The Killer

Bérenger visits a newly build quarter, a slice of paradise in the otherwise gloomy town. While he's enthusiastically admiring the charms of the landscape, he suddenly realises that the settlement is deserted. The architect tells him about a mysterious serial killer who is drowning the population. Bérenger decides to prevent the killer from committing more crimes and goes on a search for him.
With The Killer, Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), one of the central figures of the drama of the absurd, opens a cycle of four plays where Bérenger stands for Everyman, or the author's alter ego. Bérenger, naive but determined, decides in his first drama appearance to stand up to the killer whose evil deeds are intruding the eden-like landscape of absolute beauty. Ionesco structures the text as an intertwining of different genres, manifested in the sequence of three acts of different character: a fairy tale poetic world of the first represents a »radiant city«, the second turns into a proper crime drama, and in the final one, a tragic dimension is added when the lonely Bérenger finally confronts the killer and realises the powerlessness (his own and general) of the attempt to change human destiny. Ionesco thus transfers a palpable existential anxiety and his own fear of death into The Killer.
The first Slovenian performance will also be the debut in the SNG Nova Gorica for the young director Marko Čeh.