Theatre makers Ula Talija Pollak and Bor Ravbar talk to Nick Awde about their new show Living Conditions, an exploration of Slovenian housing policy and what it means to have – or to not have – somewhere to call home.
Along with almost every other country, Slovenia has a housing crisis. A shortage of housing and ever-rising prices are putting home ownership beyond most Slovenians, while in the rental market an increasing number of tenants compete for limited housing. The government has said it will come to the rescue through investing in affordable public housing – 5,000 new dwellings by 2026 – but these plans have already stalled thanks to a somewhat predictable reluctance to commit public funds.
Offering an insight into the current crisis is Living Conditions, (or Kje mi živimo – literally ‘Where do we live?’) is part of the first wave of a new initiative by the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana to develop work by young creatives who haven’t yet made work in a major theatre.
In development since 2023, the play is by dramaturg Ula Talija Pollak and director Bor Ravbar, who met while studying at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television of the University of Ljubljana, first collaborating when Ravbar was a third year and Pollak in her second year. “I was looking for someone who would be compatible with my ideological view of making theatre,” recalls Ravbar about his partnership with Pollak. Having made a show together at the Academy, they turned their attention to the housing crisis in Slovenia, a theme which they, like many young people, particularly identified with.
The Mladinsko Lab programme encourages issues-driven work, although its way of working was new to Ravbar and Pollak “it’s a bit different from what you would expect in a normal theatre institution,” they say – and that difference is apparent in the way they’ve chosen to stage Living Conditions. Site-specific and ambulatory, it plays across the spaces of the Mladinsko’s New Post Office, a former post office near the main Mladinsko building that was founded by the theatre and the Maska Institute in 2017 as a showcase for smaller-scale theatre and workshops that address socially-engaged issues.
Living Conditions – Mladinsko Theatre. Photo: Matej Povse
Living Conditions consists of two parts both thematically and conceptually, which are demarcated by the different physical settings. The first parts creates vignettes in small home-like spaces to explain how the free market works – and fails – and the impact this has on the individual, while the second unveils the state’s attitude to housing via an onstage reality game show where the protagonists compete for a rent-controlled flat.
Shows designed for small spaces often make up for limited audience capacity by placing the emotional impact right up front. “The audience isn’t gathered in a dark hall, simply sitting back to enjoy the spectacle,” says Ravbar. “It puts their mindset in a completely different position. Through the site-specific framework, we want to highlight this feeling of how it is to be constantly moving from one place to another and not having time to settle down.”
Housing is an inescapable issue in Slovenia, particularly in Ljubljana where most of the production’s team live. It was a problem the moment the country left Yugoslavia in 1991 as social structures and policies changed overnight. This led to the incorporation of a mixed system where state-owned funds are designated for building homes that are rent-controlled or sold to specific groups who apply to prove their eligibility. The reality of the policy is that there is a minimal amount of properties being constructed compared to what is needed, something which has become a familiar story around the world.
“In Communist times there was actually a housing policy, and now we don’t really have one,” says Ravbar. “So in the show we look at the neoliberalism that has created this machine of the constant rise and expansion of capitalism, which of course we cannot handle. It is very apparent in housing where people are not able to live and work because they don’t have a place to live, which is a basic necessity. This is beautifully put by Dr Srna Mandić, a Slovenian sociology academic who wrote an influential book on the subject. In the first paragraphs she points out that the Slovenian word ‘stanovanje’ means two things: housing and living in housing. It’s the same word and it captures what we’re trying to say: if you can’t be housed somewhere, you can’t live.”
“People see all the statistics and reports about how many new homes are needed but in fact we don’t really understand the crisis emotionally or understand the people who are struggling with it,” says Pollak. “So in Living Conditions we are trying to emphasize the emotional view of what a home is and what it means if you don’t have a home, not knowing what will happen from day to day. We focus on the personal stories that we have gathered from all sorts of sources – the media, studies and the direct stories that people have told us, which we put out an open call for.”
“And then we aestheticise the state’s process of application and selection in the game show,” says Ravbar. “It’s a process that isn’t correct or transparent, where the priority lists are weirdly structured, so if you’re pregnant you don’t count as having a child, and if you have seven children and someone has four you’re still all placed in the same category.”
They were shocked when they saw a video of the Ljubljana municipality’s special call for young people who live in the city but have no apartment of their own. “There were no priority groups,” says Pollak. “There were certain requirements you had to meet and three categories: small family, young single people and young couples. Then, from those who met these requirements, a draw was made for each of these three groups – with around 25 candidates in each group. So it was like spinning a wheel of fortune and ‘ooh you get a flat, lucky you!’ This was a public lottery that was videostreamed which you can still find on the internet today. It’s mindboggling that the state is doing this, and it directly inspired the game show part.”
They see keeping the balance between data and art as the play’s biggest challenge and also the “biggest lab moment”. Sharing the perspective that theatre work is political work, they know that channelling this level of intervention into the public space of theatre can be tricky.
“We need to think about who is the audience,” says Ravbar, “asking ourselves who we are doing this for, should we continue this project to bring it to wider audiences to tell them that this is what life is really like for other people. We don’t subscribe to the idea of being an artist for the sake of being an artist, making a performance for the sake of making a performance. We want to use Brechtian principles to achieve an active spectator, but the amount of information included in the show and the text is a big obstacle.”
“It’s important to know that many people in Slovenia aren’t even aware of the policies which regulate this area,” says Pollak. “So we have to decide how much information we should include because it’s important that people who have no problem with their housing situation can see the problems others are facing and, by having that experience, emotionally react to it. We see in the stories that housing is a problem that people feel very individualistically, that it’s only happening to them, so one of the steps to fight the housing crisis is for all of us to work together to form a collective action to solve the problem because that will make it much easier to deal with.”
Living Conditions – Mladinsko Theatre. Photo: Matej Povse
Pollak and Ravbar’s concept and structure neatly balance out facts and emotions: in the first part the characters introduce their individual stories and in the second part we see them in a reality game show where they are pitted against each other. “It’s as true as theatre should be but it’s also still aestheticised,” says Pollak. “So in the gameshow we see traces of the free market in the interventions of the government/state and its approaches to tackling the housing crisis, having seen the principles of the free market in the first part of the show. You’re looking for a flat to rent and you have these auditions where you have to perform a version of yourself that will be liked and that it will be chosen for the final presentation of the lease as the prize.”
“So we’re doing a show about the housing crisis but we’re also basically saying that this is about every crisis,” adds Ravbar. “All the crises of capitalism are the same and we’re constantly going back to what Engels wrote in the 19th century about how the housing question isn’t going to be resolved until capitalism is resolved. So this is the challenge which most people will have over the next 50 years. If we change nothing now, 95 percent of us will face problems in finding a home. If we can’t fix it right now, let’s fix more than just this.”
Living Conditions will be a good test for the Mladinsko audiences who are likely to be more well-off than those found in more commercial theatres – and more well-off than the casts, creatives and crew working in most venues. The Brechtian component demands its audience to look around and to be told: “If you don’t have a problem, maybe your neighbour does and you don’t even know.”
The show also makes it clear that housing is closely linked to a long list of attitudes in society that includes class division, sexism, gentrification segregation, homophobia and xenophobia, and Pollak points out that this made it hard to choose which stories to include for the final script. For example, particular to Slovenia are the ‘Izbrisani’, or Erased, tens of thousands of mainly people from other former Yugoslav republics who were living in the republic after independence and found themselves denied legal status by the Slovenian government. Several thousand are still left without documents, effectively stranded in a legal black hole.
“Some of them are still living on the street,” says Ravbar. “So do we include them or not in the show, do we ask how they can get a flat, or are we opening up a whole other discussion? In the end we decided to include groups like the Erased because they are all of us. They are here and they’re invisible but we shouldn’t erase them in this show just because they are a very specific case. The Erased are just one of many specific cases and 20 specific cases make a pattern.”
For more information, visit: Mladinsko.com
Nick Awde is a journalist, playwright, editor, critic and producer. Based in the UK, he is co-director of Morecambe's Alhambra Theatre. Books include Equal Stages (diversity and inclusion in theatre), Mellotron, Women In Islam, and translations of plays by other writers. Much of his work focuses on ethnoconflict and language/cultural genocide.
