Steel Magnolias

The entire story is set in a small-town hairdressing salon, where women reveal their emotions and disclose their inner worlds while having their looks polished. The events in the salon, “where no man has tread before”, focus on the final two-and-a-half years in the life of the young Emma, but her story – her striving for motherhood, her illness, her decision to get pregnant despite it and the subsequent deterioration of her health – doesn’t happen on the stage. We only see the peripheral events, we hear the salon visitors’ reactions to the watershed moments in Emma’s life and the lives of the people around her. Women intercept the outside events, react to them and, in seemingly casual chatter, disclose complex emotions and their intimate fights with more or less fateful problems.
The oxymoronic title Steel Magnolias conceals a comic melodrama about six women who, each in her own way, solve their problems and prove that they’re often stronger than men. Steel Magnolias premièred in 1987 in New York, two years later its author Robert Harling also penned a screenplay with the roles for six movie stars. Ira Ratej has taken the text that confronts us with small lives in a semirural town, adapted it and placed it into our environment and time. So the text that won the hearts of the audience even at its first staging in Ljubljana City Theatre in 2005 has become, directed by Katja Pegan, a new melodramatic hit.