In Mini teater we started intensive rehearsals for the new play The Diary of Anne Frank. The play is directed by Vinko Möderndorfer and the cast includes Gaja Filač, Saša Pavlin Stošić, Medea Novak, Barbara Vidovič, Tadej Pišek, Aleš Kranjec and Timotej Novaković. The visual design of the performance will be provided by set designer Branko Hojnik, costume designer Meta Sever and video designer Atej Tutta. The proofreader is Jože Faganel. The performance is a co-production with the Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana. The production is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a famous book of the 20th century, which, far from historical objectivity and detachment, depicts an intimate experience of the Second World War. A 14-year-old Jewish girl, who hid with her family in the attic of an office building in Amsterdam from June 1942 to August 1944, confided her most intimate thoughts to Kitty, as she called her diary. Anne Frank's fear of the Nazis searching for hidden Jewish families was put into unforgettable words. Her confessions are all the more shocking because the Frank family was betrayed and sent to concentration camps after they were arrested. Anne Frank did not survive. A bright teenager aspired to be a writer, and her writings on roommates, awakening love, sexuality and all sorts of subjects have become classic reading for young people and adults. Anna unforgettably confided all her fears and thoughts in her diary, which became one of the most famous books of the last century (her father arranged for its publication after the war). Her (self-)questioning is increasingly relevant today. For example, "You can imagine how many times we desperately ask ourselves here: 'Why, why this war? Why can't people live in peace? Why must everything be devastated? ... I don't believe that war is caused only by big people, governments and capitalists. No, the little man also likes to make war, otherwise nations would have resisted it long ago. There must be a destructive instinct in man, an instinct to kill, to murder and to ravage. Until all mankind, without exception, is changed, wars will rage, and what man has produced or built he will trample and destroy. And then everything will start all over again... I have often been depressed, but never despairing..." writes Anne Frank.
Europe has been ruled by a culture of lies. The ideas behind them were once summed up by Hannah Arendt as follows: "The consequence of being constantly lied to is not that it makes you believe the lies, but rather that no one believes anything anymore... Such people then can no longer make up their minds. They lose the ability to react and, at the same time, the ability to think and to judge. And then you can do with them what you like." So one cannot help feeling that, with the general outbreak of populists and political charlatans, this is what is happening in much of Europe today. A flood of those who forget. And an even greater flood of those who fall for them.
The performance will be aimed primarily at third-form primary school pupils, secondary school pupils and adults.
