On your right is the Ljubljana City Theatre, or MGL. Today it is a massive, versatile complex with three distinct stages, but its birth was an act of pure, scrappy rebellion.
In 1949, Europe was still pulling itself out of the rubble of the Second World War. The established national theatre here was doing fine, but two visionaries, Jože Tiran and Dušan Moravec, wanted something sharper. Something modern. They envisioned a second professional stage that would take risks the national theatre simply would not touch.
There was just one tiny problem. They did not have a building.
The ensemble literally had to borrow halls from the national theatre just to hold their first auditions. But by the time they secured this permanent home in the historic Seraphic College building, they were ready to explode onto the scene. And explode they did. In their first five years, this company staged sixty premieres. Forty-nine of those were either world premieres or the very first time the plays had ever been performed in the Slovenian language. They were hungry for the new, tearing into contemporary drama and works from outside the English speaking world.
If you check your screen, I have got a great historical photo for you. It shows actors Tina Leonova and Zlatko Šugman in a 1969 production of a modern British comedy, capturing exactly the kind of contemporary edge the theatre championed.
This place was never meant to be a stuffy club for the elite. A director named Ferdo Delak introduced the Workers Abonma, essentially a season ticket program specifically for the working class. He wanted to shatter social barriers and bring high quality, provocative drama to everyone. Meanwhile, their dramaturg... the person responsible for selecting and adapting the plays... a man named Lojze Filipič, looked to Paris for inspiration. He pushed the repertoire away from rigid classical interpretations and drove it straight into the cutting edge European avant garde, focusing on experimental and unconventional art.
It was a place of intense passion. The beloved actor Gašper Tič, who anchored their wildly successful runs of hit musicals like Cabaret, felt such a deep connection to this ensemble that he claimed the acronym MGL actually stood for Moja Gledališka Ljubezen. My Theatre Love. His sudden, tragic death in 2017 at the age of forty four left a massive void in the company, sparking a nationwide conversation about the intense emotional pressures artists face.
But the theatre kept pushing boundaries. They even converted a tiny space into the Studio Theatre, a fifty seat laboratory for young directors to test out raw, minimalist scripts. The building itself even had a rebellious streak. In late 2017, the facade had to be urgently renovated because chunks of concrete had started raining down onto the pedestrians below.
This company proves that true cultural ambition is not just about preserving the past, but brilliantly inventing the future.
Our next stop is about a five minute walk from here. Keep heading down the street and follow your map toward Kongresni trg, or Congress Square, where we will pick up the story.
