Szymborska’s poetry travels between irony and warmth and finds strength where life itself finds it: in paradox. The impression I got is that the driving force for every actor was poetry helping her/him to touch within themselves, according to their age and personal contexts, the most sensitive points. I think that is why the actors conveyed the atmosphere so vividly, the feel of the world emanating from Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry. Their acting unlocks very personal images in each spectator. Her poetry contains, that is how I feel it, the whole of the 20th century, all its sufferings and resurrections, written in all honesty; in its detail and in its rhythm, it conceals the awareness of a miracle which invigorates the spectator. It conveys a powerful experience of the continuity of existence bathed in fine irony. The encounter between the director Selma Spahić and Wislawa Szymborska is rewarding because it resembles a reunion of two old soul mates. The director skilfully stages the poetic narrative and provides it with a framework. With acting, she empowers poetry to show the ineffable. It takes the characters back to the world of the primeval beginning where they re-establish the contact with themselves and others. Selma Spahić’s production of 4 in the Morning is hors d’oeuvre woven of Szymborska’s poetry itself, and it is both fascinating and terrible.
Lidija Vukčević, Vijesti
The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.
The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of an-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
- three cheers for the ants. And let five o’clock come.
If we’re to go on living.
Wislawa Szymborska
SELMA SPAHIĆ (1986), theatre director, graduated from the University of Sarajevo, Academy of Performing Arts. Some of the productions that she has signed her name to are Hypermnesia (Heartefact/Bitef, Serbia), Scratching or How My Grandma Killed Herself (BNP ZE/Heartefact, B-H/Serbia), Cleaning Ladies (CNP Podgorica, Montenegro), The Secret of Raspberry Jam (SARTR/MESS, B-H), The Assembly (National Theatre Sarajevo/Chamber Theatre 55/SARTR, B-H), The Chicken (MESS/ZeKaeM /BITEF, B-H/Croatia/Serbia), Liliom (SNG Drama Ljubljana, Slovenia), 1981 (SNG Drama Maribor, Slovenia), The Master and Margarita (HNK Ivana pl. Zajca Rijeka, Croatia), My Factory (BNP Zenica, B-H), 4 in the Morning (Kosztolányi Dezső Theatre, Serbia). She is an assistant at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, and the artistic director of the International Theatre Festival MESS.
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