Playing the long game: Tomi Janežič's no title yet, endurance theatre and ways of staging violation
On an ethically knotty, 10-hour theatrical expedition in Ljubljana.
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CW: This edition contains quite a lot of discussion of rape and its representation on stage.
Last year I travelled by bus between Belgrade and Vienna four times, a journey which is supposed to take around nine hours but usually takes closer to 10 because of the inevitable hold-up at the Hungarian border, which is roughly the same running time as Tomi Janežič’s no title yet. I make this comparison because Janežič’s show is a journey: ten hours of sex, death, biscuits, Bowie and one of the most did-that-actually-just-happen? moments I saw on stage last year, or any year for that matter.
Slovenian director Janežič is a significant and influential figure in southeast European theatre. He regularly works internationally and he’s a fixture at festivals. His 2021 production of Uncle Vanya for the State Small Theatre of Vilnius (a mere four hours and forty minutes) was part of last year’s Weiner Festwochen programme and his latest production 1978, a five-and-a-half hour piece about life during the communist era performed in a building on the fringes of the city, opened in Timisoara (you can read a great review of this here) in December as part of a bigger project for European Capital of Culture 2025, which will take place in Janežič’s hometown of Nova Gorica.
So, as you can tell, Janežič is not a director of brevity. His work is category-defying. I’ve heard his style described as maximalist minimalism, which sounds right. He frequently collaborates with prominent Slovenian playwright Simona Semenič, and that’s the case with no title yet, though text is just one element of this devised, experiential show. Semenič’s play is inspired by the figure of Don Juan, the mythic lover and libertine, though it is notably more concerned with those he ‘seduces.’ The show was created via intense laboratory-style rehearsals, blending text with material created with the cast during this process. The resulting show, premiered in 2018 at Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana though Covid curtailed its ability to tour, and I only saw it last year during the theatre’s annual showcase.
Long day’s journey
We kick off at 11am. The Mladinsko Theatre is housed in a very distinctive building with a more conventionally end-on Upper Hall and a cellar-like, vaulted Lower Hall. The performance begins In the Lower Hall, where benches and cushions have been arranged on one side of the long narrow room. There is a car, or a sizeable part of a car, in one corner. Everyone is wearing unconvincing wigs. A man in overalls is painting road markings on the floor in white paint, while another actor illustrates the artifice of theatre by producing a bottle of stage blood and pouring it on his bandaged hand. There has been an accident, he explains. A woman is dying, and by the end of the show she will die. But before that, we have a lot of stuff to get through.
The actual text is relatively short, the events of the play taking place inside a single moment. A woman slips from a gurney and falls to the hospital floor and, in the moment of her falling, time becomes elastic. Janežič’s production takes a sort of Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View approach to the text, breaking it into pieces, with lines of dialogue, images and motifs scattered across the course of the show. The show is further broken down into sections, with the audience shuttled between the lower and upper halls throughout the day. Janežič is present throughout, watching on, congratulating us on lasting the course, sometimes as an observer, sometimes rather more hands-on.
The show also contains stories. The first of these is an account of a masturbatory escapade by some young boys. Funny to begin with, it evolves into a story of rape, with an older boy forcing himself on a younger one. Rape is a dominant theme of the show. It will ripple through the day. We are told that Don Juan was a rapist, that he tricked women into sex, that he took whatever he wanted, that he was a serial violator. That rape is a consequence of living in a world where Don Juans are celebrated.
In one of the show’s most impactful scenes, actor Anja Novak rattles through a list of her sexual conquests. Touring as an actor is great, she says, as she gets to add more international notches to her bedpost. Her list keeps getting bigger; there are so many names that she’s written them on her arm as an aide-mémoire. This scene is performed with such enthusiasm that it’s very funny. Following this, another actor, Blaž Šef, runs on, stark naked but for a pair of angel wings and skips around while singing in an operatic fashion. He has a lovely baritone voice and the sight of this bare-ass, aria-spouting angel is delightful. Until things start to shift. Novak pleads with the angel to save the soul of her lover. He, in turn, orders her to undress, which she does, taking off her clothes and underwear. Then the angel rapes her and it’s just horrible, one of the most upsetting depictions of rape I have ever seen on stage. Novak is completely naked. Her body is pinned against the cold hard stairs as Šef rams her hard, from behind, over and over and over again. The scene just keeps on going. It is physically difficult to watch. The desire to turn away is strong. At least one person in the audience starts quietly crying.
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