EVO EVO Brings Hit London Show Exploring Balkan Identity to Playhouse East

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The ensemble work by Harun Ćehović, Klara Kaliger, Iva L. Šimić and Filip Mayer examines what it means to represent culture while living away from home.

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A group of London-based Balkan artists attempt to make a show about their culture(s). Attempt to... as soon as they finish their coffee. And go for a cigarette break.

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Created and performed by Harun Ćehović, Klara Kaliger, Iva L. Šimić and Filip Mayer, with dramaturgy by Pooja Sivaraman and acclaimed playwright and dramaturg Paul Sirett , with the rest of the creative team to be announced shortly. Evo Evo is a collage-like, devised comedy that turns the process of making a theatre show into the show itself.

Supported by Arts Council England, the work brings together four London-based artists from Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina to explore what it means to represent a culture while living away from it. Performances will run 30 September - 3 October.

What starts as a straightforward mission: to showcase their drama school-trained performing skills and represent a cultural identity that is often overlooked or stereotyped in British discourse - quickly becomes less straightforward. Because how do you represent a culture as complex, contradictory and diverse as the Balkans? Who gets to decide what 'Balkan' even means? And what happens when the people doing the representing can't quite agree on the answer?

Through humour, songs, multilingual performance, audience interaction and a series of theatrical vignettes, Evo Evo continually shifts between performance and the process of making the performance. The audience is invited into that process, becoming part of a one-off shared experience that plays with the boundaries between performer and spectator, rehearsal and performance, reality and theatre.

At the heart of the show is 'Evo Evo' - a phrase found across Balkan languages that is impossible to translate literally. It expresses a distinctly Balkan philosophy of time: nearly there, just about to, coming now... eventually. In the world of Evo Evo, time is measured in coffees and cigarettes, love and arguments are equally loud and expressive, and knowing everyone's business is practically a social obligation. But beneath the chaos is a more complicated question: what does it mean to belong?

The show explores the push and pull between adaptation and cultural identity, and the experience of being suspended between cultures as an immigrant and young artist in London. It asks how identity is shaped by language, community and geography - and how one can tell a story about something as personal and complicated as where you come from.

Rather than presenting Balkan culture as a fixed or singular identity, Evo Evo embraces its contradictions. The specificity of the artists' lived experiences becomes a way into something much more universal: the desire to be understood, to find community, and to work out where - and with whom we belong.

The work first emerged through a collaborative ensemble process and was presented as a work-in- progress at Voila! Theatre Festival 2025, where both performances sold out at Etcetera Theatre, Camden. Following this early success, the production received Arts Council England support for further development and presentation.

For the ensemble, the need for the work is particularly urgent. While stories of migration and displacement continue to dominate public conversation, Balkan voices remain almost entirely absent from British stages. Evo Evo brings a perspective rarely represented in British theatre, using the specificity of Balkan diaspora experiences as a route towards connection rather than separation. Audience feedback from the original run reinforced this: it was the specificity of the work that made it feel deeply universal and relatable.

At its core, Evo Evo is an invitation: to recognise the differences between cultures, the similarities within them and the messy, funny, often contradictory process of trying to belong somewhere.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/EVO-EVO-to-Play-Playhouse-East-Following-Sold-Out-London-Run-20260921)._