Marius von Mayenburg
Ex
One night reveals all the fears, wounds and lies. Questions will have to be answered, scores will have to be settled.
Marius von Mayenburg (1971), German playwright, dramaturg, translator and director is one of the most exciting contemporary playwrights. All of his plays painfully explore the multiple problems of contemporary society, but most of them deal with themes concerning a family and misfits.
Ex is a story of a couple who no longer see each other. Daniel and Katarina, both highly educated (he is an architect, she a medical doctor), appear to be a successfully married couple, but in reality their relationship is completely empty. They are both dissatisfied with their lives, their careers are not as glittering as they would like them to be, they are exhausted by their young children, bored and embittered. While Katarina is aggressive and toxic, Daniel withdraws and resorts to passive aggression, which inflicts no small wounds. One evening, as usual, when they are hurling insults at each other, Daniel’s ex-love Janja appears at the door, having found herself in the street after a fight with her current partner and, in desperation, takes refuge with them. Her arrival only stirs up the couple’s quarrel. There is no end to the impatience, provocation, accusations and humiliation. It also turns out that Daniel’s relationship with Janja is by no means completely resolved.
Ex, 2021
Drama
First Slovenian production
Premiere: 12. December 2024
Performance length is 1 hour and 30 minutes and has no pause.
Creators
Translator
Anja Naglič
Director
Maruša Kink
Dramaturg
Petra Pogorevc
Set and costume designer
Vasilija Fišer
Composer
Veronika Kumar
Language consultant
Martin Vrtačnik
Lighting designer
Andrej Koležnik
Sound designer
Tomaž Božič
Actors
Katarina
Mojca Funkl
Daniel
Jernej Gašperin
Janja
Nina Rakovec
* For the needs of the first Slovenian production, we changed the names of the female characters: in the original, Katarina is called Sibylle and Janja is called Franziska.
The play deals with early middle-age crisis, a time when a person starts to question whether his/her life choices have been the right ones.
It is painful to realise that for many things in life there is no second try and that we have imagined many things differently in the past. Most of the time, it is necessary to admit that there is not much left of the youthful boldness and ambition, or, as Daniel puts it, »one day you reach for the old and tested solutions and take part in the game that everyone else is playing anyway«.
Marius von Mayenburg (1971), German playwright, dramaturg,
translator and director is one of the most exciting contemporary playwrights. All of his plays painfully explore the multiple problems of contemporary society, but most of them deal with themes concerning a family and misfits. In Ex, Mayenburg reaffrms that he is a top master of dialogue. The devastating conversations between Daniel and Katarina are stunning and rival the hellish verbal duel between the protagonists of Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The metaphors of real, genuine love that Mayenburg puts in Janja’s mouth are also striking, even if they raise the issue whether love in this form can possibly endure, or whether it is just part of youthful illusions.
The world premiere of Ex was in Sweden (2021) and is the first part of a trilogy. The world premiere of the two other parts (Ellen Babic and Egal) took place in Reykjavik (2022 and 2023).
