In this discussion of three contemporary playwrights from Slovenia, Germany, and Serbia (Simona Semenič, Anja Hilling, and Milena Marković), the focus is on the status of contemporary playwrights ...after the post-dramatic turn. I try to answer the question of how we can interpret the changes of drama and text in the works of the three playwrights and how we can use new definitions of textual, dramatic, or no longer dramatic or the post-dramatic, intercultural and intertextual, and rhapsodic in contemporary theatre. Can we understand post-dramatic theatre as a specific continuity and not primarily as a break with the tradition? Can we say that contemporary drama often exposes us to deconstructing the contrast between representation and presentation, but nevertheless establishes a powerful process of re-dramatization, of injecting the dramatic into the post-dramatic?
Simona Semenic is a female Slovene playwright whose dramatic writing can be compared on the international level with Sarah Kane, Elfriede Jelinek, Anja Hilling and Ulrike Syha. They all have in ...common the search for linguistic and formal originality of expression, they strive for innovation in their dramatic writing, which will be heard in our world of media-shaped culture and bring an immanent theatrical solution. The paper considers three no longer dramatic texts by Simona Semenic: (1) The Feast or the Story of a Savoury Corpse or How Roman Abramovid, the Character Jansa, Julia Kristeva, age 24, Simona Semenid and the Initials z.i. Found Themselves In a Tiny Cloud of Tobacco Smoke; (2) Sophia or While I Almost Ask for More or a Parable of the Ruler and Wisdom; and (3) 7Cooks, 4Soldiers, 3Sophias. The main characters of all three are tormented and abused women, victims of religious and political wars, and of patriarchal patterns and imposed social roles; thanks to their thematic and formal similarities, the three selected dramas could form a trilogy. The fates of the women, which are based on real people, are presented in a fragmentary way within a timeless fictional frame, while Semenic, through innovative textual strategies, achieves artistic effects and contemplates ethical aspects from a universal perspective, and so her works are relevant everywhere. Her writing is characterised by the undermining of established reading conventions (absence of capital letters or punctuation, writing in verse form, etc.), whereby the reader is included more closely in the process of decoding and interpreting the text. The division between primary text and ancillary text is transcended, since the stage directions are more than just guidelines for staging and become an equal part of the text, with an emphasis on their narrative function (comment on what is happening, narration of events separated by space and time, a means of communicating with the audience, etc.). The addressee of the dramatic text must thus think about the basic relations, who is speaking and to whom, as well as about the status of the author, the dramatic characters and their own position. The reader/spectator is emotionally and cognitively more involved in what is happening and becomes to a large extent a participant and consequently shares responsibility for the state of society and the world. Although Semenic breaks the basic dramatic conventions, she at the same time relativises and revitalises them in metadramatic form, while the new textual strategies are most closely connected with the questions of reception and the power of theatre in today's world. Key words Slovene drama; Simona Semenic (1975-); dramatic form; stage directions; spectator
