men and women who desperately try to survive the degeneration of thought which marks their daily lives.