Gregor Strniša
Cannibals
Drama SNG Maribor
Crew
Director: Ivica Buljan
Dramaturg: Diana Koloini
Stage designer: Aleksandar Denić
Costume designer: Ana Savić Gecan
Composer: Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar
Choreographer: Tanja Zgonc
Video: Toni Soprano
Lighting designer: sonda4
Language consultant: Metka Damjan
Assistant director: Robert Waltl
Assistant to Stage designer: Danilo Mlađenović
Cast
Jurij Drevenšek
Peter Boštjančič
Miloš Battelino
Vladimir Vlaškalić
Alojz Svete
Ksenija Mišič
Mateja Pucko
Nika Rozman
Ana Urbanc
Viktor Meglič
Irena Varga
Kristijan Ostanek
Mirjana Šajinović
Eva Kraš
Matevž Biber
Jurij Drevenšek
About the performance
Cannibals is a verse drama by one of the most individual and expressively strong Slovenian poets and playwrights, Gregor Strniša (1930–1987). In the midst of the winds of war, a poor family, on the run for cannibalism, finds a hiding place and a place to live in an abandoned chapel. In the house of God, the ghost of a former Prior receives the refugees and lets them use the monastery chapel "as a peaceful home, for a restful sleep", with the wish that they don’t go down to the crypt and let the dead have their peace. But Pajot, the father, who is a butcher, blasphemically replaces the ritual of serving God with the ritual of serving hungry stomachs, in other words, the egotistical serving to oneself. In the handily hidden crypt he sets up his workshop and with the excuse that one must survive, kills, slaughters, dismembers, grinds, sells and trades human flesh. Two grotesque-comical clowns, the almost deaf Pajot and his crony, the half-blind cook Falac, are caught in the hellish mechanism of killing, whose scornful cannibalistic logic enables them to survive. A dance of this ironicised cannibalistic clown show, in which the dancers’ hands (and necks) are grasped by the needs of full bellies, betrayals, lies, carnal desires and greed, is ended by Death with its requiem: "What you saw, could have been./Perhaps it was./Only one this is sure to be seen:/one day you’ll come to my ball, I’ll be your host."
Strniša’s polished language of the very topical morality play that blends poetry and plebeian comedy, gallows humour with the grotesque-egotistical abuse of fellow humans were in the hands of the established director and the director of the Drama of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Ivica Buljan.
Première: 12 May 2017