By: Miro Petek
Drama at the Drama Theatre. The predictions about completing the renovation of the SNG Drama are yet another fiasco for Prime Minister Robert Golob and Minister of Culture Asta Vrečko, since there is not even a building permit yet, and there will not be one for a long time, if ever, which supposedly means that the pre‑election showmanship in front of the Drama Theatre is also cancelled. Meanwhile, millions of euros have flowed out of the public coffers over the years, and the new team at the Ministry of Culture will have plenty of work filing criminal complaints. The enormous earnings of the architects and of that guy who rents out the temporary premises for the Drama, almost a million euros per year, and known for “arranging things” with a carton of rum, are just a drop in the ocean. Culture has had a lot of money in recent years also because of the previous government, which secured funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan and outlined relevant projects that the new government immediately reshaped to its own liking, following the logic of political camaraderie. Access to the “ATM code” at Maistrova 10 has been held by quite a few people over the past four years.
I was reminded of the fiasco surrounding the Drama Theatre renovation these days, when the Ljubljana Drama visited the cultural venue in my town with the absurdist play, or grotesque tragicomedy, Tango by Sławomir Mrożek. The theme of the collapse of social order, as depicted in Tango, is timeless, since the question of freedom and authority appears in every historical era. And as I watched the characters on stage, the Slovenian political tragicomedy of freedom and Svoboda unfolded before my eyes. In Mrożek’s play, Edek is a primitive, almost gangster‑like figure who seizes power at any cost, even through force and murder. The Slovenian Edek, Robert Golob, has managed to turn the public sphere into a space of ideologies and projects without clear direction or long‑term vision. Like Edek, Golob is not a bearer of great ideas; he is in constant conflict with his own interpretations and entangled in falsehoods, trying to manage the situation pragmatically with various pre‑election bonuses and payouts, higher salaries for public employees, and similar measures. He built his political doctrine as a space of constant reform announcements that never materialised, unleashed a massive staffing tsunami, and fuelled ideological disputes. When Edek kills Artur in the play, destroying the last attempt to restore social order, he begins to dance, which we understand as a metaphor for pragmatic power. And Golob, too, danced with his Svoboda after winning the election. He tried to interpret the dance as a greeting to freedom, but it turned out not to be a dance of freedom, but a dance of power. With Slovenia’s first political dancer, one could even draw an interesting association with Bertolucci’s famous film Last Tango in Paris.
Eleonora in Tango embraces complete freedom of relationships and sees traditional morality as outdated. Just as Eleonora is alternately portrayed by Maša Derganc and Barbara Cerar, I saw in this character Urška Klakočar Zupančič and Asta Vrečko. In the public sphere, they often appear as representatives of a political discourse that emphasises the need for cultural transformation of society and criticism of traditional structures, while invoking the legacy of the Partisan struggle as a fundamental symbol of the legitimacy of the Slovenian state, and maintaining a visible distance from independence as the true foundation of Slovenian statehood.
When Eleonora believes she is defending freedom, she is in fact defending disorder and chaos. With Vrečko and Klakočar Zupančič, we also live in chaos. Moreover, Eleonora in the play does not strictly distinguish between private and public space, a distinction also absent in the couples Urška and Bor, and Robi and Tina. Their public appearances have the character of a performance – which certainly attracts media and public attention – but in doing so they undermine the role and importance of institutions. With his appearances, especially since Tina Gaber entered his life, Golob has elevated banality above serious engagement with state politics.
Elections are a dramatic dance of choosing power. It matters whom we will dance the tango with, and who will be playing the music.
