City Theater: Sarajevo optimistically and movingly about the past

The guest appearance of the Sarajevo War Theater at the 29th festival in Budva ended the night before last on the stage of St. Stefan, with the performance of the play "Flour in the Veins" by the Croatian author Igor Štiks, directed by Boris Liješević.

This deeply painful, difficult, moving, and ultimately optimistic story about the people of Sarajevo today, but also about all the other people in this area whose families were destroyed and dispersed during the 90s, will be remembered for its "excess" - a good part of the crowded of the audience cried during the entire performance, which almost doesn't happen in the theater anymore.

The great cast - Miki Trifunov, Kaća Dorić, Izudin Bajrović, Admir Glamočak, Selma Alispahić and Jasenko Pašić - was sent off from the Budva festival with a standing ovation.

The actress who is remembered by the Budva festival as Karolina Neuber in the play of the same name, Selma Alispahić, said that she was touched by the reaction of the audience:

"We are at home here - the Sarajevo War Theater was the first theater that came to Montenegro after the wars, and the good emotion we share with each other was also shown in the performance of the play directed by Boris Liješević, who is from Budva. Everything, therefore, came together in one nice story. We who played also enjoyed ourselves. We also saw tears in the audience, the auditorium is located on the stage itself, which allows us closer contact. "Flour in our veins" ends by restoring hope to all of us in these areas - the past must be overcome, we must learn from it where we went wrong, how we allowed politicians, domestic and international, to manipulate us so easily and terribly. A person must hold on to his own life, to what is now, because he can no longer influence what was, not even what will be tomorrow morning. That's how I somehow reconcile life, theater, and this performance of the play at the Grad Theater - it is unrepeatable, only now and here, tomorrow when we play it, it will already be different", Selma Alispahić believes.

One of the most famous Sarajevo actresses of the former great Yugoslavia, Kaća Dorić, received a standing ovation for the character of the mother in the play:

"For me, the space that I once felt as mine is still mine. The boundaries can exist as long as they want, I know that there are people here who are glad to see me again, who once loved me and who came to see this play. It ends with the sentence: It's good that we finally found each other again. I think we are slowly doing that in our real lives too - it certainly won't be like it was, in our still beautiful country, but we will be together again", Dorić pointed out.

Admir Glamocak, whom our audience also already knows well, believes that the play "Flour in the Veins" was exceptional for them as actors also because of the way they worked with the director Boris Liješević:

"Collaboration with this wonderful, gifted director was very special, because he has a specific directorial concept - acting results are achieved through improvisations, through the private things that we carry inside us, which always gives a lot of emotions, so that every character that we bring to the stage what came out, as much from the text as from ourselves". According to Izudin Bajrović, this drama concerns all of us, because the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia affected all families in one way or another, especially those whose "blood cells were counted" in those events:

"Flour in our veins" is a relatively new play, we haven't performed it yet, and every time we go on stage we experience it very emotionally. It is a local, Sarajevo story, but in any case it also has a universality that makes its message recognizable anywhere in the world. Most of the families in this area have been scattered for the last 25 years, some have gone underground, some across the border and across the pond, and it is difficult to find a family today that stayed together in the way it used to be, before the nineties. This is our fate, and because of that, people experience this story with so much emotion," said Bajrović.

Tonight "Chekhov Said Goodbye To Tolstoy" by Irfan Mensur

The drama program of the 29th festival continues tonight at 21:30 p.m., on the stage of the Terrace between the churches, with the performance of the play "Chekhov Said Goodbye to Tolstoy", directed by Irfan Mensur (co-production of Bitef Theater and Jugoart).

It is about the text of the currently most performed Croatian playwright Mir Gavran (his works have seen more than 250 premieres on stages around the world, and have been translated into about thirty languages), whose action takes place in Jasna Poljana in 1890. At the beginning of summer, the great Leo Tolstoy invites the young writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov to his estate, to be his guest with his wife Olga. This nice visit, however, quickly turns into a conflict, in which their wives also participate....

The drama is divided into several levels - one is the relationship between a young and an old writer, which is also the relationship between new and old art, the second level is the relationship between a man and a woman in marriage, and the third is the opposition of nobility and self-love. The "connective tissue" in this story is man's struggle against loneliness...

The play stars Predrag Ejdus, Ivan Đorđević, Jasmina Večanski and Hana Selimović.