The performance of Županova Micka (1789) at the German Nobility’s Theatre in Ljubljana is considered to be the beginning of Slovenian dramatic and theatrical life. The play was adapted from German by Anton Tomaž Linhart and published the next year together with Linhart’s adaptation of Le mariage de Figaro; both became standards in the repertoires of societies and reading clubs (which also staged theatrical plays) from the mid-19th century onwards.

A fresh production of Županova Micka by the Slovenian Society in July 1848 was praised in Ilirski list / Illyrisches Blatt (“Illyirian gazette”) by the Austrian writer and theatre organizer Leopold Kordesch, who also proposed that a regular Slovenisches Nationaltheater should be founded for original and translated drama – following the example of the Croatian and Czech theatres in Zagreb and Prague. This idea, and its underlying aim of raising literary and cultural standards, had been applied to a certain extent by political and cultural societies from Trieste and Gorizia to Graz and Vienna; an especially important role in this respect was played by the Ljubljana Reading Society, which, alongside Linhart’s adaptations, staged plays by Kotzebue and others in Slovenian translations made for the occasion by members including Janez Bleiweis, Jožef Drobnič, and Ivan Navratil.

During the Constitutional Period (after 1861), the responsibility for dramatic and theatrical life fell to reading clubs, the successors of the cultural societies of 1848. They produced plays at the club premises and arranged exchange performances between the clubs. A prominent role was played by the Ljubljana Reading Club (Slovenska Matica), which for a while used the private premises of one of its members to stage plays. In the late 1860s it occasionally made use of the German Nobility’s Theatre, later to be renamed the Provincial Theatre. As in the 1850s, the ambition was to write and perform original plays, although productivity was as yet so modest that adaptations of largely German comedies (or, in one instance, from the Polish by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski) were largely relied upon. Translations or adaptations of dramatic works were printed in the series Slovenska talija (Slovenian theatre), a collection of dramatic works and plays published by the Ljubljana Dramatic Society, which emanated from the Ljubljana Matica in 1867; it carried more than 100 (mostly adapted) works published over the period 1868-96. Plays were also adapted by Josip Noli, who authored the first Slovenian manual for amateur theatre (calqued on a Czech model), also containing a catalogue of Slovenian theatre plays. The mid-1870s reprints of the collection included some established theatrical classics (Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe).

The Ljubljana Dramatic Society paved the way for professional theatre. Besides staging plays and publishing, it offered prizes for original plays based on national history and endeavoured to found a society library. It put on around 20 performances each year. In 1869, a drama school was established within the society and ran until 1879. It re-opened in 1886 under the leadership of Ignacij Borštnik, who in 1892 became art director of the Provincial Theatre in the new theatre building, which today houses the Opera and Ballet. He staged Josip Jurčič’s historical tragedy Veronika Deseniška on the occasion of its opening. The leadership of the Slovenian National Theatre passed to Oton Župančič before the First World War. In 1907, a regular Slovenian theatre was also established in Trieste.