Collected Plays of Evald Flisar, Volume 2

Evald Flisar's stage plays, critically acclaimed and performed all over the world, represent a special chapter in the history of contemporary Slovenian drama - they stand out for many reasons, but above all because of his well-known and easily decipherable view of the world. At the heart of all his plays lies the desire to depict human destinies (mostly of people that could be our friends or relatives), whose common denominator is the awareness of the tragicomic nature of life. Flisar...
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Evald Flisar's stage plays, critically acclaimed and performed all over the world, represent a special chapter in the history of contemporary Slovenian drama - they stand out for many reasons, but above all because of his well-known and easily decipherable view of the world. At the heart of all his plays lies the desire to depict human destinies (mostly of people that could be our friends or relatives), whose common denominator is the awareness of the tragicomic nature of life. Flisar defines the tragicomic as "the feeling that we are all going somewhere, although we cannot move" ... The diction of Evald Flisar's plays is wholly authentic, suffused with hidden and revealed passions, with almost naturalistic yet hardly everyday speech patterns, with language brought into the world by life itself, with ideas that successfully rise above ideologies, since they constitute part of the sensual and emotional fabric of life from which they emerge... In sparkling and witty dialogue the author paints a world without God in which two opposing views of how life should be lived clash with great vigor and not a little humor, on a fine edge between realism and phantasy, dream and reality, touching not only on the basic issues of Western civilization but also on the meaning of art and its acceptance... However, it isn't the messages of his plays, of his relentless settling of accounts with the world, that give rise to the refined, playful, oddball, ironic dialogue; it is the characters and their relationships, their patterns of speech and the surprising twists of the plot that create the metaphor; they are so convincing and genuine that we are quite simply disarmed... All the "archetypal" characteristics of Flisar's plays find their expression in exceptionally witty, skillful and smoothly proceeding dialogue. Most critics believe that Evald Flisar is one of today's most intelligently writing dramatists ... He has been called the Slovenian Howard Baker... What both playwrights have in common are a high degree of metaphorical content, masterly dialogue, comical effects and spatial-temporal leaps. Both are very successful (mainly by the number of awards they receive), and both are highly productive ... Both have - for the fast and optimal presentation of their work - established their own theaters - Baker the Wrestling School, Flisar Slovenian Chamber Theater. Flisar's plays pose a great many questions - and these questions push them into the framework of a common reality. This reality presents human values in a crisis, blind alleys of our modern world which Flisar - perhaps more so than any of his contemporaries - draws with the help of past cultural models: myths and literary symbols. To be more precise: he describes them with quotes from the world literature... Life in Flisar's plays is formed not only from the substance of our times, but also from the stuff of our common culture, which lives within us as a legitimate part of what we are.