Mandićmachine Review by Yuh J. Hwang (South Korea)
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It could be said that Mandićmachine is the most controversial performance of the Maribor Theatre Festival. One’s response to actor Marko Mandić’s one-man show is characterised by a panoply of negative adjectives, ranging from “disgusting” to “embarrassing”. This is due to the fact that its theatrical language is constituted predominantly by such features as shouting, gratuitous nudity, pissing and simulated masturbation. Whilst reprising short extracts from his past roles, from Greek tragedy to Slovenian plays, Mandić frequently selects an audience member to bring on stage. Such is the aggression of the actor’s technique that each audience member appears to be a victim rather than an active participant; none of those chosen appears to be engaged by their involvement, rather they seem to be numbed by it.
Furthermore, when the actor appears to be trying to ejaculate, the audience’s uneasiness reaches its peak. In this scene, Mandić seems to be an almost monstrous figure; a person who does not care about any shame at all, rather than an actor performing dramatic characters. However, ironically, this very moment makes one aware that the objective of this show is to push both audience response and acting to their extremes. In so doing, Mandić blurs the boundaries between things that he cannot act (such as the physical instinct of actually ejaculating) and things that he can perform, and between the human and the inhuman on the stage. This explains why the production is so problematic, at least in the sense that it keeps calling into question the authenticity of theatre itself.
Three Sisters Review by Anne Manyara (Kenya) On October 18, 2012 the Old Hall of the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor was set for Oliver Frljić’s production of what turned out to be an inexplicable attempt to cram Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters into an hour and 20 minutes.
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The play begins with Vesna Jevnikar, in front of the curtain, spewing out Olga’s words with great haste. She is joined by the rest of the cast who stand on stage as a chorus and continue to recite the lines, punctuated with laughter, in a call-and-response, semi-choreographed style. The play rattles on in this manner up to the point where Andrei proposes to Natasha, and, as he kisses her, the curtain rises to reveal the rest of the cast in a row of period-style chairs, all paired up, kissing.
This homosexual and heterosexual kissing had no meaning for me other than to say, “look at us pushing the boundaries and questioning the norms.” After a series of many such random actions, the hour and 20 minutes comes to its close, and because the play hasn’t completed the plot, the actors sit on the stage and the rest of the story is read out to the audience as if from a novel. As with most of the Slovene productions I saw at this year’s Maribor Theatre Festival, this concerted effort to make avant-garde theatre is, in essence, futile. Ultimately, Frljić’s production is a postmodern hodgepodge created, not in the service of theatre, but rather at the expense of the harmony of text, space and actor.
Conference of the Birds Review by Gergana Stoytcheva (Bulgaria) and Larisa Daugul (Slovenia) The image of the human soul as a bird is always fascinating. We are drawn, ineffably, towards the eternal dream of flying to the sky, but also the fear of the unknown. These are the universal themes in the famous work by the great, 12th-century Persian poet Farid al-Din ‘Attar, in which 30 birds set off under the guidance of the Hoopoe in search of the Simorgh, their
king. They must cross seven valleys in order to achieve the true nature of God. In Jernej Lorenci’s production, chairs, papers and mineral water are arranged at a long table. Nine birds must vote for this journey. The characterisations of these birds reference typical characters in contemporary Slovenia, with language remi3