Rudi Šeligo (1935-2004) was a writer, dramatist and journalist. He studied philosophy and psychology. His narrative fiction is characterized by descriptiveness and anti-psychologism, the same holds true for Šeligo’s dramas. The Wedding (1981) is a fairly independent dramatic text within Slovene drama. Sunday afternoon. Gathered in the inn are mostly superfluous folk who occupy themselves with their jobs during the week but do not know what to do with themselves, where to go with their pasts, loneliness and desperation on Sundays. The saw hand Malič, the best saw man in the country, killing time with drink far from his own family, the Gipsy woman whose husband and lover killed each other on her account, the Schizophrenic wavering between attacks of delirium and a manic aggressiveness, the Gravedigger, torturing himself with guilt because his child slipped into the water by the Savica waterfall, and his former wife, Mrs. Korbar, convinced her previous husband threw the child into the water himself, the narcomaniac Taja and the retired policeman who once violated his authority and was thus retired early. Jurij and Lenka, “God’s children”, he physically afflicted, she mentally so, in love with each other, to whom both the secular and the ecclesiastical powers have refused marriage, but who dare not consummate their love without the sacrament and a marriage certificate. On hearing of their plight, the Sunday guests decide they will marry them, despite the authorities. With a succession of wedding customs and rites they marry Jurij and Lenka who are already afraid that the neighbours who have fed and cared for the “children of God” until now, will from now on abandon them. To them the wedding is a real one, for all the others simply a game that evolves a grotesque, horrible ending.
le livre slovene, No. 1/2, annee XXIV, 1986