Meeting with a theater director, writer of prose stories, theater and radio dramas, fairy tales, poems and aphorisms, who participated in the process of modernization of Slovenian theater from Oder 57 to Drama and Mala Drama of the Slovenian National Theatre Ljubljana.
"It would probably be a rather slippery slope for anyone who wanted to guess, if not at least roughly determine, what Žarko Petan preferred to be during his long creative journey: a theater and radio director, or a satirist, or an aphorist, or a playwright, or a storyteller and poet for both adult and young readers, or a publicist, or a journalist. Because he was and is all of these and, it seems, he did all of them with considerable pleasure. But the fact that, in addition to all of the above, he was also a graduate economist - of course, a graduate director - this knowledge only complicates the aforementioned guess, when we do not forget that he also strongly wanted to be a film director, but was not accepted into the appropriate Belgrade Film Academy. And if we know that, despite all these diverse desires and, above all, so many activities during his military service (1959), he was wrongly sentenced to several years in prison in a political trial and then acquitted due to lack of evidence, the level of initial speculation can only be even higher.
But, be it one way or another, with Petan's numerous artistic activities, it is clear that theatre was the creative field that engaged him most, especially as a director and one of the founders of Oder 57 – together with Tone Partljič, they edited a collection of testimonies about this famous theatre (with Petan's introductory memoirs) – and also, although not for very long, as acting director of the Ljubljana Drama, an institution where he was permanently employed between 1966 and 1971 and which he then had to leave with his colleagues France Jamnik and Mile Korun – at the behest of director Janez Šenek. In 1972, he was accepted into its ranks by the Ljubljana City Theatre, where he worked until 1994, after which he became general director of RTV Slovenia for a while.
But as mentioned: if we disregard the writing of numerous books (several collections of aphorisms, also in many translations, prose stories, theater and radio dramas, film scripts, fairy tales, poems, etc.), theater directing was and always remained the most persistent, dynamic and almost certainly the central motif of Petan's artistic creation. He directed not only at home, but also in theaters of the former Yugoslavia and a lot abroad (Zurich, Vienna, Krakow)."
Excerpt from: Dušan Moravec, Vasja Predan: One Hundred Slovenian Dramatic Artists, Ljubljana: Prešeren Society, 2001.
More about the director in Žarko Petan, Documents of the Slovenian Theatre and Film Museum, volume 30, no. 62-63, 1994.
