Plays

Is the fight for rightful ideas worth murder?

Juliusz Słowacki's ‘Balladyna’ is a story about taking power in the face of the end of the world. A world in which it is too late to establish a new order. It is also a story about the proximity of the world of nature, which nowadays claims its initial rights more forcefully than ever before. Finally, it is a story about a world of women that has taken hold in an era in which it is too late for everything.

Enchanted by the worlds of Hobbit, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, we often forget about our own home-grown mythology: our Slavic gods, heroes and beasts. They tend to live in our consciousness only in an infantile, primitive form. So how about trying to actually revisit this realm?

Performance with English subtitles

So far known for her intriguing plays for adult audiences, this time Agnieszka Olsten focuses on three stories from Stanisław Lem's series Fables for Robots.

Fern Flower is a family play inspired by the work of Stanisław Wyspiański and a classic fairy tale about the search for the unattainable. How to achieve immortality? Is it at all possible? And at what cost?

‘In Poland the mystery of Hamlet is the following: what in Poland is there to think about’.

These are Wyspiański's words from his Study on Hamlet, written feverishly in several days – a work that constitutes a source of inspiration for many Polish directors. Wyspiański contained therein his fascination with the phenomenon of theatre, his love for the brilliant text, and his great desire to read it so profoundly as to shake the conscience of his compatriots.

‘In Poland the mystery of Hamlet is the following: what in Poland is there to think about’.

These are Wyspiański's words from his Study on Hamlet, written feverishly in several days – a work that constitutes a source of inspiration for many Polish directors. Wyspiański contained therein his fascination with the phenomenon of theatre, his love for the brilliant text, and his great desire to read it so profoundly as to shake the conscience of his compatriots.

The country is in turmoil. One can no longer stand by and just watch. Psychological violence turns into physical violence. In pursuit of freedom and independence, no one accepts a compromise anymore.

Yet another group in the sanatorium. New patients arrive at the springs to regain their health, profit from treatments and exercise, go for walks and, above all, dance. The director of the centre – Józef Dietl – is an outstanding doctor. A doctor who understands that treatment will not work without love or at least a spafling.

A selection of poems from Charles Bukowski’s book ‘On Cats’ creates a bitter-sweet (sung!) tale of feline closeness, tenderness, love, hate, fear, battles, wounds and dying. On the stage we’ll see four types of cats: ‘a bland fellow, gets along with all the other cats’, ‘the clown, big boy, endless scratches’, ‘her existence is so damned (...), if she could read she would probably wax to the sisters Brontë’, and ‘the perfect animal, he will never be tamed’.

Perhaps we’ll recognise our own cats among them, or we may even recognise ourselves. Our failures and brief moments of happiness, loneliness and love. Especially love. After all, as Bukowski said ‘I don't like love as a command, as a search. It must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door.'