The Dying God Triglav

The production will be based on France Bevk’s eponymous historical tale, itself inspired by the actual events from 1331 when the inquisitor from Cividale (Čedad) cut down a holy tree and filled a spring with stones once he realised that the people of Kobarid still followed the rites of their old faith and worshipped them. Despite taking inspiration from real events, the characters and the plot of Bevk’s tale are predominantly fictional and woven into a complex whole. The relatively short story is brimming with action and is therefore exceptionally vivid, simply demanding to have its narrative adapted into a theatre event. Reminders of the old faith, another mythology with another origin and another cultural foundation were a part of the struggle to retain ethnic identity in the time of fascism in Primorska. And this process of fictional escape into history with the intent of opening questions that even today come across as pertinent and polemic makes us realise why staging Bevk’s story today is topical and necessary.

The Dying God Triglav is a production with which Mojca Madon is finishing her master’s degree in theatre directing at the UL AGRFT. Madon believes that a theatre production can change an individual reading of a novel into a collective one, that a performance can come to life as an independent whole and not just as a dramatized literary work that wishes to present the content of the original faithfully. Madon enters Bevk’s material together with her team and their authorial contributions: more than directly transposing Bevk’s story, she is interested in how the story synthesises the echoes of the conflicts individual–society, minority–majority, progress–tradition, victim–executor from their own biographies. Because her identity was partly formed in the regions Bevk describes, Madon wishes the theatre event to contribute to the local environment from which she is taking inspiration. The production is being created as a gift to the people who have, knowingly or unknowingly, marked an important part of her life.

The story supported people in their belief that they are the last boundary of some other world, with some other mythology, another origin and a cultural foundation other than Christianity. The old religion or the ancestral gods were, under fascism, support and the weapon that helped maintain the awareness that we are different from our conquering neighbour and that we must not yield to the attempts of contemporary rebaptising, or, simply put, cultural genocide. Remembering the old religion was a fight to preserve identity.

Lenka Raspet