A strong sense of contradiction has pervaded the Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The West’s immature prediction of Western liberalism’s victory has been followed by the subsequent revival of ethnic nationalism among Eastern European countries. On the part of these emerging post-communist countries, this has reflected a complicated double movement—the attempt to constitute themselves as nations representing both a reaction against the state-socialist past and a hope that nationalism would be the only way to the new West European prosperity.
This double movement has been most notably captured and explored in Edgar’s Pentecost, which was premiered at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1994. The play dramatizes the process of tracking the hidden history of a fresco in an obscure Eastern European post-communist country, which faces the bloodshed of civil war and the emergence of a released nationalist fervor. This article investigates how the play challenges, from a broad perspective of ‘New Europe,’ the unexamined assumptions of European identity, employing the idea of cultural hybridity and re-evaluating the historical values of communism.
Pentecost is an investigation of the actual circumstances of ‘New Europe,’ no longer divided by the Iron Curtain, where, although the search for identity and belonging becomes increasingly pertinent, it is also no longer certain where Europe begins and ends. ‘Return to Europe,’ an expression of the Eastern countries’ aspiration to rejoin Europe, is examined in the painful, even pointless search for European identity.
At the centre of a variety of dramatic debates on nationalism, art history, the refugee crisis, and the discrepancy between cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity and Eurocentric ideals, stands a twelfth-century fresco. Found in the backyard of Europe and alleged to be the biggest art discovery, the mural becomes a dramatic metaphor for the intricate internal tensions and confusions about values in this emergent post-communist country. The conflicting arguments about the fresco’s date and authenticity and the disputes over its ownership unveil the various viewpoints on national identity and cultural purity. The fresco functions as a piquant vantage point from which to look at the ironies and agonies of post-communist Eastern Europe, and Edgar links artistic restoration with the nationalist movement of the nation, the political restoration. In this fashion, matters of art history become caught up in a wider debate over the fundamentally futile definition of European identity.