[theatre] Vinko Möderndorfer - Vaje za tesnobo (Rehearsals for anxiety)

The Trieste Stable Theatre (SSG Trst in Slovene) opened its last season with this critically acclaimed work by a prolifc Slovenian plawright Vinko Möderndorfer. Möderndorfer is chiefly interested in hyper-naturalism, semi-sarcasm and social awareness topics in his plays, mainly staying in the realm of the figurative, not delving into the abstract - that he does not do even in his movies, where he acts as the director, or whenever he directs in theatre. Why am I saying this? Because his latest play is focused on the social-monetary crisis and with it the crisis of values with which we are fighting these past few years, if not for an entire century or at least since the last world war. The good point of the performance are the actors, at least some of them, who are making one hell of an effort to breathe life (and not stereotype-infused rhetorics with only a few good shots at being funny and critical at the same time) into their lines. In general the text lacks a more intelligent approach to the topic, because as it tackles the problems of unemployment, family abuse, hierarchical struggle in the rough capitalist world, false ideologies of wealth and beauty and so on and so forth - it does that in a very straightforward way, making no more than our heads nod and respond: "Yes, it's true. What on Earth are we going to do about it?" For my eyes, the whole, not even the efforts of the performance itself, does not reach beyond the point of exposing the problems which are crucial, yet spoken about in that more or less similar manner over and over again. The male part of the acting crew puts much better effort to the performance, but that is also due to female parts being written far less complex in the first place - which I think is symptomatic for a lot of Möderndorfer's theatre work. Maybe that chauvinism is purely coincidental, since classical theatre is still a little bit of a male domain in the sense of role availability ...

I think the play would need more work from the director, the young Jaka Andrej Vojevec, maybe in that same or similar manner, because it really should upgrade the text and its (mostly) too plain approach to the topic, to be completely frank.