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Plays
Sandra Szwarc
Doppelgänger
A monologue of a man who after the death of his twin brother explores depression and phantom pain, to end with his identifying with the deceased (the eponymous double) and the desire for revenge. Jarosław Kaczynski's legacy after the death of his brother may be a key to this play but the main character remains unnamed. The author was inspired by the phenomenon of twins, as examined by psychologists and anthropologists, alongside with the mechanism of national mourning after the Smolensk disaster.
David Greig
The Events
This play by a Scottish playwright returns to Breivik's massacre on Utøya Island in 2012. The author shows the mechanism of the birth of hatred, going back to the childhood of the main character. He does not present a moral or psychological panorama, and yet through questions, answers, choral songs and references to pop culture a story about the place of tolerance in modern times is born.
Marius Ivaškevicius
Masara
The drama begins in Donbas when the remains of the plane and the bodies of its passengers fall on the home of accidental people, the security services immediately appearing on the spot. The image referring to the shooting of a Malaysian plane in 2014 in this area is the starting point for telling a story of the escalation of violence: first, by military authorities, trying to use the tragedy to introduce new, stricter law, and later, in the second part of the play, by terrorists, the self-proclaimed defenders of traditional order.
Robert Jarosz
The Fourth Volume
A fairytale story of a girl and a cat living in a crossing guard hut turns into a sensual, ambiguous story about entering into adulthood, and everything turns out to be a reading rehearsal of the play. Robert Jarosz deals with issues that are poorly understood, for example the border between the human and animal worlds, and the limits of artistic engagement. His text strikes with a simple, molded form, which is later deliberately broken.
Essays, Studies
Adam Szostkiewicz
Notes On the End of the World As We Know It
Poland is perhaps the most frightened nation in today's Europe, although no wave of refugees from Syria or Iraq has reached us and no attacks involving Muslims have taken place so far. Furthermore, our heritage includes the multicultural tradition of the Jagiellonian Republic, the best era in our history before the third independence and accession to the European Union, symbolically and civilly integrating us into Western world.
Piotr Dobrowolski
David Greig and Rightist Extremism
Greig attempted to face the darkest incarnation of darkness. The Events commissioned by the London-based Actors Touring Company, was inspired by Anders Breivik's crime. Where does the evil come from, capable of shoving a man into killing dozens of casual victims? Greig spoke to people affected by Breivik's crime. He met with people who knew him personally. He was primarily concerned with the consequences affecting the community in which they lived.
Aleks Sierz
Dark Times. British Theatre After Brexit
An extended version of a feature published in "PAJ" 115 (2017) on the theatre’s reaction to the UK Referendum vote to leave the European Union, which took place on 23 June 2016, and reasons that led to the triumph of the irrational over reason, this tendency having been noticed and described by the theatre for years.
Małgorzata Szum
London is Open
A review of London's major theatrical events, which in the summer of 2017 greeted all visitors with the large Everyone Welcome banners and London is Open, held in the city centre and above all the "theatre district" across the West End. This is another preview of the campaign launched by London's famous Mayor Sadiq Khan, who began his office in May 2016, one month before the Brexit referendum.
Rafał Pokrywka
Two Plays About Terrorism
The claim that literature has only been interested in terrorism in recent years, would be naive. Terror is not the domain solely of crime stories and thrillers, although these genres are still most likely to be involved in the description of the phenomenon, also, and perhaps primarily, for commercial purposes. It is difficult to deny this supposedly harmless literary fictions the power of social influence, especially when they turn into a media spectacle, and such a fate was encountered in Germany by Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror , and to a certain extent also by Julia Zeh’s Der Kaktus.
Variants Of Community
Marcin Bogucki, Marta Bryś, Szymon Kazimierczak, Katarzyna Niedurny, Anna Wakulik talk about the latest season in Polish theatre and diverse variants of the community it proposes.
Columns
Tadeusz Bradecki, Marek Beylin
Varia
Contexts
Notes on plays:
Olga Bach Die Vernichtung; Marie NDiaye Honneur à Notre Elue; Arkadiusz A. Grochot Kołysanka nieprawdziwa