This July, we mark the 10th anniversary since Polde Bibič passed away, the actor and theatre pedagogue, as well as a valuable author of memoirs and documentary literature on Slovenian theatre. He was a member of the acting ensemble at SNT Drama Ljubljana – and its director for a few years – but he was present elsewhere as well; next to numerous theatre roles, he created an extraordinary number of roles in film, television and radio. In 1984, the Croatian director Georgij Paro described him as the “prototype of a Slovenian actor” and added that Bibič “is like the god Janus, but with a single face that is a tragic and comic mask at once. Hence, Bibič is an ideal actor of today’s theatre moment which erases classical genre specifics and acts at the uncertain boundary of our life’s grotesque scent.”
In his commemorative vignette, the doyen of Slovenian theatre criticism Vasja Predan pointed at Bibič’s roles and singled out Falstaff in Paro’s staging of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, SNT Drama Ljubljana 1993/94 (on the photo), that “can be said to have drawn a lot from the rich repertoire of the specific folk acting (the so-called noble folk play) that is familiar to all of us, its plebeianism without restraints. /…/ In this gigantic unison of loud laugh and mockery, gaiety and lucidity, Bibič always maintains measure, he never and in no way indulges in the tempting, but cheap or even dangerous populism.”
From our Collections – July 2022 Poster:
