‘Soul of the town’: Mostar’s beloved bridge inspires tale of romance and war

Igor Memic's award-winning drama Old Bridge, staged at the Bush theatre in London, charts teenage romance at a time when the world stopped spinning'

The bridge in the middle of Mostar is the spiritual and social heart of the city. It's where people meet and gossip, snatch a first kiss or dive into the waters of the river below. The Bosnian city takes its name from the arched Ottoman-era bridge and it became a terrible symbol for the shattering of Yugoslavia when it was destroyed by Croat paramilitaries in 1993, though it has since been rebuilt.

It's the soul of the town," says Igor Memic, whose play Old Bridge, which won the Papatango prize for new writing last year, is now in rehearsals at the Bush theatre in London. Memic is from Mostar himself. His family came to the UK in 1992, just 10 days before things popped off". He doesn't think of himself as a Bosnian playwright. Immigrant identity is more complex than that and his mother left it up to me to discover who I was and who we were".