Plays

The play takes place in the 16th century. Martin Luther, an excommunicated German clergyman, a great reformer of the Church, allows Roman Catholic nuns to leave the monastery and enter into marriage, which is also indirectly supposed to help him gain the support of influential figures of Germany at the time. Everything happens, of course, in secret and under the cover of darkness.

This black comedy, which is, as usual in Anna Burzyńska’s works, filled with numerous unexpected turns of events, takes place in a Funeral Home. Ada, who works there, is a mortuary cosmetologist, but she also does special commissions… On this particular day, she is to work on a body of a man whom “God did not bless with good looks.” When Ada is powdering his nose, the man suddenly comes back to life. The woman faints. After a round of genuinely witty banter, it turns out that the man doesn’t remember who he is nor how or why he “died”.

Marian – who has been saved from the Ghetto by a Polish family, according to his biological mother’s last will,  steps his way into a seminary, only later to take up a job at a small parish. When it comes to religion, Marian is extremely serious, and when observing sinful habits of the provincial church, he feels both disgusted, and terrified.

The play Hard Gun, Dead World is the second part of the diptych At the End of the Chain, published in 2012 by the polish publishinghouse Splot. While in the first play Mateusz Pakuła was inspired by the great European literary tradition (Shakespeare, Müller, Koltès), he constructed the second one on the basis of a novel “so bad it's brilliant” by amateur writer Marcin Obuchowski – The One Who Resisted Satan.

The main axis of Mateusz Pakuła's chamber play is the meeting of two extraordinary figures of the 20th century: Harry Houdini (illusionist, escape specialist, debunker of spiritualist mediums) and Arthur Conan Doyle (writer, spiritualist, creator of the character Sherlock Holmes). The men meet in New York in 1922. They are accompanied by their wives: Bess Houdini (professionally also Harry's stage assistant) and Jean Conan Doyle (considered a spiritualist medium by Arthur).

What would result from the meeting of two famous science-fiction writers – Stanisław Lem and Philip K. Dick? What if the Polish visionary-rationalist had joined forces with the mad energy of the American author? Among other things, these are the questions Mateusz Pakuła takes on in this play. Lem vs Dick is not however a straightforward attempt at finding the answers, it is more about exploring the limits of imagination (the famous authors and Pakuła’s own) on the one hand, and testing and pushing the line separating fiction from reality on the other.

Who remembers when Pluto was stripped of its planetary status in 2006? Who protested loudly against it then, joining the chorus of the ninth planet’s fans? In whom did the excitement resurface when, in 2015, the New Horizons probe delivered the first high-resolution images of Pluto to Earth, and it turned out to be exceptionally beautiful? Certainly in Mateusz Pakuła, who in Pluto p-brane presents the story of the discovery of Planet X.

In Young Stalin, Słobodzianek invites the audience on a journey through pivotal events in the life of the future dictator, recreating in a distorting mirror the decadent yet politically charged atmosphere of 1907. It is by no means a biographical piece or a psychological study, but rather a kind of ritual. In  a grotesque rhythm, the play disenchants the figure of the tyrant, inflated by history, scholarly studies, accounts and fantasies.

In Genius, the ailing Stanisławski seeks an audience with Stalin with the hope of saving the repressed Meyerhold. Employing subterfuge and flattery, Stanisławski convinces the dictator into making a deal: in exchange for teaching Stalin how to better play the role of a ruler, the latter will grant his three wishes. And so, the famous method of physical action is used in a completely non-artistic context. After all, in the words of its creator, “Ruling over a state can be an art. Also one of acting...”.