The Turnaround from the title of Damir Karakaš's novel is the scene of a traumatic event, and that's all we will learn about the event from both the novel and this play. What follows after the traumatic event, like after any news from the crime reports, is invisible to the voyeuristic eye of the average consumer of media sensations – and that is precisely the theme of 'The Turnaround': the silent subsequent struggle of a brutally attacked person who has neither the strength for revenge nor forgiveness but tries to gather strength to continue living.
After the attack, nothing can be the same as before. Years have turned the wound on the body into a scar, but the wound is still there. However, it has changed its aggregate state – and the scar is not only on the body but also on the timeline of life experience, from which it is impossible to erase it because 'the impression of someone's eyes behind doesn't cease.' In the dramatization by Darko Lukić and directed by Dino Mustafić, we will see how one lives in that unwanted reality, but also in dreams that ruthlessly interpret the subconscious, even though reason, awake, tries to suppress it.
A person who must move on on his side has a family that experiences and shares the trauma with him, and on the other side, an indifferent system in which he is just another police file and just another medical record. What makes the difference between him and thousands of different files and records is that he is a writer, and about his experience years later, instead of revenge, he can write a novel. Literature is his battlefield, and language is the weapon to replace the deadly bayonet inherited from his ancestors. Therefore, the novel, in a way, becomes the 'fifth element' in this performance, at the end of which, just like in the novel, a little girl will cheerfully run after a sparrow with her innocent ignorance of the world in which her dad and each of us can be attacked because of our identity, stance, publicly spoken sentence – or for no reason at all.
And the main character will repeat the thought in his head like a mantra: 'It is important that we have finally started living normally' – whatever that 'normal' means.

Marina Vujčić