Slamrock

I mean, it’s such a simple allegory it’s brilliant. [...] Butnskala [Slamrock] feels like a powerful reminder that art isn’t just useful when it’s trying to change things, it’s also incredibly good at just being a beacon for discontent and cynicism. And that the value of something silly and snarky cheering everybody up when things aren’t great is fondly remembered. Even when it first happened nearly 40 years ago.  That the piece still resonates astonishingly clearly today also suggests that  Filipčič and Derganc may have also tapped some far more enduring truths about how societies malfunction.

In the 37 years since its creation, Slamrock has retained its charge and still represents material that is  subversive enough – also thanks to director Vito Taufer, his assistant, student of directing Jan Krmelj, dramaturg Marinka Poštrak – for a piercing, forceful, directorially perfected, precise collective performance, brimming with tiny acting gems. It’s been a long time since we saw such high energy collective performance. [...] The play is enthralling. The first scenes, in which the slamrock herd holler in unison before slamming into a rock are exceptional in the total concentration of each individual in the crowd and unique in the crazy collective energy that slams from the stage. [...] The performance is written into the cultural memory of this society with the all credibility of a high-quality comedy of our time peppered with the bloody-grotesque additional ingredients of the recent past. Slamrock will not yet be fossilised. Not even close.

Vito Taufer, true to his reputation, used the first-class material to stage Slamrock that even its fans from the radio times cannot oppose. Taufer’s Slamrock has everything, the narrative and the macabre, the sense and the craziness, it is at the same time an engaged play that makes us think and a cartoon mockery that makes us ROFL. If it was essential to remember quotes when listening to the play on the radio, our thoughts after the performance are enriched by the witty visual stage solutions. And with them the superb acting ensemble with the exceptional Peter Musevski, Dario Varga and Vesna Jevnikar, in top form this season, with the convincing Blaž Šef, Miha Rodman, Matej Recer and Mojca Partljič and all the others who complete the collective acting in Slamrock. Dear parents, if you wish your young ones to understand the world into which we escorted them, send them to see Slamrock. Not just you, they will like it, too.

Slamrock enthrals us with its genre diversity, scintillating humour, unexpected thought and poetic leaps and turns. [...] The excellence of the text is the base for the performance, which can be seen either as contemporary or timeless and which dynamically stretches the scope of the unexpected from the beginning to the end; this scope allows for collective and individual acting creations, [... which] breathe life into this fantastic, grotesquely satirical realistic comedy that should be a reminder for the 46th Week of Slovenian Drama of what peaks of drama and comedy art make up the Slovenian cultural and spiritual heritage.