Matija returns from temporary work in Germany to his native village of Slavinje in the Dolenjska region. He hopes to reconnect with the son he has left too long in the care of his mother and to help him overcome fears he himself barely understands. There is little time left for the ailing father, but he looks forward to seeing Sandra, his former lover, who now runs a medium-sized bakery employing about ten people. Sandra faces a familiar problem: there are no local workers willing to work for minimum wage, while many of the village’s men are themselves employed abroad, mostly in Germany. When she decides to hire a number of workers from Sri Lanka, the apparent calm of the community begins to fracture. Beneath the surface of everyday coexistence, fears, frustrations, resentments, and suppressed tensions erupt.

Inspired by RMN, Marković’s play SVN – Slavinje in Dolenjska, relocates the setting to tell the story of the inhabitants of an idyllic small Slovenian village. For those who have not yet been to Slavinje  ̶  anyone who has visited any small town between the Sava and Kolpa rivers, the Ljubljana Basin and the Croatian border  ̶  will easily be able to image this quiet, dreamy village. The creators of the production invite us to bring this place, with its long and rich multicultural history, to life within the confines of the Drama Ljubljana, so that we may hear what its residents have to say.

Although it appears that theatre could serve precisely this purpose  ̶  to help us hear one another  ̶  this does not happen very often, as we live in an age of social media and the decline of traditional forums, when the idea of social dialogue is becoming less and less relevant. Trapped in our ideological bubbles, we are losing faith in the possibility of mutual “contamination” of values, and with it, in the possibility of real change (beyond the blind violence that constantly imposes itself as the only outcome of the clash of opposing ideas). The production aims to set up a forum in which, at least for a moment, we will encounter perspectives that may differ from our own and that we usually avoid, even though it is clear that without such encounters, there is no possibility of reestablishing ourselves as a society that (like any other) carries within itself a series of unresolvable contradictions.