When The Bedbug’s Dream premiered in 2001 under Kazimierz Dejmek’s direction, Słobodzianek’s play read as a biting satire of (post-)Soviet Russia. Today, however, against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine, its grotesque tone resonates more as a form of horror. It also allows for an understanding of the Russian invasion not so much on the level of geopolitical analysis, the struggle for resources, or — worse still — armchair psychology, but rather as the result of a monstrous  cultural entanglement: on the one hand, laden with historical baggage, and on the other, driven by desires fuelled by that very history.

The Bedbug’s Dream picks up where Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous “faerie comedy” The Bedbug left off. That earlier play, which inspired Słobodzianek, follows Prisypkin, a young man accidentally frozen on his wedding day in 1929. Revived decades later, Prisypkin finds himself in what appears to be the communist utopia he once dreamed of… and discovers it is a world in which he no longer belongs. Modern Muscovites treat Prisypkin as an oddity, view him as a relict of the past, and lock him in a zoo alongside a bedbug that was also frozen with him.

Słobodzianek takes up the narrative from there. We encounter Prisypkin still in the zoo, this time after the fall of the Soviet Union. The communist utopia has vanished and no one even remembers to feed him. Our hero escapes and embarks on a surreal, often absurd journey through post-Soviet Moscow — where Faith, Hope and Charity prance around town in Armani tights.

A vagabond, who calls himself the Prophet, takes Prisypkin seriously when the latter introduces himself as Jesus Christ. But instead of offering Russia “salvation”, the miracles, which the Prophet attributes to Prisypkin, merely expose a profound chaos of values. Every one of Słobodzianek’s characters is steeped in a contradictory mix of national myths and desires. Ideologies (or rather their hollowed-out remnants) combine into a ghastly collage — communism, capitalism, Russian Orthodoxy — and result in absurd hybrids, such as “Comrade Christ,” as Słobodzianek’s Prisypkin calls himself.

A miraculous transformation of Millionaires into Bolsheviks happens not through any divine power of the “Saviour,” but simply because such a narrative conveniently suits the wealthy, whose banks refuse to release their funds. And when that fails — because the bank quite simply does not have money — the Millionaires immediately turn against “Jesus.”

Meanwhile, a chase ensues — full of errors, unexpected twists and fruitless (though telling) philosophical debates. The chase is led by the Colonel (a gangster/corrupt politician/military man),  followed by the Free Media as well as the zookeepers and their tracking dog, Nero. The nightmare, however, soon comes to an end, while the resurrection of the Soviet Union — or the dream of redeeming the Russian soul — turns out to be an illusion. Prisypkin humbly returns to his cage and his bedbug.

What “Comrade Christ” witnesses in Słobodzianek’s Moscow feels strikingly relevant in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With remarkable insight, the author captures the nuances and paradoxes of post-Soviet Russia, a country in which, as Roman Pawłowski wrote, one might encounter “former communists beating their breasts in Orthodox churches, calling for moral renewal and adherence to the commandments; politicians whose election platforms fuse fascism and anti-Semitism with Christianity and social justice; secret police agents who have stepped out of the shadows and are clawing their way to power; and impoverished intellectuals whose heads have been turned inside out by successive ideological acrobatics.” And all of this stewing in a sauce of increasingly extreme, perverse messianism. As Leonard Neuger observes: “Słobodzianek’s Russia is looking for the Saviour. Słobodzianek’s Russia must become the Saviour.”

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”. However, when he finds a balaclava in the pocket of his coat, he remembers that he is a hit man – one tasked with killing Ada at that. All because Ada made a fool of a don by mistakenly likening him with makeup to Shrek instead of Al Capone. Unfortunately, the resolute Ada has already stolen his heart, and the man finds it hard to resist her charms. These feelings make him “analyze this” in philosophical contemplation of how to have his cake and eat it too. Seizing the opportunity, Ada takes control of the situation. Now she wants to kill the man, because, as she puts it, “it’s better to take somebody out than to be taken out”. The tables turn, and now it is the man who has to find a way to save his life. What happens next with the pair of lovers from the funeral home? You have to find out for yourself.

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). Their meeting is marked with an unspoken tension at the beginning, and over time by an increasingly open conflict between the rational and the irrational. At first, however, it might seem that it is the creator of the Sherlock Holmes novels who should be the proponent of what can be grasped and proven by human reason. The paradox of both this meeting and Matthew Pakula's play is that it is Harry Houdini, magician and illusionist, chasing away clouds and "disappearing" elephants on request, who is a believer in all things rational.

As the plot develops, the atmosphere between the couples grows thicker and thicker. A kind of climax of the play becomes the moment when Harry Houdini's mother supposedly begins to speak through Jean Conan Doyle... The magician and illusionist, however, is not fooled and cannot understand how educated people can allow themselves to be drawn into such "whirlwinds of nonsense", and his wife Bess ridicules the spiritualist séance with the statement: "I think the culprit is probably Plato, our reality is just a shadow of the true reality of blah blah blah."

Houdini vs Conan Doyle by Mateusz Pakuła is a brilliantly constructed, realistic and wildly comic play for two actors and two actresses. Both the following scenes of the piece and the distinctive characters are built in such a way that the play draws you into its content and does not allow you to tear yourself away for a moment. Here the author poses a question about the function of the irrational in our lives and forces us to reflect on faith in everything that cannot be explained by reason. What human needs, longings and fears does this faith respond to? And is it really worth tracking down and deconstructing all incomprehensible and inexplicable mysteries? What, in fact, is the difference between a predilection for illusionist tricks and belief in spiritualistic séances, and, following this line of thought - belief in God?

It's hard not to get the impression that this reflection in some way also applies to the medium of theater itself and the "illusionary magic" it produces, and thus also to theatrical tools. So the question remains as to what we choose to see. Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualistic séance or Harry Houdini's "disappearance" of an elephant?

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.

In Lem vs Dick there is indeed a clash of worlds and characters, but not so much as a realistically presented confrontation between the two authors, but as a result of a gesture by Pakuła himself, who consciously marks this confrontation with his own imagination. Facts carelessly stand here next to fiction, conjectures right next to the truth, at times mixing together and making it impossible to distinguish between them, at other times appearing clearly separated, openly challenging each other. The piece balances between derision, artistic humour and thoughtful reflection on literature, theatre and reality, which is reflected in the varied, colourful language.
It all begins with the (in this case completely true) story of the conflict surrounding the Polish edition of Philip K. Dick's Ubik in Lem's translation. The Polish author could not pay the American writer his due in any other way than in zlotys, and these, after all, were worthless in the United States... In an absurd and amusing telephone conversation, Lem proposes to Dick to come to Poland, where he will be able to spend the money due to him immediately.

Pakuła's piece is divided into scenes depicting the development of this conflict and side episodes: once Dick tries to borrow money from his Mother to come to Poland, another time he denounces Lem to the FBI, exposing him as the alleged leader of an international conspiracy. The Polish writer, in turn, in one scene talks to a SB (a communist secret police) officer who threatens him, in another complains on the phone to Ursula K. Le Guin about Dick. Whose perspective an episode is presented from remains deliberately unclear, and the subjective nature of the narrative is clearly emphasised.
The relationship between Dick and Lem serves Pakuła to confront a series of opposites or simply radically different worlds: rationalism and madness, the West and reality from behind the Iron Curtain, calculated pragmatism and narcotic malaise. At the same time, the diagnoses posed here are regularly challenged by the author, the images painted in the work being erased with a single stroke of the pen. These gestures culminate when the author himself appears in the play as a brain in a jar functioning in virtual reality. Apparently he is trying to write a play about Dick, but it doesn't work out for him because he keeps thinking about his dying father.
It turns out, then, that it is the play with fiction, the artistic creation itself and its relation to reality, that are the main focus of Pakuła's interest in this piece. The layering and interlocking narratives, which are at an ever-changing distance from reality, are a recipe for a performance that is as demanding as it is absorbing in its structure, in which the author's hand remains constantly visible.

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.

'Yes. It’s going to be a cosmic story. It’s going to be a story that happened and that at the same time rather didn’t happen. That is, yes, it is based on a biography, it feeds on the so-called true life of a true human being, who really existed, yet at the same time, it allows for plenty of fabrications' 

– Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, announces at the beginning of the play. Before Clyde, however, it was Percival Lowell who was the main proponent of its existence and a fierce explorer of Planet X. You may remember him as the author of the theory of the existence of a Martian civilisation that inspired Wells' War of the Worlds.

Pakuła's 'Cosmic story' presents a number of versions of the improbable meeting between Lowell, who was ridiculed in the scientific community, and Clyde, the actual discoverer of Pluto. However, Pakuła makes no attempt to predict the likely course of such an encounter, instead playing with the very possibility of it in a series of brilliant and amusing scenes that verge on the absurd. Once, Percival destroys the paper model of the Solar System that Clyde brought him as a gift, complaining that this ‘crap made out of celluloid’ has the wrong proportions. At other times, Percival is a jaded, clown-like paranoiac who fiercely pretends to be out of it.

Although one can hardly find seriousness in Pakuła's historical play, it is by no means meaningless. Somewhere between the frivolous jokes, references to pop culture and science, but also letters from Martians or the author's songs mixed with historical facts, a long-lost dream rears its head, the afterimages of which we can see in the story about the discovery of Pluto. A dream of discovery for the sheer joy of discovery, of knowledge without purpose. And perhaps also (at least a little) of blurring the boundaries between art and science. We have lost the ability to marvel at the universe, Pakuła seems to be saying. However, he himself has certainly not lost it, as evidenced by Clyde's final monologue, in which the story of black holes, trillions of galaxies and trillions of stars, instead of becoming a boring lesson, is transformed into a rousing appeal – more stories! Because only they can make sense of the immensity of the cosmos.

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 2013, when the play was written, the mocking jabs at an ardent idealist with a gangster-like modus operandi could have been seen as a warning or expression of concern. After all, analogies to modern times in the play were easy to spot. However, in today’s context, as the idea of Great Russia once again reaps a bloody harvest across the eastern border, Słobodzianek's portrayal of Parisian ladies performing a cancan at Stalin's wedding takes on a more ominous tone, resembling a danse macabre – although devoid of any semblance of equality in the face of death. There is no point in disenchanting Putin, and the opportunity for a history lesson seems long past, heightening the significance of the play. Słobodzianek's sarcastic humor, while amusing, now evokes a sense of fear. Thus, the laughter here is not so much a respite from the horrors of the still ongoing war, but rather an unsettling echo of the sinister chuckle of history repeating itself.

The play offers ample opportunities for laughter: in a Viennese café, where Stalin meets Trotsky, Freud and Jung engage in a duel of complexes at the neighboring table (Oedipus vs. Electra), Hitler convinces Wittgenstein that the fate of the world hinges on upcoming art college exam. On the other hand, in London, a convention of revolutionaries turns out to be financed by an American capitalist (harboring the hope that post-revolution Russia will use the soap he produces), and Lenin's discussions with the Mensheviks on political strategies are repeatedly interrupted by disputes over unequal accommodations for comrades.

In spite of being filled with Parisian cancan, Georgian folklore, and political satire, the story has a tragic ending nonetheless. When an idea turns into action, and revolutionaries attack a convoy transporting a substantial sum of money, the beauty of the political utopia becomes obscured by a bloody red. The robbery results in the deaths of bystanders, including children, and the banknotes turn out to be unusable as they are all from the same marked series. There is nothing left to do in the aftermath beyond "icing" the suspicious comrades, whom furious Stalin unceremoniously shoots in the head. At the order of the future dictator, music plays as he once again dances the lezginka... this time, however, on a stage of corpses.

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...”. Thus, the dictator learns to utilize gestures, props and proper intonation to inspire even more respect, and he also learns how to reveal physical weaknesses to create a trustworthy image. Satisfied with the lesson, Stalin complies with Stanisławski's requests and, in a gesture of generosity, decides to return the favor by teaching the director how to administer beatings and punishments, using the recalcitrant chairman of the Committee for the Arts as an example.

Słobodzianek's play is part of a series of Quartets - chamber plays written during the pandemic. While each stands as an independent work, the dramas interweave seamlessly, complementing each other through shared ideas, form, and subject matter. The author blends in varying proportion historical facts, meticulously gathered through in-depth research, with anecdotes, gossip or even fiction. This strategy allows the exploration of the great ideas of twentieth-century theater history, where prominent artists engage in discussions amidst the constant interference of politics in matters of art. Meyerhold's biomechanics clashes with Stanislavsky's method of physical action, and Kantor meets Grotowski in a café in Kraków. And it is the founder of the Theatre of 13 Rows, appearing as the protagonist of most of the Quartets, who turns out to be of particular interest to the author. However, as Dariusz Kosiński notes in the afterword to the book edition of the Quartets, the focus is not on studying and interpreting Grotowski’s work. Instead, he “appears as one who, through his very presence, poses inquiries about theater and the sense of theater-making”. This is the reason why appreciating Słobodzianek's series doesn't demand a background in theater history.

The narrative is peppered with spicy details of Moscow’s theater life at the time and discussions of theatrical aesthetics in the context of communist doctrine. Although Genius initially appears to be a light and entertaining play that is a pleasure to read and immerse oneself in, Słobodzianek leaves the audience with a lingering sense of hollowness and contemplation regarding the role of art. In the hand of the dictator, art becomes just another issue for the authorities, managed akin to filling party seats. It is, however, a constructive doubt, it would seem, one that prompts the audience to look more closely at the relations between art and politics.