a play by ray brown about his friends in former Yugoslavia
 
 

June 26th 1991.
    ...the creak and crack of dancing
            skeletons announce
                a change of tempo
 

    ...you will laugh,
        you will cry
            and
        you will never forget...
 
 
 

In 1985 writer and broadcaster Ray Brown made his first trip to Yugoslavia and fell in love with the country and its people. He has returned once or twice a year ever since. He has published an award-winning story about the country and broadcast several features and talks on BBC Radio 4. In ... is normal! he works with two actors to present a funny, moving and compelling mixture of fact, fiction, performance and dramatic readings which also features music and voices recorded live in former Yugoslavia. Brown creates a unique impression of a country at war with itself. In the disrupted and sometimes tragic lives of a painter, waiter, dress-designer, peasant farmer and others, linked by their friendship with this 'half-baked English pacifist' there is meaning and hope. And in it all is a strange pattern of coinicidence connecting Brown to another writer and broadcaster, Milan Milisic, killed in the siege of Dubrovnik.

'...records an episode of resilience in the face of cruelty and  madness with that compelling British mixture of understated outrage and pity. A rich mosaic to face the mad, mad world...' Arnold Wesker

'...is normal! is terrific. Ray Brown has found an important way to write about important matters in a time when trivia rules, that has to be good...' Trevor Griffiths

'...like an except from a surrealist diary, yet it's based in the reality of what was my country...' Goran Stefanovski

'...stunning and memorable...' Grace Kempster