Glimpses into Theatre History

SLOGI and Drama lecture and discussion series

Thursday, 3 October 2024, at 18.00, Slovenian Theatre Institute

In the 2024/25 season, the Slovenian Theatre Institute and SNT Drama Ljubljana will continue to organise their joint events, called SLOGI and Drama series. They will highlight the upcoming productions from the theatre history perspective and discuss them in a wider arts and social context in the run-up to their respective opening nights. These events offer an exclusive insight into the Theatre Museum’s collections and encourage the audience to reflect on the themes and questions raised by the selected plays, their critical reception and performance history. The opening lecture of the current series will address Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun, directed by Paolo Magelli, which is to open on the Main Stage at the new venue of Ljubljana Drama on Saturday, 12 October. In his lecture, Dr Gašper Troha, Director of the Slovenian Theatre Institute, will present the reception of Children of the Sun and other plays by Gorky in Slovenia.

The repertoire of Slovenian theatres documents 21 productions of plays by Maxim Gorky. Since he was the ‘court playwright’ of the Russian Revolution, one would have expected his continual presence in the first years after the Second World War, when socialist realism was to be established in Yugoslavia. However, detailed research shows that Gorky was in fact a perpetual feature in Slovenian theatre until the early 1980s. Furthermore, it is the list of his staged plays that is highly interesting. His most often produced play included his early play The Lower Depths (ten productions), often considered an emblematic example of socialist realism, followed by The Philistines and Vassa Zheleznova (produced three times respectively) and a few other plays.

The lecture will focus on Children of the Sun, written by Gorky in 1905, while he was serving a prison sentence in the Peter and Paul Fortress. It portrays a world that has completely lost its bearings and is drowning in its own conflicts, utopian idealism and idleness. The play, a critique of decadence and an appeal for change and revolution, was staged at the Drama Ljubljana on 30 October 1975, directed by Steve Žigon. In anticipation of the upcoming premiere in the same theatre, the SNT Drama Ljubljana almost 50 years later, we will delve into theatre history with Dr Gašper Troha, Director of the Slovenian Theatre Institute. He will explore how Children of the Sun and other plays by Gorky were received in Slovenia. What did Gorky, whom Chekhov saw as his successor and was regarded by the revolution as its harbinger, have to say to the Slovenians during the period of self-management and what can he say to them today?