Vinko Möderndorfer
A Boy, a Girl, and a Gentleman
The Drama of the Slovene National Theatre Maribor
Crew
Director: Mateja Kokol
Dramaturg: Vili Ravnjak
Stage designers: Mateja Kokol, Iris Kovačič
Costume designer: Iris Kovačič
Music: sz3
Choreography: sz3
Language consultant: Mojca Kolar
Cast
A girl: Liza Marija Grašič
A boy: Timon Šturbej
A gentleman: Kristijan Ostanek
About the performance
A boy is courting a girl he’s asked out for dinner. He’s clumsy and awkward, as boys in love often are. When the disappointed girl walks out on him, an elderly gentleman gives him a pile of notes. He seems benevolent, but also annoying: he gives sharp, cynical advice and criticises, brags about his own experience … He turns out not to be a pushy waiter, but a professor of acting. The boy hasn’t flunked a date, but an impro rehearsal; but he is really in love with the girl, and they’ve been a couple for a while. They’re also studying together at the theatre academy.
The play A Boy, a Girl, and a Gentleman plays with the deceptive border between reality and illusion, and persistently thematises it, as it researches the fundamentals of the art of acting. In front of us, it unveils a theatre workshop in which questions from the personal lives of both young students are also opened, their traumatic experiences and the methods of self- salvation … and through them fears, powerlessness and the desire for success that are pertinent to today’s young generation. And on the other side, a mature experience, ambiguously mixed with cynicism and the manipulativeness of a teacher, who himself oscillates between disappointment and faith in art. In this play, which exhibits playwriting mastery, the questions of theatre art are sensitively placed into the psychosocial environment of the Slovenian society of today.
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