The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Drama
Olja Lozica

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Teatar &TD

An intimate, touching drama about a woman who, by virtue of her illness, loses her memory and with the help of a guardian, a man of immense affection and understanding, tries in unusual ways to reconstruct her former life but also to recreate her personality.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Olja Lozica, this time as the author, sets out only a conceptual structure in which an older woman reconstructs her life with the help of a young man, while the script has been created from improvisational acting byOlivera Baljak and Goran Guksić.

While Tamara (Olivera Baljak) is trying to rescue her key moments of happiness from oblivion, she struggles not to lose completely the relationships which faded away long time ago with the man she loved and who loved her, too. Faced with the consequences of galloping degenerative disease her past blends seamlessly with her present, forming a wondrous amalgamation of life that has passed away and the one that will never come. The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living; can we transfer this memory like you do with your CDs or is it irretrievably lost in transfer?

"The legendary actress Olivera Baljak and less known Goran Guksić from Osijek, a good example of an actor open to experiments, at the very stage build the relationship of mutual identification in extreme conditions, which is theatrical rarity in itself. It is particularly laudable decision by Goran Guksić to play an extraordinary person who wishes to commit himself to the other without the slightest doubt and wholeheartedly, cooperating with the slightest whim of a very demanding patient. Baljak, on the other hand, ranges strong emotional states of her heroine perfectly: from great anger, because no one understands her “correctly”, through far less declarative floods of mourning and helplessness, conscious hiding of her own disorientation, all the way to passionate need to just continue with an attempt for recalling, even at the cost of constructing a completely new world, where the boundary of history and fiction is tangibly erased. In the end, it is no longer important whose face is in front of the heroine of increasingly difficult disease. The important thing is that this is still a human face, who wants to be next to her (evenwhen no longer paid for it) and who looks at her with gentleness."

Nataša Govedić, Novi list 

Authors' team

Director  Olja Lozica
Dramaturge and Theatre Music  Matko Botić
Set and Costume Design  Mario Leko

Cast

  Olivera Baljak
  Goran Guksić