When We Dead Awaken

Professor Arnold Rubek, a sculptor, and his wife Maia have been married for several years, but don’t feel real affection towards each other. Theirs is a boring life which they try to energise with summer travels, this time, with a voyage along the coast. The professor once promised his wife that he would take her to the mountaintop so she could see the entire world in its glory, but that has not happened. Their life is turned upside down when, while they’re waiting in the summer resort for their ship to leave, Maia meets an eccentric bear hunter and landowner Ulfheim and Rubek meets Irene, who for several years was the model for his masterpiece The Resurrection Day. The quartet, who have spent their lives in the painful absence of love and have been transformed into human beasts as a result, head high into the mountains, hoping for a chance to start again.

Ibsen's last and rarely staged play, which digs into the deep problems of humanity, was directed, by the renowned Bulgarian director Stiliyan Petrov, for the first time in Slovenia, known for his specific poetics and the close attention he gives to actors’ work.

Irene: I was dead for many years. They came and bound me – laced my arms together behind my back –. Then they lowered me into a tomb with iron bars. And with padded walls – so that no one on the earth above could hear the grave-shrieks – . But now I am beginning, in a way, to rise from the dead. 

Henrik Ibsen

       

The theatre thanks to the Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria in the Republic of Slovenia for their financial support.