APREMIERE in a German theatre is a red-letter night for any playwright. But for Biljana Srbljanovic, the invitation to the first German-language performance of her Belgrade Trilogy in the middle of April was one she had to turn down. This is the e-mail she sent: ''From my desk I hear the detonations of the Nato bombs. I haven't been into a shelter so far. But I'm very afraid. I live in the centre of Belgrade, where we can hear the aeroplanes continuously. But my parents live in a suburb near a military base. They see the live transmission of these broadcasts simply by looking from the windows: burning sky means explosions. I would love to see the premiere of my play. But at the moment, when men between 18 and 65 may not leave Yugoslavia, I would not like to leave my boyfriend alone.''

There are 187 political parties in the former Yugoslavia, but no serious opposition. Over the years, Milosevic has cleverly subsumed forces which, in other circumstances, could have formed the basis of an opposition.

The independent voice of dramatist Srbljanovic, 29, is an exception. At no point in recent years could you avoid politics in Serbia, she told me before the outbreak of the Nato conflict. ''The society is politicised to such an extreme degree that a political dimension is attached to every unpolitical action in the public space,'' she said. ''The tragedy of the recent generation, and of our children, is that they are shaped by the war and - spoiled. This experience is specifically Serbian. In other European countries war does not predominate. Nevertheless, there is a universal dimension to my plays, concerning the way misunderstandings and violence come about.''

For this, Srbljanovic has been attacked by the Bosnian-Serb dramatist Caca Celan, who emigrated to Germany in 1992. Celan is disgusted with the behaviour of Serbian intellectuals towards the Milosevic regime: ''What did they do?'' she asks. ''What did they write? They sat in the bars during the slaughter in Bosnia. Where are the works of art, where is the artistic legacy? What did they do? They told jokes against Milosevic. Serbian opposition is a comic strip!''

Nevertheless, Srbljanovic is one of the few Serb voices critical of Milosevic to be heard internationally. She might discuss the Serbian situation only tangentially, but at least her plays were seen on Belgrade stages up to the imposition of war. ''My first play, Belgrade Trilogy, refers to 1995 when thousands of young people left Belgrade,'' she says. The trilogy is made up of three one-act plays which sketch the fate of young Serbs in exile one New Year's Eve. The first play follows the laddish adventures of two brothers who have escaped to Prague; the second is set in Sydney, where two incompatible Belgrade couples are forced to celebrate Hogmanay together; the third is about a trigger-happy US-born Serb who accidentally kills a young actor.

''My second play, Family Stories - Belgrade, deals more with the Serbian situation in my homeland itself, and asks how we could have reached a point where so many young Serbs emigrated or had to die in the war,'' says Srbljanovic.

In this play, the action is set in Belgrade before the Nato bombs, at a time when the war had not physically reached the capital, but had begun to get inside people's heads, especially those of the children. They reacted by playing. Here, adult actors play children who pretend to be adults. In any other children's game it would be the Wild West; in this play, it is the war of everyday life, and every scene ends in an escalation of violence.

Celan, however, finds no opposition in these plays. ''These are not critical plays,'' she complains. Srbljanovic, by contrast, fears that if she didn't deal with contentious issues sensitively, her compatriots could turn away from theatre altogether. ''My third play, which I worked on until the outbreak of war, goes another step back in Serbian history to the end of the nineteenth century, although the play will never lose its character of contemporary drama. We always had the same problems, the same types of aggressive governments, the same weak opposition, incapable of governing.''

Celan finds this approach questionable. ''It is not correct that history repeats itself,'' she says. ''If you speak about the history of a country or a space, you have to speak concretely. This whole diseased mythology of the Serbs, who call themselves 'sky people', is the last racist fairytale of this century. And we are now witnessing the end of this fairytale.''

The key disagreement between the two women is over whether it is better to leave a country in protest at what you regard as its fascist conditions, or whether it is worth the attempt to stay and work at home. ''What am I to do?'' says Srbljanovic. ''I write that they are bullshit and they applaud.''

Celan considers it impossible to change something on a local level. ''I dealt with that in my play Woyzeck of Sarajevo,'' she says. ''There, a commander visits a

theatre premiere and arrests the actors. Then he says to the artists: 'Dear artists, tell me, where did Picasso paint Guernica? In Guernica or in Paris?' ''

In the middle of April, the news from Srbljanovic read differently. The dissident author wanted to leave her homeland as fast as possible, fearing for her life since journalists critical of the system were being attacked and even shot on the streets. ''I do not want to become an emigrant, because I need my language in order to be able to write,'' she said. ''And now I feel like a laboratory rat in a hopeless situation.''

But in the end, she chose again to stay in Belgrade. With her family and her boyfriend. To support this war in the midst of Europe.