The Great White Conspiracy

It’s 1994. Seattle. A city of rain. A city where nobody’s cool. Where mainstream, preppy and glam are a definite no-no. Where Kurt Cobain could have become a rock star. Even he can’t believe – in fact, he can believe least of all – how he made it, when he’s a punk rocker at heart. Therefore, after two albums, In Utero and Nevermind, he’s ready for a change in sound. Some kind of contemplative rock, with no chorus, long passages, a lot of repetitions. His company demands the exact opposite: stronger guitars and a chorus. In other words: a hit! Kurt’s desire for a sincere personal testimony clashes with the interest of the industry. Kurt is no longer interested in the rebellion against the system, the critique of the society, ideology ... he’s only interested in the human being. He wants to look at people in close-up. Their hair, their skin, their teeth, their eyes ... But that may no longer be rock’n’roll. It is no longer the music of revolt, it’s monopolised – like black rap before – by whites, because they found in it a large industry niche, within which Kurt is a goose that lays golden eggs. But because the goose no longer produces eggs, the industry coins a conspiracy. Kurt finds himself in a heroin hallucination that is becoming more and more real: he’s caught between corpses spread on the wall, obsessive fans, possessive managers, his phantom wife Courtney Love, who’s the only person really close to him. We witness the last days of Kurt Cobain, a rock idol who changed the lives of many, but mostly of himself. Right till the end he firmly believed that it’s better to burn out than fade away.

The play certain to be a hit with Cobain’s boys and others, too, is a debut of the young Serbian author Dimitrije Vojnov. It was first performed in 2004 in Atelje 212 in Belgrade, where it continues to run. In 2006 it was staged in Kamerni teater 55 in Sarajevo and on the third programme of Croatian radio. Vojnov works as a film critic for daily press and magazines, a screenwriter and a dramaturg for TV Pink projects.