An Event in the Town of Goga

About the performance

A Slovenian classic, merged with the original creativity of the Triestine director Igor Pison, got a new, theatre-musical representation in the new staging of the Slovene Permanent Theatre. The artists focused on the central, Hana’s story, yet they also emphasised the roguishness the text offers. The original story has more than twenty characters, but Pison’s musical-theatre adaptation has retained only eight. The fragments of classical, opera and pop music play an important role as an integral part of the dramaturgy.

Through the relationships in the wavering society, the text emphasises the lack of humaneness, and in some cases replaces the people with dolls. The town of Goga is permeated with (also Ibsen’s) Ghosts which emerge through hidden traumas and frustrations of its inhabitants – they graft their phobias in the stifling monotony of everyday life, while they’re simply waiting for the "redemptive" event. These (bizarre) characters with empty lives and unfulfilled longings, the inspiration for whom the author got while working in a mental asylum, cannot reach the epilogue in any way, so they remain caught in hopelessness. The emptiness of the city in which no story moves from stalemate can only be made meaningful by creating a parallel world – it is music that accompanies, supports, strengthens and at times even  overpowers the noise of the internal restlessness, for which nobody in the city seems to have an ear. In the performance the music was thus able to become a co-protagonist in cooperation with the string trio from the music association Glasbena matica.

Première: 12 February 2016

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