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Plays
Inspector. There is Going to Be a War
Artur Pałyga
Today’s Poland, a provincial town like in Gogol’s plays. The mayor gets a letter with the message that a government inspector would pay them a visit after several years. Although the inhabitants remember Khlestakov as a cheat, the mayor orders preparations anyway. An ambitious official arrives, and takes over the power, introducing "old new times". Reawaking occupational sentiments of the townsfolk, he organizes a folk festival in the town, combined with "pre-construction" of warfare. The residents start marching on and then shoot with increasing enthusiasm. It turns out that the festival was supposed to be a joke, a provocation for the needs of television, but now it is too late to fix the situation – a war breaks out.
Waiting Room
Marta Guśniowska
In the waiting room of some unknown institution different people sit and tell their stories in turns. The stories are absurd: a woman is having an affair with her watch, a man arranges a date with a girl who looks dead, a professor starts receiving love letters from his own dog. The situations result from a word play and accidental associations. One scene easily moves on to the next. The characters are not too happy with their lives, they are rather frustrated and lonely, but the light, unconstrained narrative helps them to turn their problems into a joke.
Mary Page Marlowe
Tracy Letts
The over sixty-year-old title character returns to the past in a series of non-chronological scenes, making a kind of summary of her life. From dreams full of hope to unfulfilled plans and plans realized otherwise. Frequent moving for work that results in conflicts with her children, the hope of falling in love and a failed marriage, the dream of a trip to Paris that has never come true. From the beginning we know the finale of most situations, but discovering their sources is by no means less attractive.
Strange Times, Strange Love, Strange Lives
Viliam Klimáček
Three thematically linked but independent one act plays, their characters trying to find themselves in a country that performs a bizarre step backwards after years of development in a certain direction. The values that have been valid so far (freedom, democracy, minority rights) now seem to be a relic of the past. Lost, they are trying to find a place in this world that closets itself to all diversity and curiosity towards the other.
Essays, Studies
Defense of Necessity
Dorota Buchwald
Polish public theatres and public art institutions are the common good and undoubtedly should be subject to protection. Just as indisputable is the right of everyone to have access to the goods of culture they have created. Who does not understand this, acts to the detriment of the culture and the community that produces this culture. Only the shape and scope of this protection must be discussed.
Write Hard
Joanna Crawley
Writers, dramatists and screenwriters, born in the seventies and eighties, entered the theatre in the aura of great promise and great misunderstanding. They were considered controversial, provocative, difficult to accept. In order to prove that they are not only stageable but also open to criticism, flexible and ready to cooperate, they competed in numerous competitions, spent months at the workshops, waited for a chance to change into a career, and performative reading – into a spectacle. When all this failed, they invested their own savings and started building their own theatres. All this time forcing, rolling, grinding and tinkering the new language of Polish theatre.
You Do Not Know the Day or the Hour
Piotr Mitzner
How did Gogol’s play come into being ? Who is Khlestakov? What to laugh at in Government Inspector? The tendency to caricature in the stagings of Gogol's drama has led many directors astray.
A Small Revolution Featuring Meryl Streep
Krzysztof Tomasik
For an ambitious young actress who wanted to play interesting roles and not just be an addition to her screen partner, there was no better time for a film start than the second half of the seventies. It was then that a revolution took place in Hollywood to show women on screen. Breakthrough titles appeared, such as Julia by Fred Zinnemann (1977), in which Meryl Streep debuted.
History as an experiment
Alun Munslow
A chapter from the book The Future of History, Palgrave McMillan 2010.
Testimony as performance
Magdalena Marszałek
The act of giving testimony is marked by the theatricality that arises from the essential for testimony constellation, consisting of the testifier and the receiver of testimony (listener / viewer). Scenarios and gestures of testimony, evident in its ritualized form, for example, in a law court, are also included in testimonies-texts and their specific rhetoric.
Treasures from the Wreck of Unbelievable. The End of History and a Spectre
Dorota Sosnowska
On the latest Damien Hirst’s exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of Unbelievable, opened at the François Pinault Foundation in Venice in May 2017. The question arises whether playing with history and the past, the exhibition does not reveal, in fact, the essence of every archival collection? Are the treasures of the past always at the same time non-things that, in the privacy of the archive, violate the coherence of time, and break a coherent historical narrative through their scandalous duration, ignoring disappearance connected with the passing of time?
Reconstruction as Profanation of the Archive
Dorota Sajewska
Intergeneric flows in contemporary artistic practice reveal art as multiple, mediated, highly self-reflective, and yet fragmentary and prone to transformation, restaging and distortion. They show art as a decentralized and moving archive with an inexhaustible potential for political profanation.
Bone Theatre Media Hand
Rebecca Schneider
The subject here is to transcend the existing duality of the archive and the body through the practice and experience of the individual, as well as the indication of the dimension of performativity, which extends between the gesture and the gesture, between repetitions of (seemingly) the same. The lecture is also an example of performative thinking in the development and locality of knowledge inherent in specific practices.
Morphing History
Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera
To morph it deliberately shape, give a specific figure or structure. In the case of morphing history, this denotes different historical narratives referring to the same fragment of the past, (not only) historical and geographically variable representations, the fact of their coming into being unmotivated by the discovery of new facts or documents, as is usually the case in academic history. Morphing is rather the effect of the author using different materials, perspectives, conventions and means of expression.
Neighbours.
Andrzej S. Jagodziński, Justyna Jaworska, Jakub Krofta, Weronika Parfinowicz, Piotr Ratajczak and Maria Wojtyszko talk about southern neighbours of Poland, Czech culture and specificity.
Columns
Tadeusz Bradecki, Tadeusz Nyczek, Marek Beylin
Varia
Notes on plays
Ödön von Horváth, Dušan David Pařízek Niemand; Lutz Hübner, Sarah Nemitz Abend über Potsdam