Toxic
Toxic
Vol. 2
Toxic, Vol. 2 is sisterhood, jealousy, ego, friendship, betrayal; the body and pain; snow and love; happiness, X, a closed garden, rotten flowers, a saint, a villain, sex, virginity – caught in a vortex of brain trash (inside my head).
All day long, Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero has been looping in my mind: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
I walk into a bookshop and, instead of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Other Women, Convenience Store Woman, The Women I Think About at Night, Women Icons, The Age of Innocence … I pick up TOXIC.
TOXIC is the 2023 autofictional novel by writer and dramaturg Eva Mahkovic which, shortly after publication, became one of Beletrina’s best-selling titles.
In Pomisleki and Delo’s Saturday supplement, Vesna Milek wrote about TOXIC under the headline “Why did you have to share so many things about yourself?”:
“Her style is pop-cultural and Kafkaesque at the same time. In truth, we don’t have all that much in common, except a passion for books, theatre, and the Tudors. So why do I recognize myself so strongly in her book? Because she went brutally deep into herself in order to say a great deal about all of us as well.”
Since March 8, 2024, TOXIC has also existed as a stage performance.
Since January 11, 2025, TOXIC, Vol. 2 has been available in a revised dramatic version.
The theatrical adaptation – prepared by Nataša Matjašec Rošker following Eva Mahkovic’s own dramatization – draws its performative form from the section of the novel titled VERTIGO, and from the idea of staging a “hot mess”: a cascade of highs and lows, thoughts and reflections, quotations and ideas, icons and brain trash, music and pop, fleeting moments with X.
Small Stage
no intermission