»Community, Identity, Stability«, this is the motto of Huxley’s Brave New World in which war, misery, crime and adversity have been eradicated. Finally, everyone is happy; there is no individual property, couples or families. People mutually belong to each other, everything is shared by everyone. People are clones, manufactured in laboratories according to castes with strictly-specified programmes loaded into their brain during the test tube phase. The secret of one’s pathway to happiness resides in a tablet, called soma. There are no old people in the world. Instead, people inhabit perfect bodies in perfect health for 80 years, and are discarded afterwards. In this perfect world, in which daily group orgies are regarded as the ultimate form of interpersonal etiquette, with movies screened including smell and touch, it is a privilege of a social elite and upper castes to live, enjoy and rejoice. The lower classes are happy when they serve their superiors. Fear and jealousy are no longer; emotions are calmed down with the soma tablet and by means of a laboratory adaptation of the brain.
To stage Huxley’s novel literally would entail extreme technical difficulty and exorbitant costs. Film director Ridley Scott has not yet completed his film which was shot in 2011. This is why, given the conditions and circumstances of independent theatre production in Slovenia, the idea of staging the novel is immediately faced with a basic problem: How is one to enter the state-of-the art world of technology using a minimalist staging approach and sensorial poetics? How is one to create an interactive environment involving a large number of viewers and a minimum number of actors? What is more, should one stage the play in Slovenian, given the fact that it is indicated in the novel that Shakespeare’s works have not survived at all? There is no culture any longer; no works of art, there is only one simplified language of communication. And finally, whose point-of-view should be adopted to embrace the novel’s feel and make a distinct point of one’s own?
Barbara Pia Jenič

In co-operation with The Osum Association and The University of Nova Gorica ̶ School of Arts and with financial support from The Department of Culture of Municipality of Ljubljana.

Hologram
Mustapha Mond Tadej Toš

Video
Thomas (Tomakin) Uroš Fürst
Bernard Marx Rok Vihar
Dr. Shaw Boris Mihalj
Bernie Watson Aljaž Jovanović

Audio
Sophia Barbara Pia Jenič
Bernie Watson Aljaž Jovanovič