Repertoire

Independences: Evening I

Nowa Scena / Strefa BE

Premiere
date

29.09
2019

When we play

18.12
2019
19.12
2019
24.01
2020
25.01
2020
26.01
2020

Duration

160 min.
1 intermission

The candles lit by the Lord’s Spirit snuff

one by one, as though extinguished

by the rage of the Lord, and the road is long, and the night is thick,

and so far to go before the dawn.

(Fragment of a note by Seweryn Goszczyński, written upon the death of Juliusz Słowacki)

Dependency is death – the death of the homeland, the death of the national myth, the death of great ideals. This is the issue explored by the creators of two separate plays, presented to viewers during a single evening, bound by the title of independence. In their scripts, Mira Mańka and Radek Stępień focus on the need to salvage what has fallen apart.

Izabela Czartoryska (Beata Malczewska) is desperately gathering any material trace of Polishness. Her near-obsessive collection is meant to save her homeland, which has been demolished by national egoism. Her children around her – Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (BłażejPeszek) and Maria Wirtemberska (Magda Grąziowska) – are forcibly pulled into the madness of struggling to uphold Polishness. A similar powerlessness is seen in Juliusz Słowacki (Paweł Pogorzałek), who, in another play, attempts to conquer death with the power of his poetry, and is brutally mocked and belittled as a childish buffoon by another great hero of the national stage, Adam Mickiewicz (Maciej Charyton) – the character who links the two plays.

Is independence at all possible when our national heroes turn out to be petty and defenseless? Can the Independent be salvaged from what remains?

These plays were selected from the Młodzi w Starym competition organized by the National Stary Theatre, in cooperation with the S. Wyspiański Theatre Academy in Krakow.

Strobe lights are used during the performance.