The battle against the drought afflicting the fields of original Slovenian drama is being waged on all fronts. Any rise above mediocrity is rare, and usually associated with the subjective touch of the author – which is where we might look for an excuse for such low productivity, during times which offer creators an excess of comfort, sapping their capacity for introspection. But that's only part of the problem. The current issue of Dialogi does not try to formulate answers to the knotty problems of Slovenian drama writing. It indicates areas of vitality, and specific works and authors who hold promise for the future, who are already building the dramatic present even though the stage realizations of their works either take place on parallel levels, or their potential and approach have not been taken under a roof of any institution. The high quality of domestic drama has been confirmed empirically as a sporadic climatic phenomenon, in which the selection of competitive presentations for the forthcoming Borstnik Meeting Slovenian Theatre Festival reveals a story about how original drama and theatre live hand in hand relatively satisfactorily. If catastrophic scenarios seem unwarranted so long as a domestic drama voice is present in a stage production, then any impression of a crisis is deceptive. (Or is it?)

After Mile Korun, the second person to bring fresh air into Slovenian drama and theatre and introduce synthetic thinking about Slovenian drama and theatre of the twentieth century was Dusan Jovanovic, himself a powerful writer of drama, though in recent times seemingly fatigued in his leaps of vital spirit. Here we can ask: what does today's drama production have to offer that couldn't have been written, say, twenty years ago? What distinguishes new Slovenian drama from its predecessors? Where is its awareness of the present to be found? How is its aesthetic sensibility in any way different? While, according to Aleks Sierz, the texts of the English "in-yer-face" trend in theatre of the 1990s offer a pandan to that which in the 1950s was brought by the drama of the absurd, in the field of Slovenian drama we speak of other dividing lines and categories. Modern drama in Slovenia does not typically grab the viewer by the neck and shake him. When it questions moral norms, the writing is rarely provocative; it does not try to confront by spitting in one's face, and the ability to shock is not highly valued in this kind of writing. Drama is shaped by typical Slovenian national habitus, a kind of Slovenian Zeitgeist, which prefers to be less rather than more experimental in nature. Following stylistic precursors Artaud, Jarry, and Ionesco, Joze Javorsek went perhaps the furthest in the 1950s and 1960s, but he did not find (nor did he seek) a suitable stage realization for his works. The highest merit is offered to the conviction that indirect meaning is capable of capturing reality more fully – the beginnings of this principle of coding the mediated meaning reaching back to the 1960s, which have yet to be surpassed in terms of the quantity of high profile dramatic writing which it triggered (Smole, Kozak, Zajc, Strnisa, Jovanovic).

Thanks to PreGlej, an initiative of the Glej theater, the image of Slovenian drama writing has been showing explosive quantitative presence since May of 2005.

Through the texts presented in this issue, we hope to look beyond the limiting judgments (and their temporariness) and implicate the possibilities opened up by the texts for staging as their central existential modus. The Wild West by Iztok Lovric, which was staged in January 2005 in Ljubljana at the Glej Theatre, perceives contemporaneous symptoms through comedy. Reykjavik is another work by Martina Siler (awarded first prize at the 2002 Young Dramatists competition in Ptuj) which expands the theme of the generational search of young people enclosed in a space where they have nowhere to hang their own identity, and the division between the realistic, the utopian and the pretend is one of the fundamental existential dilemmas (professional theatres avoided the work). Matjaz Briski in The Comics of Evil continues in the direction charted by the play Cross, which won the Grum Award in 2005, and towards which stage production has not been especially receptive (see the telling contextualized essay by Taras Kermauner). This "feature-length" text is joined by two others which originated in the PreGlej "workshop", where for now relatively traditionally designed dramatic attempts in terms of content and form, exercises in style, tend to predominate. The well written Socks by Simona Semenic is accompanied by White Rain, written by Sasa Rakef, a formal exception which is a lyric take on a dramatic form and gives the impression of T. S. Eliot's "temporary separation from reality" and a series of connotative meanings.

The authors of PreGlej without a doubt are stories in the process of emerging. Their intellectual range through PreGlej reaches far and deep. It seems that PreGlej in this respect easily demands a shifting into another gear, a more precise conceptualization of its activity (see the article by Gasper Troha, who looks ahead or rather to the other side of the given state of things in modern Slovenian drama and theatre). The jury at the 2002 "New Drama" competitions warned in its concluding statement of the alarmingly paltry selection of dramatic themes and motifs: "It appears that the only things that excite young people are to be found somewhere in the triangle of simplified sexual pathology, outmoded day to day political events, and café philosophizing on the previous two topics."

Among other things it is supposedly about becoming aware of one's own position and the reasonableness of the foundations of modern reality, for which it is hard to determine an orientable picture, the reasons for the creation of theatre amidst global capitalism, with vulgar reasoning rumbling across culture. It wouldn't hurt to articulate and comfortably dismantle these and other taboos which cramp Slovenian society and ossify everyday life. All these are merely indicated possibilities. Theory of a soft sort. Apparently, all this – and more – is necessary for a convincing stage result.

Published 2006-10-05