Like so many things we make, this project began with the smallest of ingredients – a word and a hunch. In 1997 I was in Vienna with a production I had directed for the city arts complex Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana. An adaptation of Peter Handke’s Kasper (Speech Torture), created in an ex-Yugoslav country with the brutal Balkan conflict still rattling on in the east. Our project referred to the rape camps, ethnic cleansing, as well as the rapid modernisation and Americanisation of former communist countries such as was evident in Slovenia. In one of many conversations during the process with one of the actors, Zeljko Hrs, about men and war and sexual politics, I learnt the word inat that translates amongst other things as ‘pugnacious male stubborn pride’ – the stuff of warmongering, by which Zeljko would explain how his former country had fallen apart
