Plays

When The Bedbug’s Dream premiered in 2001 under Kazimierz Dejmek’s direction, Słobodzianek’s play read as a biting satire of (p

Wiki, who lives on North Street, is very lonely. She has no siblings, her parents are perpetually busy, and her peers consider her a freak. Fortunately, Wiki is a girl endowed with imagination and a love of literature. So, she escapes into her world and has numerous adventures, one of which gets out of hand, and this story is about it. Before dinner, Dad orders Wiki to wash her hands and clean her room. The girl obeys the order, but to her surprise and dad's annoyance the room turns out to be even messier than before dinner. How is this possible?

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 (Pol. Na końcu łańcucha), published in 2012 by Splot Publishing House in Poland. While in the first play Mateusz Pakuła took inspiration from 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 (Pol. Ten, który sprzeciwił się szatanowi). The play is divided into two acts.

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.