Tory Outlaw (1947–2025), a graduated theater and radio director, was a rare individual, a representative of a generation driven by ethical drive, not commercial necessity. He is inscribed in the wider theater consciousness as a director Caspar Peter Handke, the first performance of the Experimental Theatre Glej in 1970. While still a directing student at the AGRFT, in October 1968, during the Vietnam War, he launched a provocative anti-war content in the Knights' Hall of Križank (at the opening of Children's Week) with one of the first attempts at multimedia theatre in our country. As an assistant, he worked on film, radio, television and at the SNG Drama Ljubljana, for his graduation performance Maids Jean Genet, and in 1972 he received the Prešeren Student Award. After 1970 he continued to direct at EG Glej and at theatres in Ljubljana (Youth Theatre, Puppet Theatre), at PG Kranj, PDG Nova Gorica, SLG Celje, and since his student days at the Šentjakob Theatre. As a director, he was given more attention by Veno Taufer, who directed Tory's play The protégé wants to be a guardian. according to P. Handke (1972) placed in the line Monument G, Pupils, Wanderer. As an interview from 2023 testifies, Tory did not highlight the differences between professional and amateur approaches to theatre and in some way did not feel them, he experienced theatre as a field of dialogue and experimentation, where some things succeed and some do not. In a departure from the relationships that drive the theatre microcosm, he got a job at the then TV Ljubljana as a documentarian, the author of many International Horizons. From the time of the famous miners' strike in the Trepča mine in Kosovo and the riots of March 1989, which foretold the spread of Serbian hegemony and then the end of Yugoslavia, we still remember how he reported from the scene and went down to the miners' cave with a cameraman; as representatives of TV Ljubljana, they were the only ones allowed close. These venues were places for Tory to experience his talent. In his free time, he travelled the world. Tory was not a classic theater person, but he remained devoted to theater and in 2015 reconstructed the direction of a 'play without words' at the Glej Theater. The protégé wants to be a guardian.. When we interviewed him two years ago, he was full of plans to film a documentary about Anton Aškerec. With a perhaps less numerically impressive theatrical opus, additional importance lies in the moments when he pressed the camera shutter and instinctively wrote history. A creator who was limited by the theatrical medium, as too narrow, too empty of adrenaline, so he crossed over to another, across the street.
Primož Jesenko, MA
In the end you just have a suit without pockets, Interview with Iztok Tory >>
