2 February – with English surtitles.
The work of Michał Bałucki, a nineteenth-century Krakow playwright, gave the creators of this play a pretext to discuss our identity, or indeed, how we imagine it. How we would like to see ourselves, think about ourselves, what we’d like to believe in, and what we’d prefer to forget. And above all, it is a play about our dreams of Poland — sometimes touching, sometimes amusing, often moving to tears.
The artists have based their performance on the comedy “Neighbours,” situating it in the pastiche convention of the national fairy tale. Through this gesture, they not only back up the comic potential in Bałucki’s work, they also have a look at the dreams of returning to a marvellous, safe, and idealized past (a retrotopia) that are presently a recurring part of our public debate. A sign of this nostalgic yearning is the enormous popularity of historical reconstruction groups in Poland, but we can find many more traces around us as well.
“The setting is nineteenth-century Galicia, in other words, the here and now…”
Cast:
- Natalia Kaja Chmielewska
- Lidia Duda
- Aldona Grochal
- Katarzyna Krzanowska
- Beata Paluch
- Bolesław Brzozowski
- Szymon Czacki
- Rafał Jędrzejczyk
- Zbigniew Kosowski
- Michał Majnicz
- Jacek Romanowski, Grzegorz Grabowski **
- Łukasz Stawarczyk
- Krzysztof Stawowy
Creators:
- Jędrzej Piaskowski Director
- Hubert Sulima Script/dramaturgy
- Anna Maria Karczmarska, Mikołaj Małek Scenography
- Rafał Domagała Costumes
- Kasia Sikora Choreography
- Jacek Sotomski Composer
- Monika Stolarska Lighting director
- Filip Pawlik Assistant director
- Zbigniew S. Kaleta Stage manager/prompter
