The Son

Original title Le Fils
Opening night January 18^th 2020, Mini teater
Running time 1 hour and 25 minutes. No intermission. 

A discussion after the performance on Old Hall SNT Maribor.

Director Eduard Miler
Translator Miha Medved
Dramaturg Žanina Mirčevska
Stage and costume designer Jean Guy Lecat
Assistant Stage and costume designer Slavica Janošević
Language consultant Jože Faganel

Cast
Pierre Branko Šturbej 
Anne Polona Juh 
Nicolas Gašper Lovrec 
Sofia Saša Pavlin Stošić 
Doctor Robert Waltl
 

Florian Zeller's play The Son (Le Fils) could be defined as a psychological thriller, in which the author tackles a sensitive topic – depression as a permanent medical condition, under the tense arc of brilliant dialogue. With his latest precise psychological study, Zeller achieves the most convincing stage situations as possible, confirming his international reputation as one of the most performed French playwrights of our time. With his authentic and non-judgmental writing, Zeller naturalistically outlines the psychological erosion and yawning emptiness of a teenage soul that Nicolas experiences after his parents’ divorce. In consequence, Nicolas finds himself utterly powerless and his life eventually serves no purpose. During their effort to help Nicolas getting on the "right path" again, the depression and loss of meaning take their toll on other family members (mother, father and his new female partner). Could a (failed) suicide attempt perhaps be an opportunity for Nicolas to be born again – or just the final realization that we are not up to the challenge we all too easily call the meaning of life?

The drama Son acts as a precise, and especially painful, vivisection of the act of parental separation (and the establishment of new families), with an emphasis on the subsequent psychological distress, disunity, and hopelessness of the child. An interesting paradox of this conversational drama, which is well reinforced by the staging, is the realization that the inflation of interpersonal conversations means nothing, much less helps, if it does not address the right and necessary topics. Here, the constant communication is really just a reflection of psychological restlessness and a disguise for solving problems that have not yet been consciously realised.

Zala Dobovšek, Dnevnik, 22. 1. 2020

Director

During his long theatrical career, director Eduard Miler (b. 1950), collaborated with some of the most important Slovenian, Croatian, Yugoslav, Austrian and German acting ensembles, and created more than a hundred distinctly unique productions, for which he received numerous awards. Namely, he received the Prešeren Foundation Award (1987), two Borštnik Awards for directing (Baal of 1998 and The Merchant of Venice of 2011; both productions of the SNG Drama Ljubljana) and three "Lovorov vijenac" awards at the MESS International Theatre Festival in Sarajevo (in 1986, 1989 and 1999) and several other international awards. He was appointed artistic director of Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana, the Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica, and SNG Drama Ljubljana; he was also an artistic consultant of the Royal Theatre Zetski dom Cetinje and an artistic coordinator of the Slovene Civic Theatre in Trieste. He has directed plays by many great authors of the classical and modern theatre, such as Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Ernst Toller, Georg Büchner and many others.

Producer

Mini teater (1999), founded by Robert Waltl and Ivica Buljan, set up its house in the landscape of Slovenian art at a time when the aesthetics of the eighties, after the zenith of the nineties, began to live in a new generation of directors. Baroque-visual theater, retro-avant-garde, post-political theater and formalist research on the one hand, and Mini teater as a new, extreme border place, set in the tradition of European art theater, by authors such as Peter Brook, Ariana Mnouschkina, Giorgio Strehler, Patrice Chereau, Anatoly Vasilyev, and the American avant-garde from the Living Theater to Ellen Stewart and her La Mama.

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