Music: Duo Silence
Costume design: Peter Movrin, Metod Črešnar
Set design: Sara Slivnik, Dorian Šilec Petek
Video: Iztok H. Šuc, Gašper Vovk

The apparatus or dispositif for the staging of Paul Claudel’s The Hostage is tied to the ultimate act of terror in the human landscape, where we must make a choice, in order to be able, via a radically rejected framework of choice, to emerge through No! into a new singularity . . . The question of terror, in a story that belongs to the genre of melodrama, is implied through the ideological pillars of State, Church, class struggle, love, economy, and through a veil – love or money, freedom or death – with regard to which Jacques Lacan says “the only proof of freedom that you can have in the conditions laid out before you is precisely to choose death, for there you show that you have freedom of choice.”This very special Claudelian landscape is dominated by his tactile, masterful verse style consisting of long, luxuriant, unrhymed lines of free verse, acclaimed in literary theory as the verset claudélien.
Claudel’s The Hostage, set against the background of the brutality of the French Revolution, is thus a drama about the paradox of a forced choice, in which Sygnede Coûfontaine, the central figure of the drama, rejects that which represents her very essence, “down to its most intimate roots” (Lacan). The drama unfolds between Sygne’s choice and Sygne’s No!, in which the hostage of the word, through an act of freedom and with the mute and deathly grimace of her negation, emerges into a new singularity.