Living Conditions

Living Conditions satirises the housing crisis in Slovenia, perhaps the most pressing in Ljubljana. Rents are increasing while flats – holes, really – are getting smaller. What better way to stage the lack of affordable housing than through site-specific theatre? This is a production adapted to a specific location. […]  The absurdity of seeing the housing crisis as an individual problem and blaming it on the individual is heightened by the artificial glitter of a reality show. We thus stand witness to the distorted truth, because, while the contestants scramble for scraps, the providers feast on profits. Bor Ravbar manages to achieve what Nina Rajić Kranjac achieved in Angels in America. The spatial diversity of the production leaves the spectator guessing what follows each scene, and they simply cannot be bored. At the same time, rooms, a basement, a parking lot where the scenes unfold get some of the main roles. They testify to how deeply the living crisis is rooted. Ordinary people think about it, argue day after day in those very homes that they might lose overnight. It highlights how perverse it is that a roof above one’s head has become a privilege. And home has lost its meaning.

Shifting between different profiles of people from different social contexts warns about the collective nature of the housing issues that floods all the social spheres. Stane Tomazin as the emcee keeps calling the audience to find the person in the scenes who deserves a flat the most, and then invites us to the stage of The New Post Office where the reality show begins or continues. The presence of TV screens and comical inserts that we could also see in the first part of the production is now intensified. The reality show pits the individuals experiencing similar circumstances as adversaries and alienates them from one another. The production thus articulates its critique of the alienated daily life of the capitalist system, where systemic questions are solved by for-profit companies, raffles and prize draws. […] Documentary, grotesque and partly surrealistic elements in the production are fluidly woven into a whole and its end reminds us that the housing issues are a collective problem against which we, as individuals, will fight without success.

Can we grasp the distress of a pregnant student whose landlady terminated her lease? Can we grasp the distress of a single mother of three who moves from flat to flat, because she’s unable to pay the utility bills? Can we grasp the distress of a middle-aged man who lost his flat for homophobic reasons? Can we grasp the distress of a man who lost his flat due to bad luck in love and life? Can we grasp the distress of a woman, erased from the public registry in 1992? Can we grasp the distress of a senior person with minimal pension whose roof is leaking? Can we? The creators of the production Living Conditions are clearly aware of this distress and put it in front of the audience as an omnibus of stories about representatives of social groups, but also about the everyman of the heterogenous Slovenian society. In the vein of partly fictional and partly autobiographical stories, forged during the creative process, the production highlights the situation in today’s rental market that appears unsolvable. To make the situation even worse, it gets used by the media system of cheap glamour. The unconventional production, which has the spectators move through different spaces – a private house, a stuffy basement, a parking lot with rubbish bins, where they introduce a new form of a 14-square-metre flat and finally a theatre hall that becomes a reality show studio in which the mentioned individuals are ultimately humiliated – is accompanied by thoughtful and perfectly crafted spatial, visual and sound equipment that provide conditions for excellent acting creations.