"I read your play and I can say that I like it… I think she would have a good success on stage as well… But, me, young man, I advise you, to take this manuscript home and burn it!“
These are the words of the then director of the Royal Serbian National Theatre (sometime in the 80s of the 19th century) addresses the young Nušić when the latter brings him the play to be staged. Even Nusic himself, when he becomes the director of the theater, as he rereads his play, sitting comfortably in their director's chair, and overhead, in a golden frame, hangs a portrait of His Majesty the King, he decides to return the manuscript to the drawer from which he took it and leave it to wait for better times. Like that, the comedy "Suspicious Face" is coming soon 40 years to see the light of the stage.
This anecdote, although it refers to a completely different historical period and socio-political context, there is a very famous, contemporary undertone. From today's perspective, the character of chief Jerotie Pantic is no longer the character of a cute old provincial official, but a modern-day strongman and paranoid, who his obsession with listening to other people's conversations, he put it in the function of his desire for power. The others around him are no better, who complete the gallery of characters in this world where no one is innocent.
The world of Nušić's Suspicious Face, read today, represents a dystopian world in which spying and mistrust, as well as hypocrisy, corruption and fear are something completely normal. It is a world where the grotesque becomes realism, and farce becomes history again. Nusic himself, in the original manuscript for Suspicious Person, in the subtitle it says "gogoliad in two acts". Our play can be called "modern snobbery", or, a distorted mirror in which the world and the people in it are presented exactly as they are.

Dean Damjanovski, director