Vehicle

Kristijan Muck has been a member of SNG Drama Ljubljana’s ensemble since he graduated from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television Ljubljana, but he has also been actively engaged with “off” theatre since its beginnings in Slovenia. In addition to his acting career (which includes a few German-language productions, too), he has worked as a playwright, poet, essayist, director, and creator of experimental and poetry projects. Muck’s dramas, poems, short prose, and essays have been published in several books and collections. He teaches acting at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television Ljubljana.
In his latest play, Vehicle, Kristijan Muck has perfected his profound and precise analysis of life and the human condition, in a language combining irony, phantasy, genuine passion, and beauty. Ostensibly, the content and tipic of Muck's plays are surreal, suggestive rather then explicit. His characters, however, always seem to be placed in extreme situations and therefore forced to confront the fundamental questions of existence and meaning, love and communication.

Three skiers, caught in a snowstorm, find refuge with an old man who lives in the middle of the forest, far from neighbours and civilization. He is surrounded only by piles of old magazines and newspapers.The mysterious hermit resets the relationships among these modern, ambitious young people.Though he appears to be simple peasant, he is actually an inventor with a cellar full of mechanical inventions. He lives both in the past and present, and as a kind of demiurgic figure, he breaks through the generational and cultural borders between him and his visitors.The old man takes each of the young people on a journey into history; each participates in a kind of conscious reincarnation of a life that unfolds both in the present space and three hundred years ago. The author Kristijan Muck uses multiple layers of language to create the intricate structure of his drama Vehicle (2008); he dexterously intertwines historical facts and fiction.The main character is based on a real person, and the transformations of the visitors are also based on documentary articles found in newspapers from particular periods.The characters’ language is characterised by the sophisticated use of linguistic features of the historical period, marked by the changeable presence of the young protagonists.