Disappearance

Disappearance depicts the lives of two families who, at first sight, have nothing in common. The first is the outwardly respectable bourgeois family of Karl, the esteemed scientist and professor. His wife is an artist and their grown-up daughter is striving to be a politician. Despite the apparent harmony, not all that glitters is gold. Will they be able to quell all the meanness and filth that is inexorably coming to the surface? The other family is still very young, Marko and Ana have a young son, and their marriage is not going well. Marko is working on his PhD, but is struggling with a severe childhood trauma that prevents him from breathing freely. He struggles with a constant feeling that he would like to disappear. As events from the past gradually unravel, Mark and Karl’s stories become intertwined. Will Marko realise that he has to fight his own battle? Will he gather enough strength to overcome his fears? Disappearance is first and foremost a drama about facing oneself and only then about facing those who have tried to take away our right to exist.

Disappearance is a play about abuse – both about the abusers and their victims. It is quite clear that there is no excuse for sexual predators, even less so when the victims are children. But what about those who knew about the abuse but remained silent all along? And can those who have been abused also be blamed for taking the responsibility of remaining silent? The play draws attention to the hard-to-repair consequences of abuse, to the permanent damage to the soul and the loss of identity. The play also touches on some aspects of the current political situation and is a call to society to speak out, to point out the guilty and punish them.

Tomislav Zajec (1972), the Croatian playwright, has written fifteen plays that have been put on stage all over the world. He has also written novels, screenplays and poetry, and is the author of numerous adaptations and dramatisations. He has received numerous awards for his work, he is the six-time winner of the Marin Držić Award, the Croatian national award for best play, which he also received in 2022 for his play Disappearance. His play Someone Should Walk the Dog won the Grand Prix at the 29th Journées de Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre in France in 2018.

Jernej Potočan (1996), a young director, dramaturg and playwright is collaborating with the Ljubljana City Theatre for the first time as a director. As a playwright, the Ljubljana City Theatre audiences got to know him in 2020, when his play The Sorrows was staged on the Small Stage. He has received several awards for his plays: the Grossman Festival Award for The Zoo, the Second Prize at the international One-Minute Play Contest for his text We Were Left Without Friends, We Collected Stamps, and the Red Thread Prize for his text The Sorrows.