Football fans on stage? Sanja Mitrovic is a theatre-maker with a secret

Sanja Mitrović is a theatre maker with a theme and a secret. She builds on the theme with each performance. And the secret is nipping at her work's heels.

Her theme is the collective: how it grows, what it is based on, how deep mutual love can be, how euphoria can turn into rage, how it can explode from within through mutual distrust and betrayal.

Collectives she examined before: countries with a flawed past, communities in mourning, the founding fathers of united Europe, the audience of great orators. And now she delves into the most fanatical collective of them all: football supporters. With four real actors on stage, all of whom understand nothing of herd behaviour and mass hysteria. And four real football supporters, who could not live without herding and mass.

The actors ask each other and supporters probing questions. About family ties, football club, homeland and the sacrifices you would be willing to make for it. Questions about loyalty to the group or loyalty to yourself. Tomorrow is the premiere of your new show but also your grandmother's funeral. What will you choose? Will you stay at home at your father's deathbed or will you go to Feyenoord's European away game, just as he would? All the more poignant, those questions, as the interviewee is projected life-size on the backdrop.

The actors try to capture something of those murderous dilemmas, of that bigotry for which everything must give way, by quoting from Shakespeare, Chekhov and Racine. Nice quotes: self-sacrifice for the greater cause has been around a bit longer than the Champions League. But actually, everything is already contained in the name of the Rotterdam club where Sylvia discovered a love of football: HOV, Hope On Progress.

And the rage that follows the destruction of that hope is actually best seen in the look of Gert-Jan, the supporter, at the moment when two actors tear up the Feyenoord flag. This is how someone looks when the symbol of the collective that protects him from loneliness and lets him dream of victory is taken away from him, every week.

Sanja Mitrović's secret is a trauma: the murder of Zoran Djindjić. On 12 March 2003, this Serbian prime minister was shot. Sanja was still living in Belgrade at the time. She was part of the generation that grew up during the wars in the Balkans and then took to the streets for democracy. Djindjić was the hope of her generation, its hope for progress: a charismatic orator, who was on his way to lead his country from the wrong past to a united Europe and wanted to make short work of the bloodthirsty nationalists who recruited their killers from the supporters' mob. His death left the country adrift, stunned and in mourning.

Mitrović has never literally tapped into that trauma in her work. But it lies beneath each of her performances. Like a secret that must sooner or later burst open. The secret that follows on the heels of her feverish, inescapable theatre.

Chris Keulemans was a board member of Stand Up Tall Productions 2009-2014