Translator:
Suzana Koncut

Director, dramaturge and music selection:
Ivica Buljan

Set designer and video:
Mark Požlep

Actor:
Robert Waltl

Language consultant:
Mateja Dermelj

Language consultant assistant:
Špela Kopitar

Photographer:
Mark Požlep

Designer: 
Zoran Pungerčar

Co-production:
Mini teater
MG Ptuj
Novo kazalište Zagreb

Premiere:
MG Ptuj: 31st October 2017
Mini teater: 3rd November 2017

First Slovene staging

About the performance

Mohamed El Khatib wanted to write a play based on the interview he had made with his mother. In 2012 her early death ended the planned project. The remaining of the unfinished project was a patchwork of the newspaper clippings, the electronic and telephone messages, the conversation transcriptions, the videos, the shot dialogues with the father … All the material combines fictions and documentary elements, and it offers a view of the hidden life marked with death. That patchwork opens the questions of family, the state, the mother tongue, the memories and of the grief. The text is a moving autobiographic narration, at times cuttingly painful, but often also funny, that subtly interweaves the personal with the universal.

The author wrote about his work: “I combined a selection of life materials that I collected from May 2010 to august 2013. I didn’t always ask for authorisations, I didn’t ask myself about limits, capabilities, carefulness. I collected anything I could, and I made a new integral whole. Everything happened very fast and without deep contemplation. This documentary fiction in presented more or less linearly and chronologically. There is no suspense. We know that the mother dies at the end. We also know that he would have acted differently, if he could do it all over again. He would have been a perfect son. Parents always ask themselves, if they were good parents. What about us? Were we good children? Were we first-rate children? Were we the Olympic-material children?”

In 2016, the text was awarded the big award for dramatic literature (Grand Prix de Littérature dramatique).