CHILL IN AN OFFICE BLOCK

Artur Łukasiewicz, GAZETA WYBORCZA - Poznań

A small-audience story full of unbelievable emotions. And where? In a sterile, glass and metal high-rise, where the lifts travel noiselessly.
He is sitting on a bench in an empty park, wearing an expensive businessman's suit. He is looking at her as if she was some kind of weirdo. And this is unsurprising. She is yelling that she is his woman and suggests a date in a street walker's style which he cannot understand. They are in a hotel. In the background soothing "nu jazz" music . The chap is kinda funny. He requests a double room as, unexpectedly, he has just run into his ... sister. He buys her new rags. A sweater too short, trousers too baggy. Hilarious. When he was shopping his wife called (later she will tell him he has nothing to come back for). They arrange a meeting the next day in a pub but do not meet.

The second meeting after some time has passed. He is wearing the same suit but already creased. He lost his job and he is roaming the streets. He imagines too much - that they will leave for another town, that they will be together, that they will use this chance when fate has brought them back together. They are in a hotel. But why can't he see she is a prostitute? She is looking at, him surprised that he cannot understand. They are going to leave? Impossible. In the background "nu jazz" music, but different now, hysterical, mad.
"Winter" by Jon Fosse was staged by Grażyna Kania, a young director in the capital's Office Center. TR Warszawa (transformed into Teatr Rozmaitości) likes to stage its plays in rather non-theatrical venues: a printing house, a railway station, a trendy club or an office block. During the Malta Festival "Winter" was staged on the fourth floor of the Poznań Financial Centre, where in an empty, glazed quadrangle of the high-rise two sets were arranged: one with a park bench and the other - with a hotel bed. This barely sketched situational drama acquired its full dimensions thanks to excellent performances by Jacek Poniedziałek and a young student of the Cracow Theatre School, Magdalena Popławska.

It is not an ordinary psychological drama. Behind the actors' backs there are no ordinary stage decorations but a real city with the night falling. Thanks to this different perspective the play seems more natural, closer. The words of the heroes, repeated persistently: - "I don't understand"/"perhaps yes"/"I have been looking for you" are distant from melodramatic convention. They prick like pins.