The play Bajbok at BELEF on August 16 - a forgotten word for prison as the title of a chamber performance

The play Bajbok is performed on August 16 at the Residence of Princess Ljubica in Belgrade, as part of the thirty-third BELEF. The ticket is 500 dinars through tickets.rs, and the start is at 8.30 pm.

The word bajbok is old and slowly disappearing from everyday speech. It means prison, detention, a cell. It comes from German and entered Serbian in the lands under Austro-Hungarian rule, spreading southward from there. It is one of those expressions the generations before us used, and which today you mostly meet in literature and in old films.

The performance is part of the festival's summer cycle at the Residence, a nineteenth-century house built for the wife of Prince Miloš Obrenović and today a museum. The space is intimate, the audience sits close to the performers, and the walls themselves are part of the experience. For a text on this subject, the setting does half the work.

BELEF this season runs from June 20 to September 22 and has over forty programmes at several locations across the city, from monodramas and chamber concerts to shows for children. Part of the schedule is free entry, part carries a symbolic price.

Tickets are 500 dinars, around 260 denars, through tickets.rs. That is among the lowest prices for a theatre performance in the Serbian capital this season.