press
SHIFT theatre III
ABC oder Krieg, quasi una fantasia, 2014-2015
Nostalgy with a pinch of imagination
(...) The story intertwines historical facts with the concurrent crucial topic, the so-called "črkarska pravda" (the so-called Alphabeth War) in the first place, however, it does not lack the author's imaginative interventions: the most exposed one being a relationship between the paintress Mina Karadžić and her model, France Prešeren. Ivo Svetina wrote a wonderful text, which takes us back to school days when we learnt about the formation of Slovenian language. Wit and playfulness among the main protagonists is abundant. Particularly endearing are the scenes between Karadžić (played by Ivan Bekjarev), Jernej Kopitar (Peter Musevski), Matija Čop (Borut Veselko) and France Prešeren (Jure Ivanušič), every now and then falling into quite intimate love scenes or fatherly affectionate acts with the two female characters - Mina Karadžić (Aleksandra Balmazović) and Antonija pl. Höffern (Vesna Pernarčič). The stage director, Barbara Novakovič Kolenc, created an orginal and convincing set design in accord with the plot and time, and rendered the text in around twenty tableaux, lined up along the performance as cinematic sequences. (...)
DNEVNIK, 26 January 2015, Nika Leskovšek
Kneading the language visually
(...) Gently floating and aesthetically beautiful performance with significantly (almost painting) image by director Barbara Novakovič Kolenc (which is also set designer) must therefore bear a strong voice seal. Its theme is, after all, the language actually a mythological structure (construction) which hide behind the history of constructing language and cracks it on the vortex of power. Theatre (stage) language, this time built primarily with associative visual layers - it is more a theater of images - that affects subtle and in a parallel level lead the viewer in-between the links in the text. (...)
DELO, 23 January 2015, Matej Bogataj
Review: ABC oder Krieg (Quasi una fantasia)
(...) Ivo Svetina's text perfectly adheres to historical facts, as far as it concerns the characters and the importance of the polemic. As such it can be ranked alongside literary biographies as well as series and plays about Prešeren and Trubar, evidently as the nation-building and didactic vehicle (...)
He placed the historically costumed protagonists (design by Alan Hranitelj) into the emperor's library. Jure Ivanušič plays Prešeren, a statuesque poet, who actually takes the gun in his hand by the end of the play, though remains powerful and charming. Mina is Aleksandra Balmazović, most fragile and delicate in its aroused sentiment. Karadžić is Ivan Bekjarev, featuring as a kind of a ready-made, as if taken from a textbook reproduction, an advertisement for Serbian epic poetry by image and sound. For better understanding of Čop's personal failures, Borut Veselko decides to stutter, especially before his beloved, or in some intricate arguments, as if to stress his clumsiness when faced with Kopitar, performed by Peter Musevski. A pragmatic, not exactly the most flexible man, follows his vision, the letter of the law and his firm belief that grammar should come first, and then perhaps poetry. Vesna Pernarčič is a slightly mysterious Baraga's sister.
The performance is a historical croquis, a fabricated fragment of the national and linguistic history. In this regard it is quite intelligible and didactic as well as bond generating, open towards Vienna, one of the former metropola and the site of a lively controversy on various aspects of the development of thinking, grammar, writing and poetry.
