Entitled Lubezni in teh Stavri (Love and These Things), the new season at Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre will explore love and its complicated relationship with power, and feature work by Nina Rajić Kranjac and Sebastian Nübling.
Details of Mladiinsko Theatre’s 2023/24 season were announced this week. This autumn audiences in Ljubljana can watch Nina Rajić Kranjac’s production of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part drama set during the time of the AIDS crisis. Translated for the stage by Katja Zakrajšek, the Pulitzer Prize-winning text will see the Mladinsko (SMG) ensemble joined by guest performers from Croatia, including acclaimed young actor Adrian Pezdirc.
Later this year there will also be a new production by director Michal Borczuch inspired by Argonauts, US author Maggie Nelson’s auto-fictional book about motherhood and starting a family, which will explore non-traditional families in Slovenia and the activists fighting for their rights.
In January, Mladinsko’s youth theatre will present a new piece, The Art of War/The Art of Peace, directed by Ana Duša in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine and taking inspiration from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
In March next year, there will be premiere of a new original project: Slovenia counts by the renowned German director Sebastian Nübling, a regular director at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin where he is a member of the artistic advisory board. The show will explore different Slovenian stereotypes.
The biggest project of the season will be an ambitious international collaboration between Italian company ErosAntEros – curators of the Polis Theatre Festival – Emilie Romagne ERT Theatre / National Theatre, TNL – Luxembourg National Theatre and the Permanent Theatre in Bolzano featuring music from the legendary Slovenian band Laibach on a production of Brecht’s experimental musical Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a resetting of the story of Joan of Arc to early 20th century Chicago.
The New Post Office space will play host to all chapters in the evolving Sex Education II project exploring female desire and there will also be a multi-day festival Shelter, dedicated to the work of director Žiga Divjak within the space.
Founded in 1955, the Mladinsko Theatre was the first professional theatre for children and young people in Slovenia. It is now one of the leading spaces for theatrical innovation and experiment in the country.
For more details, visit: Mladinsko.com
Further reading: interview with Nina Rajić Kranjac: “Questions of identity fascinate me”
Further reading: interview with Laibach: “We don’t belong to one state only – we belong to all of them”
Natasha Tripney is a writer, editor and critic based in London and Belgrade. She is the international editor for The Stage, the newspaper of the UK theatre industry. In 2011, she co-founded Exeunt, an online theatre magazine, which she edited until 2016. She is a contributor to the Guardian, Evening Standard, the BBC, Tortoise and Kosovo 2.0
