ABOUT BRIT-POL THEATRE
Brit-Pol Theatre was founded in 2000 by Peter Czajkowski (Artistic Director) and Tina Jones (Associate Director). Brit-Pol Theatre specialises in producing Polish theatre and poetry performances, always using the best English translations available. We use professional actors and technical staff to stage both classic and contemporary works for as wide an audience base as possible. We aim to create exciting, modern interpretations of Polish works. We are located in the U.K., in London. We enjoy the support and encouragement of the Polish Cultural Institute who have nurtured our progress and continue to do so.
Polonia Aid Foundation Trust and the Federation of Poles in Great Britain and BALTIC Restaurant and Bar, Blackfriars Road, London have all generously supported us.
Key Personnel
Artistic Director - Peter Czajkowski
Associate Director - Tina Jones
Associate Translators - Barbara Plebanek & Tony Howard
Patron 2000-02 - Dr. Stanislaw Komorowski – Ambassador of the Republic of Poland
BRIT-POL THEATRE - Polish Theatre in English. An Introduction by Peter Czajkowski.
Polish theatre is unique and yet as far as I am aware the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain has never produced a Polish play. Polish theatre writing has been lost within the generalised image of Eastern European and Russian culture. Brit-Pol Theatre has been set up to specifically promote Polish dramatic literature, both modern and classic.
The Genesis of Brit-Pol Theatre
I have been working as an actor and director in British theatre television and film for over twenty years but since 1993, I have also directed Polish plays and poetry in English at the Polish Cultural Institute, the Polish Embassy and POSK. In 1999, I had meeting with the then Polish Ambassador Dr Ryszard Stemplowski who suggested that I create a group to continue this work and bring in the talents of more of my professional English associates. I thought this an excellent idea and set about creating a company. We have maintained our link to the Polish Embassy in London as the current Polish Ambassador Dr. Stanislaw Komorowski has attended several Brit-Pol Theatre productions and has spoken highly of our work. So, with actress, writer and director Tina Jones I created Brit-Pol Theatre - meaning The British-Polish Theatre Company desined to produce modern interpretations of classic and contemporary Polish plays, in English, for British audiences as well as for the Polish community in Britain. With the encouragement of Dr Jan Mokrycki from the Federation of Poles in Great Britain and some commercial sponsors including WODKA Restaurant, Brit-Pol Theatre was able to develop it's first project. Brit-Pol Theatre started on a small scale with two play readings of Polish plays at The White Bear Theatre Club in Kennington, South London in November 2000. COUNTRY HOUSE by experimental theatre pioneer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) tarnsalted by daniel Gerould and TO STEAL A MARCH ON GOD by Hannah Krall translated by Jadwiga Kosicka. The latter a harrowing account of the memorie sof Dr Marek edelman the Deputy Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Rozewicz Festival 2001
The Polish Cultural Institute, under the directorship of Joanna Wroblewska, organised The Rozewicz Festival through collaboration with Brit-Pol Theatre, Arc Publishers and the translators Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard. There were also connections with Oxford University and Warwick University. Brit-Pol Theatre produced THE CARD INDEX (a full production of Rozewicz's first play) and RECYCLING (a dramatised reading at Riverside Studios of Rozewicz's newest translated and published poems) - as part of the festival. The Polish Cultural Institute had the mighty task of producing several poetry readings by Rozewicz around the country, a series of films at the Riverside Cinema and a reception at the Institute, as well as taking him sight-seeing and organising a farewell dinner! Also, Tadeusz Rozewicz was visiting Great Britain for the first time since 1993 and this celebration of his work was designed to raise his profile in the British press, and among the public. This was something the P.C.I managed to acheive by eliciting long, glowing articles in The Guardian and The Financial Times and by succesfully marketing the events. The Royal National Theatre sent a representative from the Literary Department to see The Card Index and subsequently they all read the collected works of Rozewicz in READING THE APOCALYPSE IN BED (published by Marion Boyars, translated by Adam Czerniawski, Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard). They have now asked to be sent all new Polish theatre translations. This is in itself an achievement. I must acknowledge the work of the Polish Cultural Institute, on The Rozewicz Festival, in organising the Festival and supporting Brit-Pol Theatre. Enthusiastic audiences, a good relationship with Mike Kingsbury at the White Bear Theatre and excellent P.R. and marketing of THE CARD INDEX by the P.C.I meant the show got rave reviews and a TIME OUT critic's choice. The production was a sell-out; in fact, we could have filled the theatre three times over! So, we proved there is a popular audience in London for Rozewicz. Because of all this, we have been invited to be in BAC's Time Out Critic's Choice Season 2002 (a season of four Critics Choice shows from the previous year).
‘20 Million Polish Women’
In November and December 2001, we were part of twenty million Polish women! We presented two shows as part of the Polish Cultural Institute's Polish Women's Season titled: 20 Million Polish Women. We presented a poetry performance of POLISH WOMEN POETS from the 20th century and a rehearsed reading of FARRAGO by new Polish writer Lidia Amejko.
2002
We will maintain our link with the Polish Cultural Institute under the new Director Joanna Stachyra and the Deputy Director Malgozata Szum and will continue to promote Polish theatre and literature to a wide audience. We are very privileged to enjoy their support and encouragement. We are also very happy to continue our relationship with our commercial sponsor, the excellent new Polish restaurant in London: BALTIC. I am also very pleased that the Polish Ambassador, Dr. Stanislaw Komorowski has kindly agreed to become Patron of the Brit-Pol Theatre Charitable Trust, which we will be forming in the near future. This is the next stage of Brit-Pol Theatre's development. Keep logging onto the website for updated news.
Time Out Critic’s Choice Season
In March 2002, we will revive THE CARD INDEX as part of BAC's Time Out Critic's Choice Season. We will continue to collaborate with the Polish Cultural Institute, make new relationships within BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) and endeavour to encourage the Arts Council, London Arts Board and British Council arts funders to come and see the show.
Hopefully, in time, we can take the company on to greater things and to theatres all over the country. This will not only benefit Polish culture abroad, by giving Poles over here a taste of their own culture but allowing second generation Poles who might not speak Polish a chance to have access to the theatre text in performance. We also hope to enrich the overall cultural diversity of British culture by making Polish theatre part of the UK scene. So that Rozewicz, Krall, Amejko, Vilquist and Fredro (to name a few) might have a place beside Checkov, Wilde, Moliere, Gogol, Ravenhill or Yasmina Reza in the London's West End and major subsidised theatreland!
REVIEWS
THE CARD INDEX TIME OUT: Lucy Powell May 2001
Entering the politically and dramatically seismic world of poet, playwright and Polish resistance fighter Tadeusz Rozewicz is an experience that everyone should undergo at least once. And Brit-Pol Theatre's loving production of his best-known play is as powerful an example of his dangerous, deliriously absurd work as you are likely to come across for a long while. The Hero of the play lies in bed with a woman, and his job is to be entertaining. But it is a Sunday; he doesn't feel like getting out of bed, and he doesn't feel much like talking either. His memories, however, which span a childhood in 1920s Poland, the Nazi occupation, and the communist regime which followed it, ensure that he will talk, because the past will not be silent. At the insistence of three insanely ghoulish Elders who emerge from the wardrobe and wheeze, whistle and vomit their way through their lines like a broken set of bag-pipes, the hero sorts through his life, aided by the appearance of various friends and officials, alive and long-dead. There is nothing redemptive about Rozewicz's play. Time and the unity of character that reminiscence usually brings are smashed beyond all recognition in this ferocious, surreal joyride through history, culpability and memory. By the end, we are not even sure of our Hero's name, let alone his nationality. The cast are superb and are directed with tangible passion by Peter Czajkowski. The Card Index was written in 1960, but the play on show is so startlingly modern, so challenging and so relentlessly hilarious it makes you wonder what writers - and audiences, of course - have been doing in the theatre for the last 40 years. (Lucy Powell - TIME OUT.)
THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD: Patrick Marmion, May 2001
'BEDROOM FARCE WITH A NIGHTMARE FEEL' (Very Good**)
'The Eastern Europeans are maestros of miserabilism. They can turn common or garden gloom into epic comedies of self-absorption. Or, in the case of Polish writer Tadeusz Rozewicz's 1960 absurdist drama, a hectic bedroom farce of self-absorption. Rozewicz's delirious play is about a man who cannot get out of bed. He is an Everyman aged between nought and 40. The traffic of people through his grotty boudoir turns it into a busy cattle market. Amidst the hubbub, he claims to be "having difficulty turning into a human being" and is in the grip of extreme psychological alienation. He looks at his hand as if it were someone else's and, amazed at his ability to control it, plunges it under the sheets to massage his flagging libido. A product of the post-war period, following Nazi occupation and Stalinist rule, Rozewicz's riotously iconoclastic play has no truck with classical convention. Although he employs a self-righteous chorus who emerge from the hero's closet, Rozewicz soon has his hero kill them off - having first failed to kill himself. At a personal level - with his bickering with parents and dismissing lovers - the play is the fantastical daydream of a shambolic idler. At a political level - where he is harassed by meddling bureaucrats and wounded partisans - it is a sinister nightmare reflecting Polish history. Nor is Rozewicz above ridiculing Germans on the way - particularly as his brother was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944. Peter Czajkowski's direction and Adam Czerniawski's translation not only recapture the original spirit of the Theatre of the Absurd, they also re-cast Rozewicz's play in a contemporary British idiom. Steve Wilson's dingy design is off-set by Mark Doubleday's urine-coloured lighting. An ensemble of 10 creates a chaotic procession of characters who would be tiresomely capricious, but for the innate comedy of the situation and the variety of the acting. Paul Mooney's hero is a steady dramatic locus as an exhausted, indolent, anxious, guilty spectator on his own life. He is inclined to agree with the character who says "people are a herd of animals slithering on shit". The brilliance of Czajkowski's production is that it milks the pathos and comedy of this farmyard formulation for a post-BSE generation.' (Patrick Marmion, EVENING STANDARD).
THE THEATRE RECORD May 2001:
'Earlier this year I saw a sampler of the great man's work, performed in Polish, but it didn't prepare me for the wild humour, his devastating observation of the daftness of artistic life under an oppressive regime.
Peter Czajkowski got a splendidly collectible clutch of performances from his large cast in a play which, whatever it meant (and don't ask me) never had a dull moment. Another feather in the White Bear's well upholstered cap, this is just one of a whole series of exciting shows promised in Kennington this year, A few grand would help Michael Kingsbury to achieve even higher standards in a venue which already achieves miracles on a shoestring. Maybe the RSC could sub him.' (Ian Herbert THEATRE RECORD)
2000- 2001 PLAYREADINGS AND NEW VOICES IN POLISH THEATRE
1.Country House by Witkacy
2. To Steal A March on God by Hannah Krall
3. Farrago by Lidia Amejko (a new voice)
1. COUNTRY HOUSE by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)
Playreading held at the White Bear Theatre on Monday 13th November 2001.
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a prolific writer of the inter-war Polish avant-garde.
CAST:
THE FATHER: DIAPHANT NEARLY - David Quilter.
HIS TWO DAUGHTERS: SOPHIE, 12 Caroline Wildi & AMY, 13 - Elaine Wallace.
THE COUSIN, JIBBERY PENBROKE - Richard Sandells.
HIS COUSIN (& Mrs. Nearlys) ANETTE WARBLING - Eunice Roberts.
THE MOTHER'S GHOST: ANASTASIA NEARLY, nee WARBLING - Tina Jones.
TWO BAILIFFS: WENDELL POUNDWOOD - Colin Gourlay & JOSEPH GRISWOLD - Jonathan Lermit. THE COOK: URSULA FUSTY - Jane Lucas.
THE SCULLERY BOY, MICHAEL BUMPTER - Tim Mills.
DIRECTED BY Peter Czajkowski. TRANSLATED BY Daniel Gerould.
PUBLISHED BY HARWOOD ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS. Part of The Polish Theatre Archive.
Country House (W Malym Dworku) is a wicked subversion of all those realistic psychological dramas of jealousy, adultery, murder and suicide that ask to be taken seriously. Witkacy's send-up assumes the form of a ghost story, in the course of which a family of four is gleefully dispatched to the other world. When it was first performed in 1923 in Torun, the play was presented only twice at the end of a season of experimental work for connoisseurs. Because it derides convention - moral, social and dramatic - Country House was judged unsuitable for the public, and special arrangements were made so that no students or young people would be admitted. Three years later, as directed by the playwright himself in Lwow, the drama proved an unexpected success with audiences and ever since has been among Witkacy's most frequently performed works. Today we can appreciate Country House not only as a systematic demolition of stage realism, but also as an anxious probing of the elusive boundaries between life and death, exposing the "dark places" of the human psyche that make us laugh nervously.
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz or 'Witkacy' is an outstanding figure of Poland's inter-war avant-garde culture. He committed suicide on the day the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. Re-discovered by the Polish experimental theatre directors of the post-war period his works remain an essential part of both the classical theatre and the modern experimental repertoire. His life and writings inspired the work of Kantor, Szajna and Grotowski - and many others. He has been called the 'patron-saint' of post-war Polish theatre and yet he is largely unknown to the British audiences. The personality of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, embraces a whole series of creative activities that make him a unique figure in Polish and European culture between the two World Wars. Dramatist, poet, novelist, painter, photographer, art theorist, from 1919 onwards he was one of the most representative members of the poetic and artistic avant-garde in Poland, together with Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, and a supporter of Formalism. Also an acute and eccentric philosopher, Witkiewicz was a radical critic of bourgeois society and the kind of social existence generated by capitalism and communism, both of which he feared would lead to the complete dehumanisation of social life and a growing totalitarianism, with the consequent annihilation of the individual personality.
The translator - Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate School. He is Editor of Slavic and East European Performance, and has also translated and edited numerous books and articles of avant-garde Polish and Russian drama.
2. TO STEAL A MARCH ON GOD BY Hannah Krall
Brit-Pol Theatre presented this ’memory’ play by Hanna Krall based on the life of Marek Edelman – survivor of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Edelman was deputy commander of the Uprising. He escaped through the sewers with the help of the Polish Resistance and later fought in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he went to live in Israel but could not settle, so returned to Poland where he became an eminent cardiologist. This is a documentary drama based on two sets of testaments from Marek Edelman. The young Marek’s words are taken his book: The Ghetto Fights, written in 1945. The older Edelman’s words are based on a series of interviews he gave to Hanna Krall in 1977. From those interviews she wrote a best selling book, To Steal A March on God, then adapted it into this play, which was first staged in Warsaw in 1980. Set in 1977, after the Ghetto Uprising remembrance ceremony Edelman remembers incidents from 1943. His younger self returns and Edelman revisits his past. Later, in the hospital where he works, consequences of his past come back in flesh and blood. All the characters who appear in the play and all the events described are authentic. In the spring of 1943, the Uprising lasted a month but only the first six days from April 19 to 24 were effective, whilst the Ghetto fighters still had ammunition. Then the Nazis brought in tanks and artillery and finally set fire to the entire Ghetto. It was all over by May 16th. Most fighters were killed. A few, like Celina and Edelman were helped to escape through the sewers by the Polish Underground.
CAST:
Dr Marek Edelman 1977 – Leonard Fenton. Young Marek 1943 – Colin Gourlay
The Ghetto Fighters: Zygmunt – Tim Mills. Stasiek – Richard Sandells. Celina – Caroline Wildi.
Adam, Boy with Biscuits & Professor – David Quilter. Joachim’s Daughter & Dr. Wróbel – Tina Jones
Directed by Peter Czajkowski
.
TO STEAL A MARCH ON GOD – a ‘memory play’. At the end of the war Marek Edelman, former deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and one of its few survivors, emigrated to Israel. Failing to adjust to life there, he returned to Poland to pursue a career in medicine, eventually becoming an internationally known cardiologist. Because he could not romanticise the Uprising and play the hero Edelman stopped attending the annual commemorative celebrations. Rather than try to tell the world unwelcome truths he chose to be silent. In 1977 Dr Edelman broke a 30-year silence and agreed to do a series of interviews with the young Polish-Jewish journalist Hanna Krall. She turned these conversations into the best-selling book To Steal a March on God. The title refers to the constant vigilance needed to forestall the punishing blows of a mighty adversary. The play, written the following year, takes as its source these interviews as well as Edelman’s 1945 memoirs, The Ghetto Fights. First performed in May 1980 at the Popular Theatre, Warsaw, To Steal a March on God is an original documentary drama that recreates the history of the Uprising through the dual vision of a youthful participant and a mature survivor. It offers the double portrait of a truly heroic twentieth-century anti-hero interrogating himself. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which 1,500 largely untrained Jewish fighters battled well-equipped German units began on April 19th 1943 and lasted 22 days. The end of the Uprising had killed almost all the Jews. Marek Edelman, one of the five commanders, was responsible for the ‘Brush-makers district’ of the Ghetto. Assisted by the Polish underground he escaped from the Ghetto on May 9th 1943, through the sewers and consequently took part in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Making use of fluid chronology Krall’s play mingles past with present and follows the stream of memory. The events of the Uprising from April 19 to May 10, 1943 are treated as free-floating recollections subject to repeated authentication.
HANNA KRALL – writer, born in Warsaw in 1937 and trained as a journalist, she worked as a reporter for ‘Polityka’ and specialises in describing the everyday lives and situations of apparently ordinary people. In her best-known book, To Steal A March On God (1977) she applies the technique of a double time-frame. She used the same technique in two novels, the semi-autobiographical The Subtenant (1982) and Windows (1985). To Steal A March On God introduced Jewish subjects to her writing; this continued in The Subtenant and in Hypnosis and Dancing at Someone Else's Wedding. The main theme is the intertwining of human fates; the stories mostly concern the search for identity and the complicated Polish-Jewish-German relations of World War II and the years immediately following the war, including the tragic events of 1968, often with a deeper background in the history of a given family or locality.
JADWIGA KOSICKA – translator. Born and educated in Poland, Jadwiga Kosicka worked at the Polish Academy in Warsaw before moving to the United States in the 1970s. She has translated many books and plays and is the author of A Life of Solitude, a biographical study of Stanis?awa Przybyszewska.
Published by HARWOOD ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS in The Polish Theater Archive, Editor D. Gerould.
3. NEW VOICES – FARRAGO by LIDIA AMEJKO
FARRAGO
Written by Lidia Amejko Farrago played at the Dramatyczny Teatr in Warsaw in 2001.a metaphysical comedy involving the hell-raising actor - Farrago - arriving in heaven after a drunken binge and a car crash... yet he is blissfully unaware of his situation. His Excellency has never met an actor before.
Cast:
FARRAGO - EDWARD DE SOUZA
HIS EXCELLENCY - MIKE BURNSIDE
ST. PETER - DAVID QUILTER
DIRECTED BY PETER CZAJKOWSKI
AT THE WHITE BEAR THEATRE
NOVEMBER 25TH 2001
UK PREMIERE
TRANSLATED BY DOROTA GLOWACKA
2001-2003 FULL PRODUCTIONS
The Polish Cultural Institute Rozewicz Festival 2001
The Card Index and Recycling by Tadeusz Rozewicz
THE CARD INDEX 29th May - 17th June 2001
The White Bear Theatre, Kennington, London SE11.
'The Card Index was written in 1960, but the play on show is so startlingly modern, so challenging and so relentlessly hilarious it makes you wonder what writers - and audiences, of course - have been doing in the theatre for the last 40 years.'
The Card Index, (KARTOTEKA in Polish) a play by Tadeusz Rozewicz was staged at the White Bear Theatre by Brit-Pol Theatre Company in May 2001. Translated into English by Adam Czerniawski with additional scenes translated by Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard. It ran for three weeks to packed houses and critical acclaim. Brit-Pol Theatre also staged a premiere reading of Rozewicz's new work - RECYCLING, translated by Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard at the Riverside Studios. Again this production was very well recieved.
The Card Index is and is not autobiographical; Rozewicz likes contradictions. The play is, however, rooted in the life of the author. Born in 1921, Rozewicz's education was truncated a year before the second world war broke out. His father, a minor official, could not afford to keep him in school. During the war Rozewicz fought in the Polish resistance. Afterwards, his writing turned away from traditional forms. He maintained his creativity despite the constraints of the Stalinist regime in Poland. In 1959, when Rozewicz wrote The Card Index, he needed to exorcise the ghosts and memories of his generation. In 1993, I directed a show about Tadeusz Rozewicz and had the good fortune to have supper with him afterwards. He asked me why The Card Index had not been produced professionally in Britain. I said one day I would do it. When I set up Brit-Pol Theatre to produce Polish Theatre in English, this was the first full production I wanted to do. The modern feel of Rozewicz’s work had always struck me. I knew that it was particularly Polish, but felt that it had universal appeal as he writes about things that continue to affect us all. When Rozewicz visited our rehearsals recently, we were charmed by his mischievous humour. He could not resist adding a few new ideas to the production, including the red nail polish on the secretary's toes!
Director - Peter Czajkowski
The builders
had left a vertical opening in the wall
I sometimes think
my home is too conventional
all sorts of people
can easily get in
From THE DOOR by Tadeusz Rozewicz.
Translated by Adam Czerniawski.
CAST LIST AND PERSONNEL FOR THE 2001 PRODUCTION
CAST in order of speaking:
The Hero - Paul Mooney
Mother, Olga, Fat Woman, Journalist - Tina Jones
Father, Fatso the dog owner, Old Miner - Martin Bendel
Female in Bed & Secretary - Justine Koos
The Chorus of Elders:
Elder & Peasant Crow - Peter Luke Kenny
Elder & Official with Cap - Darryl Knock
Elder & Official with Hat - David Brett
Uncle & Teacher - Seamus Newham
Man with Parting, Waiter, Youth, Reporter - Lawrence McGrandles Jnr.
Waitress, Lively Lady, German Girl - Sarah Rutherford
Director - Peter Czajkowski
Designer - Steve Wilson
Lighting Designer - Mark Doubleday
Original Music - Warren Wills
Associate Director - Tina Jones
Costume supervisor - Rodney Worth
Stage manager & lx operator & asst. to director - Elizabeth Maddison
Additional translation - Barbara Plebanek & Tony Howard
Assistant director - Jonathan Heron
White Bear Artistic Director - Michael Kingsbury
Press & Marketing - Katy Hadwick at The Polish Cultural Institute.
REVIEWS
TIME OUT review of THE CARD INDEX:
'Entering the politically and dramatically seismic world of poet, playwright and Polish resistance fighter Tadeusz Rozewicz is an experience that everyone should undergo at least once. And Brit-Pol Theatre's loving production of his best-known play is as powerful an example of his dangerous, deliriously absurd work as you are likely to come across for a long while. The Hero of the play lies in bed with a woman, and his job is to be entertaining. But it is a Sunday; he doesn't feel like getting out of bed, and he doesn't feel much like talking either. His memories, however, which span a childhood in 1920s Poland, the Nazi occupation, and the communist regime which followed it, ensure that he will talk, because the past will not be silent. At the insistence of three insanely ghoulish Elders who emerge from the wardrobe and wheeze, whistle and vomit their way through their lines like a broken set of bag-pipes, the hero sorts through his life, aided by the appearance of various friends and officials, alive and long-dead. There is nothing redemptive about Rozewicz's play. Time and the unity of character that reminiscence usually brings are smashed beyond all recognition in this ferocious, surreal joyride through history, culpability and memory. By the end, we are not even sure of our Hero's name, let alone his nationality. The cast are superb and are directed with tangible passion by Peter Czajkowski. 'The Card Index' was written in 1960, but the play on show is so startlingly modern, so challenging and so relentlessly hilarious it makes you wonder what writers - and audiences, of course - have been doing in the theatre for the last 40 years.'
(Lucy Powell - TIME OUT.)
THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD REVIEW OF THE CARD INDEX:
'BEDROOM FARCE WITH A NIGHTMARE FEEL' (Very Good**)
The Eastern Europeans are maestros of miserabilism. They can turn common or garden gloom into epic comedies of self-absorption. Or, in the case of Polish writer Tadeusz Rozewicz's 1960 absurdist drama, a hectic bedroom farce of self absorption.
Rozewicz's delirious play is about a man who cannot get out of bed. He is an Everyman aged between nought and 40. The traffic of people through his grotty boudoir turns it into a busy cattle market. Amidst the hubbub, he claims to be "having difficulty turning into a human being" and is in the grip of extreme psychological alienation. He looks at his hand as if it were someone else's and, amazed at his ability to control it, plunges it under the sheets to massage his flagging libido.
A product of the post-war period, following Nazi occupation and Stalinist rule, Rozewicz's riotously iconoclastic play has no truck with classical convention. Although he employs a self-righteous chorus who emerge from the hero's closet, Rozewicz soon has his hero kill them off - having first failed to kill himself. At a personal level - with his bickering with parents and dismissing lovers - the play is the fantastical daydream of a shambolic idler. At a political level - where he is harassed by meddling bureaucrats and wounded partisans - it is a sinister nightmare reflecting Polish history. Nor is Rozewicz above ridiculing Germans on the way - particularly as his brother was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944.
Peter Czajkowski's direction and Adam Czerniawski's translation not only recapture the original spirit of the Theatre of the Absurd, they also re-cast Rozewicz's play in a contemporary British idiom. Steve Wilson's dingy design is off-set by Mark Doubleday's urine-coloured lighting. An ensemble of 10 creates a chaotic procession of characters who would be tiresomely capricious, but for the innate comedy of the situation and the variety of the acting. Paul Mooney's hero is a steady dramatic locus as an exhausted, indolent, anxious, guilty spectator on his own life. He is inclined to agree with the character who says "people are a herd of animals slithering on shit".
The brilliance of Czajkowski's production is that it milks the pathos and comedy of this farmyard formulation for a post-BSE generation.'
(Patrick Marmion EVENING STANDARD)
ABOUT ROZEWICZ
Tadeusz Rozewicz is unique in his effortless mastery of both poetry and drama. He was born in 1921 in Radomsko, Poland. He fought in the underground Home Army during the Nazi occupation and began publishing with the clandestine press. After the war he studied art history in Krakow and his first book of poetry, Anxiety, appeared in 1947. He set himself the task of reinventing literature in the face of a brutality that seemed to have devalued everything, including words themselves, for an audience of survivors: "We learnt language from scratch, these people and I." His stark, stripped, honest poetry, distrusting every trace of rhetoric, was quickly recognised as one of the key moral voices of post-war European literature. He has published well over twenty volumes of poetry, including Open Poem (1957), Conversation with the Prince (1960), Traumatic Stories,1979), Miscellaneous Poems,1983), always a fragment (1996), recycling (1998) and Smiles (2000).
In the early 1960s Tadeusz Rozewicz also established himself as one of the most innovative post-war dramatists. The Card Index (1960), an absurdist social satire, has been called Eastern Europe's Waiting for Godot. It was filmed by Krzysztof Kieslowski in 1979. In The Card Index Rozewicz presents us with a modern Everyman - a guilty Hamlet who can't get out of bed - and who hilariously yet painfully pulls his life to pieces before our eyes. At one and the same moment he has half a dozen names and a dozen histories - he is an artist, a freedom fighter, a nonentity, a philosopher, and a little boy: "The hero is five, twenty-five and forty years old. We accept the convention of The Card Index at once, from the very first line... as if it were the only one, the natural form for the theatre." (Jan Kott )
His other, ceaselessly experimental, plays include Marriage Blanc (1975), the anti-heroic war play Dead and Buried (1979) - which provoked national controversies both during and after the Communist era - and The Trap (1984) a haunting study of Kafka. His other writing includes essays - especially theatrical and literary theory and fiction. He has been translated into forty languages and performed all over the world.
In his seventies Tadeusz Rozewicz entered a new period of intense creativity. Alongside recycling, his most recent works include the play The Card Index Scattered (1995), and the prose memoir Mother's Going Away (1999) for which he won the prestigious Nike 2000 prize. He lives in Wroclaw, Poland.
RECYCLING
20 May, Sunday
4pm, Riverside Studios
A dramatised reading of recycling performed by
Peter Czajkowski, Martin Lindsay & Tina Jones of Brit-Pol Theatre
- with an introduction by the author, Tadeusz Rozewicz.
now nobody can recall
the weight of a human tear
the price of tears is falling on the stock exchange
panic in the market..."
RECYCLING - new poems that consider the nature of art, writing, and Time. The core of the book is the title sequence recycling, a three-part meditation on modern history. Here Rozewicz, who has called himself "the poet of the rubbish dump", draws together apparently random scraps of fact, rumour and misinformation - sifting through the debris of the world's mass media - and creates a collage epic, a black-comic portrait of our time and ourselves. Tragic and witty by turns, as immediate as this morning's headlines, recycling is one of the most powerful recent achievements of the poet who has been called "the chronicler of the twentieth century".
RECYCLING is published by ARC Publishers - see Link on LINKS page.
20 MILLION POLISH WOMEN SEASON!
POLISH WOMEN POETS - POETRY AND MUSIC
We were pleased to present two shows as part of The Polish Cultural Institute's Polish Women Season. When historian Norman Davies was asked what the Polish contribution to the EU would be, he replied: - "20 million Polish women". To promote Polish women artists the Polish Cultural Institute has organised this season which includes poetry, theatre, films by Polish women directors, book launches and music. The Festival runs from 25th November 2001 to 30th January 2002
"POLISH WOMEN POETS"
A poetry reading with music performed in English by Tina Jones.
music composed and performed by Warren Wills.
AT THE CANAL CAFE THEATRE
MONDAY 3RD DECEMBER AND TUESDAY 4TH DECEMBER
AT 7.30PM
Featuring the work of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Halina Poswiatowska, Wislawa Szymborska and Ewa Lipska.
The Canal Cafe is an initimate cabaret theatre above The Bridge House Tavern in London's historic 'Little Venice' area by the Grand Union Canal and Regents Canal.
SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS
POLISH CULTURAL INSTITUTE We have enjoyed several fruitful commissions and collaborations with the POLISH CULTURAL INSTITUTE. The Polish Cultural Institute aims to present the most recent developments in Polish culture to a wide British audience. They organise and support a wide variety of events in the fields of music, film, theatre and the visual arts, in venues around the UK.
BRIT-POL THEATRE'S MAIN COMMERCIAL SPONSOR
BALTIC RESTAURANT AND BAR Modern Polish cuisine and a great bar! Pre-theatre menus, set lunch menus and private room facilities. Close to the Young Vic, Old Vic and the Tate Modern just south of the river, near Southwark Tube.
74 Blackfriars Road London SE1 8HA Tel: 020 7928 1111 email: info@balticrestaurant.co.uk
BRIT-POL THEATRE has also received financial support from:
POLONIA AID FOUNDATION TRUST
THE FEDERATION OF POLES IN GREAT BRITAIN
BLACKWATER CONSULTANCY
And several private patrons
CONTACT US
If you would like to become a sponsor, commercial or private, please contact us via this website. Our commercial sponsors receive the placement of their logo on all Brit-Pol Theatre publicity material and advertising space in our show programmes. Private sponsors receive a mention in the show programme (unless we are instructed otherwise) and free tickets to the show. If you would like to discuss the sponsors packages please contact us via emaiL.