Contents:
Plays
Michał Zdunik
A Detailed Theory of Life and Dying
A poetic drama inspired by the story of Jan and Antonina Żabiński, who hid Jews in the Warsaw Zoological Garden during the war. The text has a polyphonic form of a radio play: we hear voices from the past, voices of the city and simply voices of subsequent radio broadcasts on this heroic married couple. Versions of the past are tangled up and what witnesses do not remember is added up by the ghosts. The modernist language smuggles metaphysical questions: the possibility of reaching past events and the meaning of what happened.
Mateusz Pakuła
Soldier Švejk And The World Peace
A political cabaret. The good soldier Švejk (written in several actors’ voices) explains how he dealt with the problem of wars. The comic dimension and the energy of this text come from the collision of the terrible atrocities that affect the world with the naïve but clever attitude of the Czech pacifist. The play is also an accusation of a sated, liberal West, which calms its conscience in different ways or simply refuses to engage in global conflicts. The multiplicity of references to high literature and pop culture transforms Švejk into a riddle composed of several layers, and the element of fun has a liberating effect.
Lydie Parisse
The Opponent (L’Opposante)
A story of an old woman from Brittany who during the war fell in love with a German, and after the war was forced into an uncontroversial marriage of reason and without love. It is a journey against the logic of time: after her own funeral the main character recollects subsequent events from the past, revealing her own loneliness and mystery, which she managed to preserve for decades. No one knew that her affection lasted, that at the bottom of the drawer - as if it was about precious relics - there are several memorabilia carefully saved from the process of erasing everything. She betrayed, twice, first the homeland, then her own family, and yet it happened without her permission: under the influence of feelings, under the pressure of emotions that everyday life cannot handle.
Essays, Studies
Małgorzata Szpakowska
The storehouse of poisonous gas
During the pogrom in Kielce in 1946, no one issued orders or organized the massacre; however, from the beginning there were plenty of willing performers. At least this is the conclusion of the monumental work by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir Pod klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego [Under the curse. A social portrait of the Kielce pogrom] (Warsaw 2018).
Kornelia Sobczak
March Chatter 2018
The feeling that we are living in the nightmarish tragic re-enactment of March 1968 is quite common. The wording itself appeared in social media, in article titles and private conversations. A stubborn, weird, irresistible, imposing analogy was also noticed at the exhibition Stranger at Home at the “Polin” Museum of Polish Jews, the last part of which gathers the latest exemplifications of anti-Semitic narratives, referring directly to the book by Michał Głowiński.
Zbigniew Majchrowski
"Forefathers’ Eve" part five
"We demand further performances" - this was the postulate carried on a banner made of a sheet, rolled up by a group of students in the evening of 30 January 1968, after the last performance of Forefathers’ Eve in the National Theatre. And today, on the contrary, picketing "defenders of values" scream in front of theaters or even from among the audience: "We do not want such performances!".
Bartosz Żurawiecki
The sight of our suffering
Happy End is said to be the first comedy in the work of Michael Haneke. You can argue with this, in fact a lot of grotesque, weird, obscene humor is present in Funny Games and in the Pianist. The latest film, however, undoubtedly is distinguished by the subtlety of tone.
Piotr Olkusz
Writing by the eye
The playwriting work of Lydie Parisse is closely related to her activity in the field of visual arts. The stage productions of her texts very often have the character of spatial installations in which the viewer follows the action. In these works, often very feminine, always asking about the relationship between the character and the place where he/she lives, one can see the fascination by the works of Annette Messager and Jean-Luc Parant. The style of the texts remains in connection with the work of Jean-Luc Lagarce, to whom Lydie Parisse devoted an interesting monograph.
Apolinary Rzońca
Quisling’s legacy
The author traces the heritage of Quisling and longing for the great Norway, not only in Anders Breivik, who is guilty of the massacre on the island of Utoya, but also in Karl Ove Knausgard, author of the novel My Struggle, staged by Michał Borczuch at TR Warszawa theatre (2017).
Two classes.
A conversation with Joanna Nawrocka, director of the Ochoty Theatre w in Warsaw.
Another discussion in the Weather Forecast cycle about the situation of Polish theatre in the context of the social situation and the cultural policy of the state.
Columns
Marek Beylin, Tadeusz Nyczek, Pedro Pereira
Varia
Contexts:
Olga Byrska on the margin of Karel Vanhaesebrouck’s feature Theatre of War. Commemorating World War I in Belgium in "The Drama Review" vol. 61, n0 4, Winter 2017.
Notes on plays:
Łukasz Staniszewski Słoń; Pascal Rambert Actrice; Roland Spranger WORK.