Mirek Kaczmarek

The performance is performed in Ancient Greek with simultaneous translation into Polish using headphones.

A play co-produced by the Nationaltheater Mannheim

The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald – one of the most important novels of the 20th century – on the stage of the Słowacki Theatre! A tale of a great dream, great love, great disappointment and great emptiness. A tale of a world shaking off the dark times of war, throwing itself into the revelries of the Jazz Age.

Jay Gatsby's residence, the Valley of Ashes, Long Island, USA. The summer of 1924. Around 8 p.m. A string of posh limos pull into the driveway. The servants welcome the guests with broad smiles and champagne. Inside, you can hear the bustle and sounds of a jazz band tuning up. The overwhelming, dizzying scent of perfume, flowers, desire and money. And the constant questions: where is the host, how did he manage to invite the crème de la crème of New York?, and finally: who is this Great Gatsby? Suddenly there comes the music – swinging, rousing. Everyone hastily sheds their expensive coats and runs onto the dance floor. And you? What are you waiting for? Get in and party with us!

We all know the first lines of the invocation opening ‘Pan Tadeusz’. Lithuania is Adam Mickiewicz's homeland, which the poet lost just like one would lose their health. In recalling Lithuania, the first thing that springs to the poet's mind are its beautiful farmlands. But is he at all concerned with the stories of the people who cultivated those fields? ‘Pan Tadeusz’ is clearly focused on the story of the nobility, as its title suggests; after all, it tells the story of the last nobleman's foray. The national epic seems to completely ignore the rest of the world. So who is it written for? What do we, as contemporaries, actually have in common with the story of incessantly bickering nobles; a story that ends with the contractual marriage of a fourteen-year-old girl to the titular ‘Pan’? What does this story really teach us today? And what is it actually about? Are we supposed to admire it or hate it?

And what if Poland plays the leading role in a horror story? Cast according to conditions. And not in just one episode, but in multiple seasons spanning centuries? What if the action takes place mainly in a cemetery, where behind every tombstone lurks a starving ghost – the soul of a national (anti)hero, crying out for penance and absolution? What if going down to the basement gives you goosebumps, because you never know what you'll come across, what – carefully hidden – will come to the surface and ruin the whole house? What if a few digs with a shovel can summon ghosts of the past that we will never be able to get rid of? That will stay with us, imposing their narrative and their aesthetics? What if this prevents us from noticing what is really important? Even if it lands right in front of our eyes. What if everything is just theatre?

‘Polish Horror Story’ is a nostalgic and liberating theatre piece written in the convention of the horror genre. A grotesque journey through the landscape of the Vistula River, where ‘you stumble upon a grave at every step’, where laughter and tears, absurdity and pompous solemnity merge into a unique elixir that we recognise at the first note. It is a story about a country engaged in a constant struggle between essence and costume.

One of the most controversial figures in Polish politics in recent decades, people's tribune, founder of 'Samoobrona' [Self-Defence] party. His turbulent political activity – from organiser of farmers' blockades and strikes, to the position of deputy prime minister and deputy speaker of the Sejm, through to his mysterious suicide in 2011 – prompts us to take a closer look at his personal story, but also at the situation of the entire social sector he represented, heavily affected by the transformation of the 1990s.