And the century will blush. The Kocbek Case

About the performance

And the Century Will Blush is a play based on a monograph by Andrej Inkret that covers the life of poet and politician Edvard Kocbek between 1928 and 1952. It is a complex biography, a socialist example of the melodramatic story of the co-founding of a movement that was simultaneously a resistance movement and an attempt to construct a state. In anticipation of the newly emerging social and class context, his fellow fighters – his comrades – see and condemn him as a transgression, as something that sticks out, as an ideological and ethical troublemaker, as an outsider. The story becomes more complicated when the protagonist, who nominally occupies high state functions (Minister for Slovenia in the Provisional Government of Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, Vice President of the Praesidium of the People’s Assembly of the People’s Republic of Slovenia and member of the Executive Committee of the Liberation Front of Slovenia), acts as an artist and articulates through art the ethical dilemmas of the heroic wartime period – not least the question of settling wartime scores, including liquidations. The questions are ethical, religious and, above all, political. An outstanding cast of young actors offer a documentary-style reconstruction of incidents from Kocbek’s life in the pre-war years, his time with the Partisans and his war diary Comradeship, and also the anathemas triggered by his collection of stories Fear and Courage.
The play features a cast of young actors: Kocbek up to 1945 is played by Borut Doljšak, while the older Kocbek is played by Peter Harl. His wife Zdravka is played by Barbara Ribnikar as alternation for Anuša Kodelja, while Matija Rupel plays Boris Kidrič. Gregor Podričnik is Edvard Kardelj and Timotej Novakovič is Josip Vidmar. Lovro Zafred plays the journalist and the two narrators are Tori Zdovc and Mario Dragojević. The final part of this play about loyalty and bearing, gesture and resistance consists of an interpretation of Kocbek’s poems performed by Gregor Čušin, Pavle Ravnohrib, Tori Zdovc, Barbara Ribnikar and Duo Silence and a brief manifesto on ethics by Alain Badiou performed by Janez Hočevar. The play came into being as a study with excursions through the forest of Kočevski Rog, with talks on Edvard Kocbek’s time (Aleš Gabrič), with music by electronic duo Silence and choreography by Gregor Luštek. The director is Matjaž Berger.

"And the Century Will Blush is a successful dramatisation of an exceptional biography; its themes of loyalty and betrayal intrigued and engaged all the creators of the production, including the young generation of Slovenian actors." 

(Tadeja Krečič Scholten, Radio Slovenija, 12 July 2021)
 

The production is 2 hours long and has no interval.

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