Nato closed Vlad Ilich’s chess club during the 2001 insurgency in Macedonia. Decades later, it gave him the material for his debut performance at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. When life gave him lemons, Ilich wrote sketches.
“At the time, even Lord Robertson, the then-secretary general of Nato, was using these terrible chess metaphors to explain the Balkan War,” he laughs. Why give the diplomats all the good material?
Ilich grew up in now-North Macedonia during the war. In 2018, after a 27-year dispute with Greece and countless rounds of UN-mediated talks, North Macedonia’s name was finally agreed. Or, as he quips in one of his sketches, it was a period where “we go to the border and say “we’re Macedonia, and the Greeks say, “no, we’re Macedonia” and we both walk away unemployed.” Today, his routine is made up of these quirky stories of childhood days filled with Soviet cartoons and Nato officers.
“There is a healing element to it,” Ilich tells me as we dodge London’s summer rain on the Barbican’s lakeside terrace. “It’s only after a good 15 years that I reflected on it and thought, ‘Oh, this was not normal circumstances.”
Ilich’s childhood tales were steeped in politics. His father taught him how to play chess and, when the club first opened, his first teacher was a war deserter. “He taught me how to surrender,” Ilich explains.
Once, he tells me, he fought with his Albanian neighbour (today the pair are good friends). The Albanian side of Ilich’s town switched off the water supply as an act of resistance.
When Ilich came out on the street to play as he always did, his neighbour smiled cheekily and sang: “You don’t have any water.” Later that afternoon, a queue of 150 men, women and children poured into Ilich’s backyard as their family had access to a well.
When his neighbour’s father found out about their altercation, he forced his son to apologise. “That’s okay because… you don’t have any water,” Ilich sang back. Conflict or not, kids will be kids.
In 2018, Ilich moved to London and now jokes that he tells acquaintances he could spell Nato by the age of seven. “Then, say, Jonny from Brixton would tell me he could spell ‘quinoa’ at the age of seven. That was kind of the difference.”
Over the last six years, he’s been slowly crafting the art of being funny in three languages and his sketches have amassed seven million views online. According to The Stand Up Club, he has the niche title of “the only North Macedonian comic working in the UK”. None of this was part of Ilich’s plan.
“I didn’t plan on coming to the UK,” he tells me. “It was sort of lucky. I was in Malta where I met somebody there and I fell in love with this girl. Blah, blah, blah, it’s all very cheesy stuff,” he laughs. Ilich is well aware of the stereotypes around moving countries for a lover (it fills a section of his routine). “She’s like, ‘Let’s move to the UK’. And so we did and we broke up.”
Ironically, when I look down to check to make sure my voice memo app on my phone is still working, Vlad Ilich jokes that he’s accustomed to being recorded. “From border control,” he smiles.
One of the first headlines Ilich recalls reading when he moved to the UK was loaded with Brexity, anti-immigration rhetoric. “It said the Romanians, Bulgarians and Macedonians needed to go home, but I just saw that as a challenge. Really? Okay. I was like, how long can I stay?” It was then that Ilich began dabbling in stand-up.
Six years later, Edinburgh is calling and, he concedes that preparations are proving a nightmare. “You have to be ‘on’ all the time. A magazine will suddenly want a 500-word piece on why people should come to the show or want to know how to summarise the show in three words.”
I can’t help but ask how he would do this. “It’s about people ending up hurting each other and how you can apologise by cooking a really bad mushroom risotto. Oh, of course, or, in my case, by playing a game of chess.”
Vlad Ilich’s debut show Vladislav, Baby Don’t Hurt Me will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s Pleasance Courtyard Attic, July 31 – August 25 (not 14th)
