Vinko Möderndorfer    

Ten

Year of writing: 2011
“What is worst is the falling of the angel of values. Of all values. Young people won’t know where to turn. Life will be devoid of everything. It is already happening. This is what we should fear … A world where the only value is money, is a dead world.”
Total cast size: 6 (3 f, 3 m)

grown-ups

dramatic poem
values, everymen, current social picture of the world, criminal behaviour

The play features six characters, taking turns in individual scenes. The scenes, vaguely addressing the Ten Commandments, are seemingly unconnected. They reveal unresolved conflicts and past traumas, questioning of values in a modern society and searching for answers to the fundamental questions of human existence. The series of scenes presents an image of the modern world and society, but the climax comes right at the end of the play.

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For the author's contact please write to sigledal@gmail.com.

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Awards, nominations, shortlists and recommendations

Nomination for Slavko Grum Award

Through the innovatively structured play Ten, subtitled as Dramatic poem, its author expresses dramatic action on two levels; dramatic present time and fragments from lives of the “ordinary” people are meticulously structured to make up a playful yet cruel image of this state of emergency caused by the human existence being devoid of all value. This theatrical study is constructed by combining the six characters (Young man, Young woman, He, She, Old man, Old woman ) linked by the urgency to answer the questions “Who stole? Who has been stolen from?” with freely floating scenes of key moments from the lives of typical, but recognisably individualized people. Their experience from various borderline situations between a man and a woman, a grown-up child and a parent, an employee and an employer etc. contain no moralising when they are joined with seemingly intangible impulses of the constructed dramatic characters, committed to the game of pursuit (“six characters in search of a ‘culprit’”). The game ends in a grotesque confrontation where the characters strangle each other and in this way the game is lucidly merged with the impliedly written human distress and underlines the shocking, tragicomic analysis of the absent empathy in the modern world.

2012

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