Vinko Möderndorfer    

The Dogs Bark

Year of writing: 2015
History play in verse and prose
Total cast size: 11 (2 f, 9 m)

+ army

grown-ups

drama
intertextual references, politics, current social picture of the world, poetry

All possible disasters affect the land. The Duke is convinced that all that needs to be done is to find out who is to blame and everything can be restored. He chooses his ugly daughter to find the culprit and in return she asks to have her books back and to be allowed to travel. The Duke’s other daughter, a beauty, falls in love with a poet and asks him to kill her father so that she can take over leading the country. In a fight outside the city both daughters perish and the poet decides to expose the Duke’s responsibility for their death.

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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

A grotesque play about the eternal mechanisms of power structures opens with references to Jarry’s Ubu Roi on one hand and the legend about King Matjaž, a character from Slavic mythology, on the other. This half unreal world is a very precise representation of the nature of today’s world where seemingly everything changes but actually it all always stays the same. The author borrowed the title from a well known saying: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” The Duke wants to save his starved and weary country by looking for a scape-goat, replacing his ministers and so on, but this doesn’t really change anything. In this impossible situation the only hope for a solution seems to be a thinking man, an ex-poet who has not had his poems printed for a long time because books are forbidden. Moreover, after all these years people wouldn’t trust him even if he gave them his word. These are the relationships the author builds a convincing and tense action on, in order to find an answer to the question: Why have we sunken into a state of radical apathy where we are all victims of numerous social phantasms? Could the reason be Beautiful Daughter’s hedonism and obsession with beauty? Or Ugly Daughter’s intelectual snobbery? Or is it opportunism of ministers, Eavesdropper and Eavesdropper’s Son?

2016

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