Vitomil Zupan
Flags - Man - Blindness (Zastave - Mož - Slepota)
SNT Drama Ljubljana
Crew
Director: Mare Bulc
Dramaturg: Darja Dominkuš
Stage designer: Damir Leventič
Costume designers: Urška Draž, Tomaž Draž
Composer: Boštjan Narat
Lighting designer: Andrej Hajdinjak
Language consultant: Irena Androjna Mencinger
Assistant to the dramaturg: Urška Sajko
Cast
Bos – Assassin 1: Klemen Janežič
Joe – Guard 1: Rok Vihar
Betka – Simona 1: Tina Vrbnjak
Bos’s mother − Director: Saša Pavček
Dolinar, Bos’s father − King: Bojan Emeršič
Police chief – Executioner: Boris Mihalj
Interrogator – Guard 2: Uroš Fürst
Tonič – Joe’s father − Colonel: Alojz Svete
Lela – Simona 2: Maša Derganc
Brumen – Assassin 2: Jurij Zrnec
About the performance
A-play-within-a-play-within-a-play
Baptismal performance of the adaptation
Adapted by Mare Bulc after the plays The Assassin and the King, The Worms and White Rockets Fly towards Amsterdam
Première: 6 February 2015, Small stage
180 minutes, one interval
On the centenary of the birth of Vitomil Zupan, we’ve prepared a performance that is a collage of three plays and three poems of this giant of the pen. The director and the author of the adaptation Mare Bulc has intertwined Zupan’s short plays The Rebellion of the Worms (1969/70), The Assassin and the King (1971) and White Rockets Fly towards Amsterdam (1973) to form a new play. He has added the poems Blindness, Man and Flags from Zupan’s collection of poems Midnight Wine, written in the same
period as the three plays.
The core of this adaptation are three of Zupan’s artists: the poet from The Worms, the scrawler from The Rockets and the comedian from The Assassin. Their stories are clearly connected to the present day and the director hasn’t hidden his desire to comment upon current events in the country.
The story of the comedian assassin is introduced as a play-within-a-play: the characters from The Rebellion of Worms and White Rockets meet as the actors from an amateur theatre group rehearsing and staging The Assassin and the King. The dramaturgical approach that Zupan used in The Assassin inspired Bulc to expand it and deepen it and to give his own play the subtitle "a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play".
It is impossible to say what Zupan would have thought about all this. But it is certain that he emerges from Bulc’s triptych the way those who like him like to see him. As a man who was incredibly empathetic and generous for an egomaniac, an unbelievable feminist for a chauvinist, incredibly courageous for a coward, as a man who thought a lot, acted a lot and never buckled from his task – to describe things as they are and not as we wish them to be.
(Katja Perat, Mladina)
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