Human error

Director Matjaž Pograjc transforms theatre into an airport, and the audience is cast in the role of passengers on the flight of Air Mladinsko. We are informed immediately at the check-in that the plane will crash and we will die. The beginning thus promises an enigmatic experience, which can be expected, because the plane is going to Fargo. It was this Coen brothers’ film that was the original inspiration in the film season of the Mladinsko theatre, its bizarre everyday wrapped in dark humour sort of tries to sneak into the Human Error.

Although the Human Error is supposed to be a disaster piece, the poetic structure in Pograjc’s work cannot be neglected. All his favourite (preferably athletic) theatre heroes of recent times – from the climber Pavla Jesih to the skier Rok Petrovič – are poetic, suggestive personalities. [...] The last scene takes place in the post mortem already, when that plastic shell of the airplane collapses into itself, over the spectators-passengers departing into darkness. An excellent dramaturgical move. Behind us, the scene of a tragedy, debris, bodies, suitcases, objects that appear bizarre, and two blokes: an Irishman who “perhaps is, and perhaps isn’t an investigator” (Uroš Kaurin), and the Slovenian investigator (Ivan Peternelj), who draws strange parallels with some sort of Slovenian reality. This part is the most suggestive.

The entrance of the audience to the performance Human Error is marked by the procedure and specific arrangement of the theatre space. Very soon it becomes clear that this is an attempt to reflect on the phenomenon of death from which nothing escapes. But it seems that death here is just the trigger, while Matjaž Pograjc’s basic theatre goal is to bring the audience into a special emotional state, a state where the question of the meaning of life opens, and life’s uniqueness is emphasized above all.