Intimate Theatre

Roman Pawłowski, GAZETA WYBORCZA

Warsaw's dramatist's plays are a success on Polish stages

The opinions that Ingmar Villqist will remain the author of one and only play, Helver's Night, the play that came through the scenes in the whole country last season, including TV Theatre, would be misjudgements. The text was followed by other one-act plays belonging to The Anaerobes series, published in Dialog. This month it was staged by The New Theatre /Teatr Nowy/ from Łódź, and Rozmaitości Theatre in Warsaw gave the opening night of The Anaerobes author's version.
Villqist's playwriting requires the theatre that could be named, after Strindberg, one of the patrons of this creation, the intimate theatre. While television turns into mangle, the theatre has a chance to become one of the last places where the intimate meeting between people is possible. This is what The Anaerobes is about. This is the story of the people who are on the edge of their lives and struggle to survive.
In the title The Anaerobes Villqist describes the crisis of the couple of men growing up a child together. One of them intends to leave, the other one does his best to rescue the family. In one-act play, Cykweiss, the woman invites her father to a wedding party - father by whom she was sexually abused in her childhood. Wedding preparing is supposed to be a psychological torture for him. The hero of the play Untitled is a boy having AIDS, who is dying in his parents' arms, turning into a child at the same moment. In The Phantom a woman and a man want to have a child so much that they behave as though they had one.
Villqist goes deeply into the intimate life of his heroes and observing this process requires some special conditions. Fortunately, both spectacles are faithful to the spirit of his playwriting. In Warsaw, The Anaerobes is played in the old joinery turned into the stage with tens of sits. One can hear the tick-tack of a clock standing on the night shelf and actors' breaths: Jacek Poniedziałek and Marek Kalita. In Łódź the play is performed on the bigger stage, though it is still in closed-circle atmosphere, what is the success of good light direction.
Łukasz Kos, director of Łódź performance, merged five one-act plays together gaining the new one, the one that tells the story of human life. That is the best realization of Villqist's play that had been staged so far. Kos discovered, that The Anaerobes series plays were the fragments of the bigger wholeness, where the situations, names of towns and heroes repeat, and everything happened in Ellmit circle, magic seaside town, where the hospital of mentaly handicapped Helver was situated.
There are very good roles in both spectacles, although they are all extremely difficult. Kalita in Rozmaitości plays mother to the teenage daughter of his partner while she appears at the end, he takes off her wet clothes with care and puts her to bed. This way he not only determines the situation between him and Karla but also reconciles himself to his partner's past.
In The Anaerobes in Łódź Wojciech Błach, who plays the same part, adds much natural homour to the performance, he speaks and behaves not like a gay but like a mother rapt on a child what causes the laughter of the audience. However, he is able to show the dark side of the drama - when he screams „I love you, I love you", putting the stoppers into his ears and nose, he is not a fanny boy playing mommy any more, but a man begging for love. The same actor in one-act play Untitled reaches the top, playing a man who almost does not exist. Naked, motionless on his bed, he is waiting to die. But he is conscious till the end: the moment he feels his father's (Dymitr Hołówko) presence by his side, he speaks with a gentle voice: „This is God", is very impressive, and from that moment on the naturalistic scene turns into the symbolic one. Suffering acquires the importance of the religious sacrifice.
I would have to mention the whole cast to appreciate Lodz performance: wonderful Joanna Król, who is turning in the twinkling of an eye from a warbled maiden into the revengeful woman treating his father in a cruel way; I would have to say about Mariusz Saniternik who is building his part of the humiliated father with no words, only by his presence, about Elżbieta Bielska-Graczyk who gave the quintessence of the suffering playing the mother part in Untitled. And naming all the actors is useless in that case, each of the spectators should experience it on their own. There are next Villqist's plays forthcoming - The Phantom is to be staged in Stary Teatr /Old Theatre/, Entartete Kunst in Teatr Polski /Polish Theatre/ in Poznań, so there will be more and more opportunities to compare them.