Kamieniecka, Anna Elżbieta

Grandfather "died of fear of love". Grandmother's body is alive, but for years her thoughts have been circulating around her fiancé from the war, a Home Army soldier, who picked elderberries for her. The heroine suffering from Alzheimer's no longer distinguishes between truth and fantasy - but maybe she never did? The spectre of Grandfather and the memory of the Home Army soldier are no less real than the Granddaughter, a woman of blood and bone who visits her grandmother in a nursing home. In this space, the living and the dead meet as if they were not separated by any boundaries. As the author writes: "the everyday reality of the meeting of both worlds is crucial, despite its fatalism, uncertainty and horror that it entails.

Paradoxically, it is the Grandfather's Spirit that seems to be the most rational, clear-eyed character. "ONE CANNOT DIE, THE OTHER CANNOT START LIVING!" - he accuses the Grandmother, his wife, and his neurotic Granddaughter. The old lady did not even try to find happiness in marriage. She fell into the routine of everyday rituals - cleaning, cooking - without trying to create a successful relationship with Grandpa. Her heart was always occupied by someone else - the idealised image of the man who brought her elderberries and danced kujawiak with her. Grandfather took a ghost for a wife: a woman present only in body, absent in spirit.

"You, so in love with life, you don't like life... Because life just is what it is!" - says the bitter Spirit. "And you've clung to what is not there! A dream of Poland, for which you have to give your life. The man dancind kujawiak, who once held your hand... Life is not something that you will fucking erect a monument to! You do not recognize the smell of bread, sweat and burnt pots...".

The Granddaughter, on the other hand, does not want to allow any admirer to come close. She defends herself against the intimacy, but at the same time she desires it. Both female heroines are in a clinch. Will a voice from the afterlife be able to change their mental perspective? Will the analysis of the choices made by her ancestors help the Granddaughter to work through the problems and eliminate the barriers that prevent her from achieving happiness? "For what would you do? Without this damn adventure of a war?" - the Granddaughter asks the Grandmother, provocatively.

Anna Elżbieta Kamieniecka's play is not only an in-depth psychological portrait of the three main characters who have to redefine their relations and settle accounts with the past. It is also a brilliant, slightly biting, but also a carefully calculated commentary on the romanticization of war. Grandmother devoted her whole life to building a pedestal for her former fiancé. For her, the war was indeed a "damn adventure" - and extremely romantic. Grandfather, who survived the deportation to Siberia, has other experiences.

Grandmother is at death's doorstep: she is getting ready for her last ball... The last witnesses of World War II are dying. Their testimonies are becoming more and more mediated stories, narratives serving certain particular rhetoric. The figures of Grandmother and Grandfather represent two extreme ways of practicing memory: romanticizing, mythologizing - and evoking the past with all its macabre and awareness of how it influenced the present. In this context, Kamieniecka's well-written play, far from sentimentalism, speaks not only about the fate of a certain family, but about settling accounts with history per se.

She is an attractive, athletic thirty-year-old. He is a charismatic hypnotherapist of German origin. They meet in a park; he stands up for her and saves her from oppression, she takes the bait. In a plot that could develop into a simple story with a happy ending, the true characteristics of the two quickly become apparent. The protagonists are not the people they want to be seen as. The game begins with the discovery of dark secrets, mental health and even life at stake.

Ela, the young woman we meet in the prologue, is in fact a woman-child. She experienced the trauma of harassment in her early childhood, which the reader learns about slowly, and she only seems to exude independence. The mysterious saviour, Helmut, wastes no time and gains her trust step by step. Noting the woman's obsession with a healthy lifestyle, he feeds her unhealthy snacks. The gesture, which in other circumstances can be considered paternal, in this case bears the hallmarks of a hidden need for domination. Sensing the woman's subcutaneous fears, he offers her a hypnotherapy session. The mother tries to reach the inner world of the heroine, insisting - almost violently - on meetings with a psychiatrist. It turns out that for a long time now the young woman "felt nothing", she is blocked both in the sexual sphere and on a deeper level - in the sphere of feelings.

There is one person that Ela can expose herself to. At first aggressive and closed towards Helmut, she gradually begins to open up and feel happy under his influence. However, these positive feelings are only associated with Helmut's presence. In the end, she rejects everything else - her work, her interest in reality, she breaks off all contacts. The relationship between Ela and Helmut turns into a kind of dark power struggle. It seems that there is chemistry, suppressed eroticism between the characters, but this is only Helmut's strategy. Ela becomes a toy in the hands of a psychopathic hypnotist. Helmut gradually takes away her self-confidence, promises her work, promises intellectual development (importantly, he gives her de Sade's Justine to read), exquisite life, and finally - earth-shattering sex. He instinctively senses the victim's repressed trauma and knows how to deepen her addiction to him. Soon, the final confrontation takes place, a deep hypnosis lined with possessive intentions. As in a good thriller, at the last moment the victim awakens a dormant power to articulate the "NO" clearly. Rational sense returns, the capacity for self-determination returns; Ela wakes up as if from a dream. Birds return home...

In this dark psychological drama, there are several levels of interpretation, including those of a psychoanalytical nature. The fact that the action is taking place today in Gdańsk, a multicultural city, leads to ambiguous overtones. Helmut is, after all, a German, and young Ela was hoping to follow her father's footsteps and become a Hebrew translator. Helmut's toxic, almost organic sadistic attitude towards Ela is an echo of the pathological relationship between the race of 'masters' and 'subhumans', a destructive energy that has not stopped resonating in contemporary Europeans. A text, much like a labyrinth, leads us into the darkness of the psyche and does not allow us to break away until the last line of dialogue.