Monsters

Simona Hamer successfully plays through [the didacticism of the novel] in the performance; she selects the issues that are key to the modern time, but rarely receive treatment on stage – in Hamer’s Monsters we’re no longer threatened by the A-bomb, we’re threatened by environmental cataclysms and the consequential destruction of life on the planet – including the destruction of one’s own life. It is this not very self-aware (self-)destructiveness that is key for Lord of the Flies as well as Monsters. Taufer’s Monsters are conceived through a unified, concise aesthetics, which – perhaps intentionally? – slants towards the so-called camp – it wants to be serious, but somehow constantly breaks through and leans on the side of the kitsch, which in this case is some sort of a surplus in terms of contents or philosophy; it reminds us that the aesthetics of this performance would be hard to establish without the kitsch, because one of its key topics is (deep) ecology, for which we do not really have a developed discourse, let alone artistic aesthetics: as a society, we don’t take ecology seriously, in other words, we approach far more seriously the questions pertaining economy and production, the questions arising from the society itself, without being able to reflect on our relationship to the environment – without which our economic activities would of course not be possible. Even more; as soon as we introduce the question of environmentalism into the question of economy and politics, it radically changes and can be in the opposition with the expected and the currently desirable. […] Monsters, even with their (aesthetic) slips, implicitly warn that they are addressing key questions that we haven’t really learnt to really think about – and we’re running out of time to learn.

The stereoscopic layering of the set with partly transparent drapes (set by Branko Hojnik and Urša Vidic) fits well with the pre-recorded narrative, which in turns matches the video projections that announce the already mentioned totalities. The costume uniformity (costumes by Ana Žerjal) emphasises the mediocre thinking of the sufferers involved. The fragments of the collective movement (choreographer Jana Menger) eloquently present the suppressed unconscious or demonic, which causes fears in a person, triggers psychosis and wakes up the desire to kill. […] A group of spoilt, and apparently already adult children who try to save themselves after a – let’s call it – shipwreck and return to civilisation, is a lucid metaphor for today’s bourgeois conformism, which never crosses into hedonism. In an imagined path towards the latter, the former always loses nerve and stops, because it’s either too cold or too hot, because it’s raining, because the traffic is bad and so on. It is this eternal eschewing of the hedonistic spice of comfortable living that justifies the modern epidemic of the 'homo eccentricus'. My impression is that the performing was divided between the theatre of images and a number of markedly narrative inserts, with the former functioning better. Thus, for example, the scenes of killing, conjured by the dynamic play of light and the shadows of actors’ silhouettes plainly show us human urge to kill.

Monsters are a performance of an accelerated pace, filled with powerful music by Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar with a drummer onstage, the choreographer is Jana Menger, the visual image consists of  meaningfully minimalist costumes by Ana Žerjal, set by Branko Hojnik and Urša Vidic, and video by Voranc Kumar, and of course an exceptional cast, in which nobody lags behind. And it’s the ensemble acting that has been the mainstay of the Mladinsko for decades, is the cause for theatre pleasure every time.