Contents:
Plays
Elżbieta Chowaniec
Lady with an Ermine
A story inspired by the biography of Simona Kossak, researcher and populariser of animal life. A descendant of an artistic family, she did not live up to the hopes placed in her and she holed up in the Bialowieza Forest because she was happier among the deer and wild boar than among people. The author reaches for an interesting formal catch, writing out characters of Simona and her relatives into different animal voices. In this way, to a certain extent, she fulfills her character’s message to try to go beyond humanity and give voice to the inhabitants of the Forest.
Krzysztof Bizio
Front
Five scenes, in each there are two men and the third one who is silent or the two just talk about him. Different scenarios and situations: at the police station, before the funeral, after a job interview, in a summer house, in an abandoned hangar. And five studies of violence, which sometimes results from absurd reasons. Once again the playwright Krzysztof Bizio, using minimalist but expressive means, investigates the anatomy of the conflict.
Irina Waśkowska
Visit
We do not know whether the main character of this monodrama is talking to a close person, a psychoanalyst, or maybe she is praying. In poetic emphasis, often similar to the Song of Songs, she talks about the subsequent experiences of puberty, and, above all, about sexuality. Was she a victim in her youth? How did this experience affect her adulthood?
Asya Voloshyna
Mum (Mama)
For the main character of this monodrama each birthday is a reason for a special type of remorse. When she was a few years old, her mother died of cancer leaving a series of letters to be read on her daughter’s birthdays over the following years. They contain primarily birthday wishes, but also a list of visions of the daughter’s life. And what the mother imagined and wished for is significantly different from reality.
Essays, Studies
Monika Żółkoś
Mothers’ hell
An extremely strong voice of opposition to the ideologization and institutionalization of motherhood comes from the author commonly placed in the midst of the literary life in the interwar period. The theatrical work of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska read today reveals its journalistic edge, sounding bitter and penetrating. Motherhood is perhaps the biggest topic of her dramas, which has not yet resounded enough.
Agata Łuksza
"Mrs Prosecutor", or resentment
Mrs Prosecutor by Morozowicz-Szczepkowska is not so much a forgotten text as a completely unknown one, which - probably - never left the drawer of the author's desk. It is a drama that directly and explicitly shows the pathologies of the Stalinist regime in Poland in the early 1950s.
Inconsistency
Interview with Maciej Nowak, artistic director of the Polski Theatre in Poznań.
You can
Interview with Karolina Ochab, director of the Nowy Theatre in Warsaw.
Further talks 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.
Marina Davydova
A curtain labelled "Putin"
For some time, not only has Kirill Serebrennikov been a director, but also a symbol of the new Russian theatre. And his "business" is a prism through which one can, with some good will, see all political, economic and aesthetic problems of Russia.
Pawel Rudniev
Dark – sleep, light – run away
About Irina Vaskovska, who in her work takes up expressive feminine themes. The most serious conflict in her approach is the withering and dying of the female body in the context of control and oppression, the prohibition of love and the impossibility of life following the opinions of others.
Maryla Zielińska
Anti-doc tragedy
Asya Voloshyna, the author of Mum, wrote this play in the crisis moment of her professional life, when she wondered whether what she was doing made sense. She wanted to test herself in an experiment, a new form, a different language. She thought about the documentary drama made of fiction, so that the literary creation would seem a fragment out of life in the Teatr.doc style.
Ewa Majewska
Ophelia's madness as a structural transformation of the public scene
Following Ophelia's activities in Zorka Wollny's performance, not only do we follow the system of representation, but also experience the problems and limitations of political representation. We find in ourselves and in others all those abandoned, ridiculed, isolated and desperate women who experience the clash with social sex standards as collisions with an opponent that is impossible to overcome.
Paulina Trzeciak
Emancipation anger
The structure of performances by Marta Ziółek takes the form of a collection of various, fragmentary, but related movement compositions. The performances that transcend the medium of the dance interpenetrate with the socio-cultural contexts, and thus they are placed at the meeting point of various disciplines. Four performances by Marta Ziółek - Do Yourself, IT, So Emotional and Pixo constitute a journey through the everyday experiences of late-capitalist reality.
Columns
Marek Beylin, Tadeusz Nyczek, Pedro Pereira
Varia
Contexts:
Olga Byrska about the discussion in the French press regarding the controversial proposal for the release of Céline's anti-Semitic pamphlets.
Notes on plays:
Audrey Schebat La Perruche, Ibrahim Amir Homohalal, Florian Zeller Le Fils