The Play We Took Seriously

In Škofja Loka, a small town near Slovenia’s capital city Ljubljana, you can catch a staging of the oldest play in Slovene.

The Škofja Loka Passion Play or Processio Locopolitana is a play that shows snippets from the Old and New Testaments, especially the suffering of Jesus Christ, and was written on the basis of traditional Slovenian penitential processions. 

The play always draws thousands of spectators, and is therefore the largest open-air theatre production in Slovenia.  

The play was staged from its creation to 1751 each year on Good Friday. Three hundred years later, in 1936, it was presented on the courtyard of bourgeois school.

WWII stopped the production of the passion play, but afterward, there was even a staging of the play in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the Slovenian Village.

The revival of the play began in the 1970s. At first, only parts were performed, and then the entire story in the church of Sv. Anne in the Capuchin monastery. 

First performance in the old town was in 1999, followed by performances in 2000, 2009 and 2015.

Performing such a complex play requires hundreds of actors! These actors are all amateurs.

At the staging of the Passion Play in 1999 and 2000, director Marjan Kokalj wanted to follow Friar Romuald’s instruction that the actors should be ordinary local people from the area of Škofja Loka – there were 680 actors who co-created the play in those years.

The 2009 production of the Passion Play attracted 24,000 spectators, with 800 actors and 80 horsemen taking part. 

Under the director Borut Gartner’s watchful eye, new pieces of music were added to the production, including three minuets for lute, which were written as “tabulatuta”, a special note system, and were added into the manuscript written on a piece of paper.

Six years later, in 2015, the play was directed by Milan Golob, who wanted to focus on professional work with the actors, as he believed that the play should be understandable rather than spectacular. His reprisal counted 958 actors, 64 horsemen, and 23,000 spectators.

The production in 2015 was also made better by the costume design, which was upgraded from the previous years. 

The Škofja Loka Passion Play is undoubtedly a spectacular theatre production.  

At the same time, it brings to life Biblical stories we are only used to reading, lending an even more profound depth to the written word.