Elias Canetti
The Wedding
Hochzeit
The one thousandth premiere at the Slovene National Theatre Drama Maribor will be celebrated with The Wedding (Hochzeit, 1932) by Elias Canetti (1905–1994). In his plays, Canetti, who was born in Bulgaria, deals with the endless social and intimate issues without embellishment or prejudice, and with great insight and a cosmopolitan attitude influenced by European cultures. In 1981 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his literary works that are very diverse, yet homogenous and
for his "writing which reflects his worldliness, richness of thought and great artistic power”. His works feature two themes which defined Canetti's life in his early childhood years – death (mortality) and the power of the masses. In The Wedding, which is the first play after the teenage attempt, 'the disaster' in verse, he widely opened the doors to a multi-apartment house that is the seemingly bright symbol of the bourgeois future, which resembles a leper house of human relationships, from
where the stench of personal, family and social disintegration spreads. In The Wedding, Canetti deals with the impulses of individuals in a mass of people – what happens when during a wedding celebration masks fall off the drunken wedding guests to reveal their subconsciousness of immorality, non-ethics and terror that the bourgeoisie otherwise hides, and when emotional and instinctual freaks that may also be dangerous, peep from behind the facade of respectability. In The Wedding, which is a
prophetic and apocalyptic criticism of the collapse of human values within an economically-driven social system, Canetti presents us with a group of spiritual cadavers who are only interested in the material well-being and satisfaction of sexual passions. Canetti does not attempt to diagnose the social evil, social drawbacks and weaknesses, but drives them to the point just before the bang without giving judgement.
The Wedding has been staged in Slovenia for the first time by Eduard Miler, a director whose plays he directed in Maribor the professional public and the theatre audiences continue to remember.
Cast
Milada Kalezić
Sara Dirnbek
Kristijan Ostanek
Mirjana Šajinović
Maša Žilavec
Ivica Knez
Bojan Maroševič
Irena Mihelič
Mateja Pucko
Vlado Novak
Ksenija Mišič
Nika Rozman
Viktor Meglič
Nejc Ropret
Mojca Simonič
Vladimir Vlaškalić
Ana Urbanc
Aleš Valič k. g.
Davor Herga
Irena Varga
Peter Boštjančič
Maša Žilavec
Mateja Pucko
Sara Dirnbek
Matija Stipanič