Scandal in the Valley of St Florian

Cankar knew alright. Cankar knew very well indeed. It doesn’t matter which one of his plays you read or see, you always face the astonishing realisation how current his dramas are. […] Cankar’s work is so strong that it holds in practically every possible interpretation (*cf. theatre history!). Of course, also the present one from the Mladinsko Theatre built under the skilful direction of the resident director Vito Taufer. The fundamental directorial shift: all the roles are played by men. All but one – the Devil is a woman. Even better: the Devil is neither, has no gender – is universal. […] All this only convincingly tells us that where even the Devil cannot take what rightfully belongs to the Devil, all we can say is: 'Just drop it, will you?'

[Taufer r]etains the textual wholesomeness, stylisation, and grotesque of the characters; he doesn’t narrow down their territory, but neither does he 'gratefully' expand it. He doesn’t plant the aggressiveness at any cost, but rather leaves it with some kind of museum mustiness within the framework of the original idea, as automatised prototype puppets. […] If Taufer’s staging remains consistent in the original sequencing of events and dialogue wholesomeness, the arbitrary intellectual interference then lives through the language of the relativism of gender identity, which the performance deliberately turns into a pointedly negligible drama moment. […] The transformation of male profiles into female thus has a function of duplicity; on the one hand, it is accepted as yet another natural phenomenon within the long perverted parochial society (and is therefore not explicitly problematised), and on the other, this very sneaky directorial concept becomes an indispensable driving force, without which the performance itself would soon slip under the weight of the superficial illustration of the literary script. Stage figures are accompanied by an incessant contortion, a fakeness, in short, acting 'in full', joined also by 'acting' within the drama sketch – as a source of the response to the foreign element in the 'immaculate' environment – which doesn’t let itself go until the finale.

Taufer’s directorial decision – looking far into the past, into the time of classical Greek theatre, when only men were hid behind the masks of male and female characters, to achieve comical effect is not a new approach, but it is effective. In Cankar’s farce, all the roles are thus cast by men, only the Devil is deftly played by an actress. […] Relevance permeating the text comes a surprise to the audience and forces them to think about unimagined dimensions of the repetitive pattern throughout the history.

Following Cankar, the revival of the Scandal also brings a reflection on the artist and her or his place in the society. Is today’s artist a bandit or the keeper of human dreams? Is the resolution of internal and external battles still possible in the art, or has the art been somehow corrupted, scandalised? The performance last night proved that the troubles Ivan Cankar faced are chillingly similar to the troubles today. A performance like this can thus bring the unwavering faith in progress – social, political, economical, personal – into question.