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ALEKSANDER NIKOLAJEVICH OSTROVSKY (1823-1886) is a Russian playwright. His early works were comedies in which he derided the representatives of the crude and selfcomplacent merchant class portrayed in The Storm. Later on, he improved his relations with the authorities and began to write historical dramas which won him the sympathy of Tsar Alexander 111. He founded Maly Teatr in Moscow and he was appointed before his death the director of all state theatres in Moscow, in USSR, Ostrovsky enjoyed the status of a cult author. There is a museum dedicated to him as well as the Ostrovsky Humanitarian Centre in Moscow. There are many monuments to Ostrovsky across Russia. Three films were made on the basis of his novel How the Steel Was Tempered and it was also adapted for the stage a number of times.

JERNEJ LORENCI was born in Maribor in 1973. He became active in theatre when he was in secondary school when he directed his first productions under the sponsorship of Mrtvo gledališće Maribor. Subsequently he enrolled AGRFT in Ljubljana to study theatre direction where his mentors were Mileta Korun and Matjaž Zupančič. After graduation he gained directing experience in Slovenian, Croatian and Bosnian theatres. He was the artistic director of the theatre in Ptuj and has won many local and international awards. In 1997 he was a co-founder of a theatre school Prva gimnazija Maribor. In 2006 he was appointed assistant professor and a year later a docent for theatre and radio direction at AGRFT in Ljubljana. He has directed plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Moliere, Chekhov, Strindberg, Bulgakov, Pessoa, Handke, Krimp, Sarah Kane and many others.

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