Join us for the second edition of Script Secrets, ETC’s online talk series that opens a window into the minds of some of today’s most exciting European playwrights.
In this special online event, the ETC Drama Committee's 2025 selection recipients, playwrights Svenja Viola Bungarten, Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti, and honorary mention recipient Goran Vojnović, will present their plays and reflect on the driving themes, questions, and creative processes behind their work.
- Darling, Svenja Viola Bungarten (2025) -
Deutsches Theater Berlin (Germany/Berlin)
- who run for happiness, Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti (2024) -
Prešernovo Gledališče Kranj (Slovenia/Kranj)
- In Search of Lost Language, Goran Vojnovic (2024) -
Slovensko Narodno Gledalisce Nova Gorica (Slovenia/Nova Gorica)
This event invites participants to uncover the stories behind the scripts and the artistry involved in tackling challenging and complex issues through theatre. The talk will delve into:
- How these playwrights build worlds and characters on the page
- The inspirations, histories, and contemporary contexts informing their work
- The thematic links between individual and collective experience in their plays
- The journey from local story to European stage
Cover Photo: 'Der Liebling' © Eike Walkenhorst
Practical Information & Registration
Thursday 18 September 2025, 12:00-13:30 CET - Online
Agenda
- Welcome & Introduction by the European Theatre Convention
- Insights into the ETC Drama Committee
- Presentation by playwright Svenja Viola Bungarten
- Q&A
- Presentation by playwright Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti
- Q&A
- Presentation by playwright Goran Vojnovic
- Q&A
- Concluding remarks
Speakers
Svenja Viola Bungarten for Darling (2025)
ETC Member Theatre Deutsches Theater Berlin (Germany/Berlin)
The giant corporations NEVER and IMMER (‘Always’) are vying for a monopoly position on the market and to invent the next innovative feminine hygiene product. CEOs Franka and Bettina want to buy up each other's companies and get at each other's throats. Their children vie for the inheritance and the affection of their mothers, while their confidants, consultants and interns scent their own career opportunities. Complex intrigues and affairs unfold in this “career comedy”, as do unexpected alliances.
Inspired by pop culture references such as the films, The Favourite, The Devil Wears Prada and the series Succession, the play explores the costs of success and the ways women participate in patriarchal systems. It states the question, what does power do to feminism and what kind of power does feminism need?
Svenja Viola Bungarten has been writing plays since 2014, when she started studying Scenic Writing and Narrative Film at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin.
Her writing is highly influenced by pop cultural motives and feminist thought. It reflects on ways we tell stories and longs to explore and repurpose genre for a social and political thought. She instrumentalises humour as a powerful tool for dealing with despair and escaping hopelessness.
Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti for who run for happiness (2024) -
ETC Member Theatre Prešernovo Gledališče Kranj (Slovenia/Kranj)
The primary theme of the play "who run for happiness" is running. We follow a group of runners of various ages and genders who don’t know each other but meet for group recreation. The story is framed as a journey of this random group, which responded to a Facebook invitation, running from the city through the forest on an evening run. As they run through space, the stage directions reveal the decay of a certain era.
Through inner first-person monologues that intertwine between the unnamed speakers, the intimate worlds of the runners are revealed to the audience. These monologues explore recreation as a way of “healthy” disconnection from reality and diagnose various reasons behind the need for such an escape. "who run for happiness" is an analysis of the current state of the world and the individuals who can no longer find their place in it.
Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti's main area of interest and research is institutional (post-)dramatic theatre, with a focus on theoretical reflection on production phenomena. During his undergraduate studies, he focused on marginalised communities in Slovenian dramatic theatre, especially representations of male homosexuality and the significance of ŠKUC Theatre in this field. He completed his undergraduate studies, as well as his postgraduate studies, with research on prominent but still unexplored Slovenian female directors (Nina Rajić Kranjac and Mateja Koležnik). He is continuing his research activity in this direction, reflecting on contemporary phenomena and especially the works of Slovenian female theatre directors in his doctoral dissertation.
Goran Vojnovic for In Search of Lost Language (2024) -
ETC Member Theatre Slovensko Narodno Gledalisce Nova Gorica (Slovenia/Nova Gorica)
Set in the early 1960s, it the story of two brothers of Slovenian origin who, due to their violent father, took separate paths in life during their early adulthood. Each ended up on a different side of the Slovenian-Italian border. The first, Giuseppe Materazzi (or Marjan Ramovš) became a prominent figure in the Italian fascist regime, while the second, Stane Ramovš, rose to a position in the Yugoslav administration.
The play was commissioned as the second part of trilogy of stories from Gorizia area in the context of 2025 European Capital of Culture. The trilogy explores complex relationships between the lives of the inhabitants and the intervening politics.
In Search of Lost Language delves into the unreliability of memory, exploring how memory - be it individual or collective - can fade, deceive, and divide.
Goran Vojnović likes to explore the themes of identity and complex history of ex-Yugoslav area as his family background is ethnically mixed (Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian) and he has first-hand experience of being a stranger in one’s own land as well as in the country of origin.
