Plays
Cuckoo
Zyta Rudzka
A family drama with a middle-aged woman in the centre and some men around her: an unfaithful husband, a gaga father, an authoritarian brother, a taciturn stepson, and finally a mysterious Dogless Man who comes to repair a cuckoo clock. Under the layer of morals, the play talks about the strangeness, aggression and obsession of purity growing between people: about the return of fascist sentiments. The spilled, avant-garde form makes the text an intriguing “model kit”.
In Event of Moone Disaster
Andrew Thompson
When in 1969 man takes his first steps on the moon, Sylvia meets a cosmonaut at a party. Years later, in 2055, her granddaughter will be the first to land on Mars. What do three generations, which are brought up in the shadow of the conquest of the universe, know about themselves? The protagonists of Thompson’s play seem to know better what lies behind the horizon than what has been shaping their lives. Is it easier to prepare for an expedition into the unknown or for a meeting with the person we care about?
Shore Leave
Szymon Jachimek
A family drama with a retired sailor in the centre and the family around him. During a birthday party of former captain, family rituals are recreated, but the hero himself, depressed, does not want to take part in his own celebration and is weaving fantasies about adventures on the high seas. Funny in dialogues, but in general a melancholy play about the difficult „breaking into the port” and oppressive mechanisms of family life.
Essays, Studies
Shortages of language
Olga Byrska
Zyta Rudzka’s Short Exchange of Fire and Dorota Masłowska’s Other People, two new Polish novels in which the form and language play a huge role. What realities are created by these two languages? What are the differences between them? Working on language and on how it affects the form begins when language loses its apparent transparency and from the description tool itself becomes an object requiring exegesis.
Speaking Polish
Andrzej Lis, Marianna Lis
Dorota Masłowska’s Two Poor Romanians Speaking Polish is a text full of extremes: the traditional form of drama combined with the ancient fate over the main characters leading to the tragic finale is contrasted with extremely contemporary content, colloquial language and games with the narrative, introducing chaos and leaving the recipient with a sense of a smaller or greater loss after the curtain falls.
Between discontinuities and merging
Michał Lachman
Andrew Thompson’s In Event of Moone Disaster (premiere 2017) is the work of a debutant, a play selected and awarded in a competition organized in 2016 by a small London theatre Theatre 503. Out of over 1,000 submitted pieces, the one selected shows the reality existing in fragments, in temporary discontinuity, on the borderline of a utopian dream and reality that ironically mocks and ridicules the characters.
Question of institutional equality
Piotr Morawski
Social hierarchies have changed. The conditions for the production of cultural goods have also changed. Finally, the function of cultural institutions, which are also employers, has changed – theatres becoming medium and large enterprises. Creating democratic rules in society requires returning to the discussion about fair distribution of work, also in theatres. And not just tackling the subject on stage.
Reproduction of bad patterns
Stanisław Godlewski, Monika Kwaśniewska, Piotr Morawski, Anna Smolar, Zofia Smolarska and Justyna Sobczyk
A conversation about hierarchies and power relations in the institutional theatre, as well as about the possibilities of changing and transforming them.
Entrance for students by the side door
Kornelia Sobczak
As an institutions embedded in a specific cultural, social and moral reality, universities recreate social hierarchies and inequalities. People who study, work and lecture there had been subjected to processes of socialization appropriate for their gender, age and origin, before they came to the university, and they bring this whole burden with them. Simply put, if the white man in his forties is symbolically the most favoured figure in our culture, then it will be very much so in the university.
Applied biographics
Diana Poskuta-Włodek
Each subsequent volume of the Biographical Dictionary of the Polish Theatre is not only a collective image of theatre people whose biographies have been included in it. It is also somehow a synthetic picture of the condition of Polish theatre studies and the state of research on Polish theatre. Particularly, the third volume is an exceptional work in this respect. If written by the team of a handful of editors, to a greater extent than before, it is a milieu work, which is best evidenced by the bibliography of sources which, apart from their own, impressively extensive and accurate queries, the editors used.
Columns
Tadeusz Bradecki, Tadeusz Nyczek, Marek Beylin
Varia
Contexts: Zofia Cielątkowska on the Pushwagner’s exhibition The Machine Is Calling – Soft City and Unseen Works in Kunsthall Oslo. Notes on plays: Christopher Brett Bailey This Is How We Die; Ella Hickson The Writer; Berlin: Autorentheatertage. Playbill