City Theatre Ljubljana (presented as part of the 58th BITEF)
Have you heard of the Quilters? It’s understandable if you haven’t. Although their blog has over a million followers, not everyone is familiar with their activist work. Following their violent death, the UK Home Secretary personally imposed a block on information about them. Reports about them have also been deleted from the internet. It’s clear people don’t want you to know. The absence of information about them suggests the UK government’s repressive measures are increasing.
Noah and Celeste Quilter, like many others, raised questions about who MPs really worked for, corporations or the people who elect them? Where do the real centres of power lie? Are identity politics a distraction tactic to prevent people from dealing with more important issues such as rising unemployment, the economy or climate crisis? The deaths of Noah and Celeste Quilter, in mysterious circumstances, tells us tat no one who raises these important questions is safe. Their death should be a wake-up call to us all.
Because so few people know about the Quilters’ story and the significance of their deaths, and there is a climate of silence surrounding the case, the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood – writer of acclaimed plays like The Children and The Welkin – embarked on an extensive research project, the material for which formed the basis of a docu-drama designed to keep the flame of freedom and truth alive, at least within the theatre.
Kirkwood tells the story of how the Quilters came together in 2011. She obtains data from the Guardian, a newspaper whose infamous Blind Dates column has been bringing single people together for years. The Quilters met on one of these Blind Dates. Kirkwood even obtains the CCTV recording of the young couple’s first meeting. A lip reader reconstructs their conversation. She manages to establish a whole series of incidents from the Quilters’ lives thanks to their video blog, hacked cameras and recordings left by an unidentified stalker nicknamed F12 by Reddit commenters.
Presumably to avoid exposing herself to legal risk or danger, Kirkwood’s name was originally not attached to the play. When it is produced, it is mandated that certain paratextual elements such as the title and author’s name are always replace. When it was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2022 it was under the title That Is Not Who I Am. The author was credited as Dave Davidson, a man who had worked in the security industry for 38 years. This was to be his first play ever to be produced. Only during the performance was the author revealed to be Kirkwood and the play’s true title revealed to be Rapture.
Similarly, the Slovenian production at the Ljubljana City Theatre, is marketed, in a nice bit of word-play, as being called Rupture. The author is credited as Rrose Sélavy, the alter ego of Marcel Duchamp, the founder of conceptual art. The text was staged by the young director Jan Krmelj. He sets events inside a kind of tin hangar,(set designer: Lin Japelj) in what appears to be an isolated location, which hints at the necessity for secrecy of the performance. In addition to chairs and a table, the room is mainly filled with recording devices, cameras and microphones as well as a video projector.
The play’s author is confidently played by Ajda Smerkar. She contextualises the scenes from the lives of Noah and Celeste, which are performed in a traditional dramatic manner. Jernej Gašperin plays Noah as a curious, well-informed and charming man who, in his desire to uncover state secrets loses his sense of distinction between truth and conspiracy theories. Diana Kolenc is impressive as Celeste, who strikes the right balance between someone who eagerly pursues activism but also has a tendency to escape into Netflix bingeing. There’s a fourth presence on stage in the form of Boris Kerč, a mostly silent figure playing several supporting roles such as a grumpy stage technician or a mysterious stalker and perhaps an agent of a secret service called F12.

Rupture – City Theatre Ljubljana
The backbone of Krmelj’s direction is the alternation of narrative and dramatic forms of expression on stage through the frequent use of recording technology. Scenes change at a slow pace to give each moment of the Quilters’ lives the attention and respect it deserves. However, since Kirkwood does not provide a conclusion and the Quilters’ suspicions are neither clearly confirmed nor challenged, the two-and-a-half hour play can seem tedious at times. Krmelj skilfully directs the actors, builds up the atmosphere of a thriller, and masters the multimedia aspects of theatrical communication. You can see that he takes the documentary material extremely seriously. However *** SPOILER ALERT! *** the Quilters’ story is entirely fictional and its authentication is a device, essentially part of a theatrical prank. The play is not documentary but mockumentary – fictional events presented in documentary form.
As Kirkwood skilfully depicts the Quilters as they face real economic challenges, their isolation intensified by the Covid pandemic, she references real institutions and personalities such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, while constantly maintaining the awareness that we are watching a play. By including herself as a character in the drama, it means we can say that we are dealing with a historiographical metafiction. The term comes from the Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon and means, among other things, that the line between fact and fiction is blurred to emphasise the subjective nature of historical representations and to question objectivity. From this point of view, Rapture is a good example of such postmodern techniques.
Jan Krmelj’s approach to this play is, however, risky. If you come to a performance where you know you are going to see fiction and the authors go to great lengths to convince you of the truth of the story, you may develop a resistance to these deceptive techniques and this lose patience with the slow, serious atmosphere generated by the performance. However, if you stay through the show, you’ll be rewarded with an exciting train of thought that leads you to the subject of verisimilitude – even if everything you’ve heard and seen is fictional, it’s still highly plausible.
By sacrificing any sense of excitement during the performance, Krmelj is actually criticising the existing order. By eliminating all factors of classical theatricality and not even trying to create any kind of humorous interlude (though the text contains moments of potential humour and irony), the director almost provokes the audience. Although it is a lie, nothing that happens in this play seems improbable or impossible. On the contrary, the death of the Quilters is so believable and logical that we can play a bit with the conclusion – the only thing that makes it strange is that it is not true.
The play was staged with the idea of warning us of the dangers that can arise if the reality in which we live remains unchanged. Its critical potential is limited to fuelling doubts and fears about the existing regime, but the danger is that it can also contribute to the development of conspiracy theories, i.e. attempts to find a coherent explanation for the chaos in which the world currently finds itself. This artistic imagination is demonstrably based on a frightening plausibility and that is what makes this piece provocative – it questions the relationship between conspiracy theories and critical thinking.
Credits:
Director: Jan Krmelj//Dramaturg: Petra Pogorevc//Set designer: Lin Japelj//Video designer: Dorian Šilec Petek//Costume designer: Brina Vidic// Composers: Val Fürst and Pavel Panon Raščan//Lighting designer:Boštjan Kos// Sound designer: Sašo Dragaš
Cast:
Ajda Smrekar, Diana Kolenc, Jernej Gašperin, Boris Kerč
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Andrej Čanji is a theatre critic and theatrologist based in Belgrade.