The “Tunnel of Frights” of the title might seem to suggest a fairground attraction, but here it also describes a specific situation (or trap?) into which every couple falls when a baby comes into their lives. “Sometimes my parents irritate me. I have known them for some years, and an exchange of opinions always turns foul at the same point. Before I came along, they must have been a beautiful couple. There are photographs where they look utterly carefree. At first I thought they were created for me alone. They are the only parents I will ever have…,” says Otto, the son in Heckmanns’ drama. “It is not irrelevant here that the director cast the Peszek family in a fairly unusual configuration. Błażej Peszek plays the husband of his real wife, Katarzyna Krzanowska, and their father and father-in-law, Jan Peszek, plays the child. This takes the performance to a higher level of metaphor, and the parental issues loop in an inter-generational contradance,” wrote Magda Huzarska-Szumiec in Gazeta Krakowska. It takes true mastery to deal with traumatic matters with such a light and appealing touch.
The concept of casting a real family of actors in reversed roles (…) pays off in spades. The use of various figures gives actions the air of signifiers – as in the dreamy ritual where they throw themselves on puff seats. Dominik Strycharski has a hand in the action, creating music with various toys. The sounds loop, drive one another, even serve as catalysts – this is chaos, bedlam. This is not a play for those with a low threshold for irony and maliciousness. To borrow a phrase from the Father: “He won’t believe us that we’re happy.”
Gabriela Cagiel, Gazeta Wyborcza

This play was translated as part of the Villa Decius and Polish-German Cooperation Foundation “Creative Scholarship 2012” program.