This mini-play is the result of a joint international project of the Mitos21 Theater Network, of which the National Stary Theater is a part. David’s Formidable Speech On Europe is the declarative title of the theater event that premiered in June 2013 in Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. The point of departure for the play, in which twelve actors from various countries took part, was David Cameron’s now-famous, controversial speech of January 2013, which echoed widely throughout the world. “That speech is symptomatic,” stated the creators of the Berlin project. “It says a great deal about the state of today’s Europe, and is simultaneously a kind of provocation.”
Studying this text with theatrical tools turned out to be an appealing challenge for the theater people, allowing them to summon dreams of a Europe where political and cultural differences lead not to sharpening antagonisms, but were a richness and a virtue. The Polish version of the monodrama is played, today, as a commentary of sorts to Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski’s play The Battle of Warsaw 1920. It features a brilliant Małgorzata Gałkowska, who does a splendid incarnation of David Cameron alias… Margaret Thatcher. It is the figure of Ms Thatcher – as a symbol of certain standpoints and ideas – who links the evening’s two plays.