Vinko Möderndorfer    

Three Women

Have shopping centres become a tool to achieve happiness? Can we really buy anything?
Total cast size: 3 (3 f)

+ a kind female voice, a very awkward older male voice, a kind male voice, almost feminine younger male voice, a mean male voice

grown-ups

drama
class and cultural criticism of the society, pursuit of happiness, consumerism

Three Women is a play about the search for happiness in shopping centres and about the absurdity of consumerism as a modern-day religion. Vinko Möderndorfer uses his well-honed style and dialogue to display the entire misery of shopping addiction. He applies surgical acuteness to cut open the emotional abyss of each of the three women who come to the shopping centre to quench their increasingly severe spiritual and emotional void. In the story, he pushes the young woman to the edge: at the shopping centre, the youngest of the three women wishes she could buy a child. At the same time Three Women is a harsh criticism of the society and the neoliberal system generating consumer addicts in a premeditated way, in order for them to be more easily controlled and manipulated.

Full script can be accessed via Digital Library of Slovenia.

Any use or reproduction of all or any part of this text without the written permission of the author is strictly prohibited. 

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

Three Women is a piercing play about three tiny life stories from our everyday life, but it grows into an effective, funny, yet bitter metaphor about the modern-day human state of mind marked by the violence of consumerism patterns. We are aware of this violence and we deeply hate it, but we either don’t know how to really resist it or we are unable to. The coffee shop at the modern and shiny shopping centre selling top-notch fashion brands is to the three women an authentic substitute of their home living space filled with disillusion and loneliness. In fact, the coffee shop turns out to be a mysterious location of new life, which gives the play a somewhat bitter after-taste of victory that our society and civilisation have achieved in their development. The characters of all three women are refined and solid. The sensitive and funny dialogue gives the piece an added quality of authenticity and offers an opportunity for excellent acting creations.

2015

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