Old Bridge, The Bush

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A fully engrossing, well-honed and smartly paced work by first time writer Igor Memic ,delivered by a hugely impressive cast of 5, plus an old bridge. To be fair they could have used Hammersmith Bridge given its current condition but let’s not go there (locals: we don’t!).

So, why did this win a notable prize ..

As former-Communist-former-Yugoslavia pulls apart we witness the historic and seemingly multicultural town of Mostar spiral from ageless idyll to asymmetric hell. Our narrator, Mina, is the sole survivor of a group of four friends, and we view events through her subjective lens, her memories. Inevitably then, as a memory piece, Mina is at the centre of events - we see only her relationships to everyone else.

There is one more layer of perspective. There seems to be a parallel suggested between Mina with her unborn child and our writer Igor Memic who left Bosnia with his mother as a 2-year old in 1992. Of course we don’t know if fictional Mina travelled to London but we do know she had an Aunt here (the phone calls), that the new-born daughters name was anglicised to Millie. The London Aunt is all the family we are told about.

I wondered if what we experience is the memories of Memic’s mother as told to, and represented by, her son. It is how families pass their stories through generations.

Mina’s remembrances tell of a cultural landscape of Muslims and Catholics and Jews and Croats and Serbs and Bosnians and … it’s a jumble out there. The physical landscape includes surrounding mountains with winds rushing though and, traversing a deep gorge and unifying what would otherwise be divided, the old stone bridge: heel first, toe second, and as old as Shakespeare, they say.

There’s an inevitable sentimentality, as well, about time, place and people (who doesn’t do about that one perfect summer) that feels almost memorialising.

One thing we also learn about conflict is it matures the hell out of relationships: in two years this group went from George, Andrew, Pepsi and Shirley to the family in Die Harder.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the writing is how none of the countless tribal or political cans of worms are allowed to cloud the author’s central aspiration.

I read the play as a love letter to a time and a place and a culture and a tolerance and to friends who won’t have polaroid memories because it ended for them as they searched for their mother, protected their pregnant partner from sectarian madness, or their closest surviving friend from a hillside sniper.

A love letter but also perhaps a testament to youth, to Journey’s End, a Remembrance, in Europe, in what is now the EU, not much more than 30 years.