Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear audiences. Dear Citizens of Poland,

If I might take a moment of your time.

We stand here before you, on the national stage. We see you and we feel that a tension in our hearts, thoughts, and souls unites us. We are standing here on the national stage at a special moment in time. As the ensemble and the administrative, artistic, and technical team of the National Stary Theatre, we have found ourselves in a dificult situation that might well weigh upon the fate of this place in the years to come. We are standing on the stage and speaking to you about something that is important to us. This is the essence of theatre. And so, we hope, it shall remain. We believe that the theatre is a place to meet and to hold dialogues. Dialogue has not always been easy or pretty. But it must be started. That is why we work here. We believe in the theatre and its power to affect reality. You believe the same. That is why you are here. The difficulties we may soon encounter might well destroy us or burn us out, but they also hold great potential to strengthen us, to reform us, to bring us together and to teach us something.

This will not be easy, we are people and we are personally implicated here, we work in set circumstances; we have families, coworkers, and friends. The people with whom we disagree are very important. They hold a mirror in front of us which reflects our weaknesses, our shortcomings, our greatest problems. We are beginning to understand what is truly important to us, what really binds us together. We are becoming conscious of how very crucial this is for us. Now we can truly understand that our strength is in our community. None of us alone can achieve what we all can do together, by supporting one another – by having our differences, but honestly staring each other in the eye. This is a new paradigm.
We are standing here before you and we see you and feel the tension in our hearts. Now we are together. Now we, and all of Poland, are playing in “The Wedding.” Today we should be able to say without shame or hesitation: “Poland is a great thing.”

If theatre is a republic of artists, if theatre is a republic of viewers, if it is part of the nation, then the theatre’s flag is its curtain. Let us raise it for matters that unite people and develop them, not those which divide them. Let us tend to the future of the Stary Theatre. Let us nurture this golden horn. Before people depart, before a new order takes hold.
We are announcing that we have sent a letter to Vice-Premier Piotr Gliński, Minister of Culture and National Heritage, with a request to meet with our ensemble before making a decision to sign the nomination for the directorial candidate selected by the competition commission. We received a positive response from the Ministry, and the meeting will take place on 18 May.

We are open to this dialogue and we believe that it is possible.

Thank-you for being with us.