Plays

Four friends and someone who is only here for a while. Fun, old age and big dreams.

The characters in the play are close to each other. They spend time together, discuss life, support each other, know about each other's weaknesses, witness each other's new infatuations as well as illnesses and ageing. They free themselves from the expectations imposed on them and start anew on their own terms.

The play is based on the stories of several older people interviewed by the script's creators. The themes that emerged from these conversations included the idea of freedom regained in adulthood – the absence of commitments towards their family and career, the feeling that ‘you no longer have to prove anything to anyone’ – as well as freedom defined as independence, which has to be fought for in order not to lose it. This ambiguous situation that comes with old age leads to new loves, decisions to relocate, the desire to pursue your dreams, to reclaim your physical well-being, or the need to make a film about the political situation in the world.

The performance shows that sometimes it's not too late to implement even the craziest plans, though it may prove difficult.

The show, under the working title ‘Australia’, will invite the audience to an interactive encounter with anxiety-ridden characters, struggling with both latent individual phobias and the increasingly widespread fear of nuclear war. We will tell the story of a family that ends up in an airport in the middle of the night, frantically trying to get out of the country. In the intimate space of the Machine House, we will examine where our fears come from, how quickly we are able to transmit them to one another, and what they can lead to. We will ask: How do we distinguish between what appears to be valid and what might be considered paranoia? Just how bizarre states and reactions can anxiety lead us to? Is there a way to effectively make people feel safe? And how often is our own helplessness the source of our dread?

The show, under the working title ‘Australia’, will invite the audience to an interactive encounter with anxiety-ridden characters, struggling with both latent individual phobias and the increasingly widespread fear of nuclear war. We will tell the story of a family that ends up in an airport in the middle of the night, frantically trying to get out of the country. In the intimate space of the Machine House, we will examine where our fears come from, how quickly we are able to transmit them to one another, and what they can lead to. We will ask: How do we distinguish between what appears to be valid and what might be considered paranoia? Just how bizarre states and reactions can anxiety lead us to? Is there a way to effectively make people feel safe? And how often is our own helplessness the source of our dread?

[...] one cannot be satisfied with the role of an unwitting performer of existential activities. And inself-defence,
one must pursue the meaning of everyday life as if it were a lurking criminal.

We are going to philosophise. Though perhaps philosophising may seem like the wrong term in this case, because it is associated with the mind, and here it's about philosophising with the body, philosophising about what we experience, and how we experience it as carnal beings. As beings in female bodies. Philosophising is mostly associated with the "heights" of the human (meaning: male) intellect, and to many it seems the opposite of a daily routine filled with trivial activities. We, on the other hand, wish to philosophise about the ordinary, the banal, the trivial, about the cleaning up, the busyness, the puttering around and tending to everything. About the daily labour that is the essence of our existence. This is where we’ll be searching for the meaning and properties of our human-female existence. In the existential reality that takes the form of a washcloth, a cherry fruit or a piece of meat.

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.

Who is Madame Bovary today? Does she even exist?

She does.

She's a wife, a mother, a woman, a person of high creative potential, a person fulfilling the needs of other people and of society, often believing that they are her own needs.

An adaptation of Dorota Masłowska's latest novel premieres on the stage of the Słowacki Theatre!

It will be an urban performance about FOMO (fear of missing out) of the residents of modern metropolises. It’ll tell personal stories about the disorientation of modern people, entangled in the reality of simple and one-dimensional messages, so incompatible with the desired image of the modernist European, who is concerned with ecology, progressive, and thinks seriously about the future of the universe. It will be a story about existential loneliness in a world where relationships with other people remain the only reality, although every contact makes you bleed. A story about protagonists who crave to be heard, while simultaneously panicking that they don't really have anything to say.

‘Magic Wound’ will also be a play that delicately diagnoses the awkwardness of functioning in the form of a therapy of our collective fears – more or less acknowledged. So once again we will make it about language – though this time about the language of love.

Two doctors: Józef Dietl – a retired doctor and the president of Krakow, and young Stanisław Kurkiewicz – the pioneer of Polish sexology. They meet at the end of the 19th century in a Krakow salon in order to co-treat an elegant, mature female patient. With light-heartedness and humour, they reveal to us the secrets of the then Krakow, the Polish sexological terminology and... theatre.

Poland. A bunker somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The not so distant future. Weary from the exhausting civil war, the delegations of the Patriot and Democratic parties meet under the guidance of a neutral Hostess to negotiate the terms of peace, and to erase the demarcation line dividing the map of our country. Weapons and phones deposited, notes spread out, the roar of explosions on the surface has stopped for a while – time to start the talks! ‘Peace’ is a play written especially for the Słowacki Theatre by Szczepan Twardoch, who also co-directed the play with Robert Talarczyk. It's a story about contemporary Poland and Poles. About our ambitions, fears, desires and frustrations. And about the fact that perhaps what unites us most as a nation is our... mutual hatred.

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

A play co-produced by the Nationaltheater Mannheim