Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti
A Single Emerald
According to the author in his introductory note, »the book, first published in 1925, describes events that had taken place a few years earlier. In the sultry days of summer, at lavish parties full of booze, people and cars, a love story is gradually coming to an end. The story that began in 1918. It was disrupted by the war, which had a profound effect on the unhappy lovers, on each of them in their own way. When they meet again, their love is marred by a fatal accident hidden beneath the glamour and the hushed misery of the drunken nights.
Inspired by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2021
Monodrama
World premiere
Performance length is 0 hours and 55 minutes and has no pause.
Creators
Director
Jana Menger
Dramaturg
Sandi Jesenik
Set designer
Niko Novak
Costume designer
Bjanka Adžić Ursulov
Language consultant
Barbara Rogelj
Lighting designer
Boštjan Kos
Sound designer
Matija Zajc
Music for the song by
Niko Novak
Almost a hundred years after the novel's publication, the love of Gatsby's life, Daisy Fay, embarks on a journey down the memory lane and takes
the story into her own hands. When love is gone and her husband Tom Buchanan is gone, and so is her cousin Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's famous novel – this is a time and a place for her thoughts. She looks up again, catches a glimpse of the pair of eyes, and her brain reacts with a reaction that facilitates the feeding of memory, turning the pair of eyes into a single light. A single emerald shining brightly, and beyond it, the sea of the past. Daisy, like a sailor in the middle of a shipwreck, sails through the storm of The Great Gatsby and meets her long-time friend Jordan Baker, her husband's ill-fated lover Myrtle Wilson, and her own daughter, whose name hardly anyone remembers.
What is left of love when the storm passes? What lies beyond the light that flickers on the other side of the shore? Was it worth the blood that was shed?
These are Daisy’s thoughts against the backdrop of history, while somewhere in the distance, the sound of products scanned on the checkout counter belt at a speed achieved only by the most skilled supermarket cashiers is heard.«
The production was directed by Jana Menger, a distinguished choreographer, dance teacher and dancer, and in recent years also a successful director of plays and musical theatre productions.
Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti is our young writer-in-residence of the current season. We asked him to write a play for the legendary actress Jožica Avbelj, with the initial associative thread leading us into the novel The Great Gatsby.