On April 22nd at 7:15 pm on the Big Stage of the National Stary Theatre the long awaited premiere of the play “Polish Dreams / Les rêves polonais” by the duet Jędrzej Piaskowski/Hubert Sulima based on Michał Bałucki’s Neighbours will take place.

he work of Michał Bałucki, a nineteenth-century Krakow playwright, gave the creators of this play a pretext to discuss our identity, or indeed, how we imagine it. How we would like to see ourselves, think about ourselves, what we’d like to believe in, and what we’d prefer to forget. And above all, it is a play about our dreams of Poland — sometimes touching, sometimes amusing, often moving to tears.

The artists have based their performance on the comedy “Neighbours,” situating it in the pastiche convention of the national fairy tale. Through this gesture, they not only back up the comic potential in Bałucki’s work, they also have a look at the dreams of returning to a marvellous, safe, and idealized past (a retrotopia) that are presently a recurring part of our public debate. A sign of this nostalgic yearning is the enormous popularity of historical reconstruction groups in Poland, but we can find many more traces around us as well.

“The setting is nineteenth-century Galicia, in other words, the here and now…”

CAST

Bolesław Brzozowski

Natalia Kaja Chmielewska

Szymon Czacki

Lidia Duda

Aldona Grochal

Rafał Jędrzejczyk

Katarzyna Krzanowska

Zbigniew Kosowski

Michał Majnicz

Beata Paluch

Jacek Romanowski

Łukasz Stawarczyk

Krzysztof Stawowy

CREATORS

Reżyseria: Jędrzej Piaskowski

Scenariusz/dramaturgia: Hubert Sulima

Scenografia: Anna-Maria Karczmarska, Mikołaj Małek

Kostiumy: Rafał Domagała

Choreografia: Kasia Sikora

Kompozycja: Jacek Sotomski

Reżyseria świateł: Monika Stolarska

Asystent reżysera: Filip Pawlik

Inspicjent/sufler: Zbigniew S. Kaleta

PREMIERE: April 22 / Big Stage