The Realistic Theatre of Skierniewice with the project "Busz po polsku"

From 5 to 7 May, the stage of the Theatre of the Eighth Day will host the Poznań-based Palmer Eldritch Theatre with the premiere of “Alien”, the Gdańsk company Zielony Wiatrak with “Kręgle” (“Bowls”), and the Realistic Theatre of Skierniewice with the project “Busz po polsku”.

“Alien” was created in collaboration with the New York playwright Howard Pflanzer, who, fascinated by the production “Jarzenie”, proposed a joint theatrical venture to the company. The meeting of these artists produced a work that is moving and at the same time ironic, full of an original sense of humour and boldly exploring the mythologies of popular culture.

In this production ecological paranoias meet hypotheses about extraterrestrial civilisations, and a Poznań group communicates with an American freak. Is the ocean that separates the makers a barrier to the imagination? Who are the Aliens really, and are they in fact among us? How large is your ecological footprint, and does our planet really belong to us? What do those who were here before us want?

“Kręgle” — an existential mangle

Two players. Or perhaps one? Who, by the force of his convictions and beliefs, tries as with a bowling ball to knock down the pins of questions and doubts arising from a collision with the badly worn face of his own existence. Marek Brand’s production, so heterogeneous in its import, prompts the viewer to reach for a varied interpretative apparatus, and not a Freudian one alone. “Kręgle” is not merely worth seeing — it deserves to be seen. Besides its reflective and aesthetic charge, the production is distinguished by a closeness between actor and spectator, thanks to an auditorium built in the shape of a U. (Anna Kołodziejska, Teatralia Trójmiasto)

“Busz po polsku”

One of the most interesting propositions outside the current of “necessary theatre” was the project of the Realistic Theatre of Skierniewice, inspired by Ryszard Kapuściński’s collection of reportage from the Polish provinces, written between 1958 and 1961. “Busz po polsku” shows the process by which reading brings the imagination to life.

The project consisted of an exhibition of photographs and a theatrical showing. The pictures were taken mainly in Warmia, near Węgajty. The word “exhibition” does not quite capture the way they existed in the landscape of a Warmian village. One discovered them while walking slowly towards Godki from the direction of Węgajty or Pupki. No route was marked out. The photographs, captioned with quotations from Kapuściński’s stories and lit intensely by the sun, hung on a fence, on a barn, between two roadside posts, appearing not in an exhibition manner but rather a performative one. The makers called them “animated photography” or “staged photography”, meaning that real elements were set beside constructed ones, and actors beside chance amateur models. In the photograph from Cisówka there appeared, for instance, a descendant of the Łuksza that Kapuściński wrote about, along with people from the village who had taken part in the opening of the station described in the piece “Daleko” (“Far away”). (Kamila Paprocka)