Reviews from German press - excerpts
Sad, Cheeky, Profound: The New Play by Dorota Masłowska at [“digging deep and getting dirty” International Playwriting Festival on Identity and History] at the Schaubühne.
The author has been a star in Poland since the time when, at the age of less than twenty, she published a novel White and Red. Now she is twenty five, and since then has written one more novel and two plays. (...) Masłowska has a wonderful gift of mimicking authentic voices; in her second play she ideally conveys the language of various generations and social groups. She places a panorama of Polish society in a dilapidating Warsaw tenant house. Her characters are as plastic as they are gloomy and the author gets carried away in her presentation of the layers of collective decay which leads to the point that laughter gets trapped in the viewer's throat. (...)
In the performance prepared at TR Warszawa, Grzegorz Jarzyna skillfully juggles with the elements of non-reality. Three white walls of the stage are at the same time video screens. At the beginning the actors stand lined up as if they were characters from a cut-me-out book, they step forward, or like the Grandma in her wheelchair, move forward into the spotlight. The scenes are acted with laconic peace, they are barely sketched rather than bravely charged while on the screens the viewers see flashing children’s drawings which fit the infantile family mania involving the celebration of poverty by means of excessive use of negations such as “I am going to my non-room”.
The impressive finale of the play reveals that the mania of negations is much more than a game. The worlds of the poor and the nouveau rich overlap, the reality mixes with the non-reality all to create a gloomy unity. The images of Warsaw destroyed by German bomb raids are shown on the screens. Granny died during the bombing which is finally noticed by the Girl who abandons her cynical pose. And she suddenly feels that the reality begins to sink in when she realizes that she herself could not have possibly existed. Poland – is it one huge nightmare? ”We are not Polish, we are normal people”, cries the Girl. Digging deep. Well, you cannot dig any deeper.
Andreas Schäfer, Tagesspiegel
No matter how hard we tried, presented at the “Digging Deep And Getting Dirty” festival at the Schaubühne in Berlin, is not a national mass but a satirical slaughter of pigs in which Masłowska sketches a gloomy image of contemporary Poland again. What is new is the fact that Masłowska caricatures not only the young people who are devoid of hope, their demoralized parents but the cultural elite as well. Also, the language spoken by the Granny proves that the twenty-six year old Masłowska can use registers different from teenage and internet slang.
(...) thanks to the magical staging by Grzegorz Jarzyna with video screens on which all of the characters may be multiplied and objects conjured, even the caricatures of the elite gain a romantic dimension which they did not have in the text.
Matthias Heine, Die Welt
Everything starts with clear and rather empty space, instead of the totally cluttered room as it is written in the stage directions. The props are very few or they appear as simple drawings presented on the screen. The clue of the play is in its language, it is in Masłowska’s dialogues filled with raging puns, clichés and stereotypes which continuously bring to mind surprising and comic associations.
(...) The second world war is a recurring reference point for those verbal cascades. Granny feeds on sweet memories from before the war, Mother is fed up with listening about them whereas Little Metal Girl has not got the vaguest idea of them (“Granny never went to any sports camp!”). The time after the war is nothing more than disgusting sauce: socialism is not even mentioned here but real capitalism as described by the young author makes exactly the same impression. The flats are too small. The stew is watery and life is nothing but badly paid work. If you get lucky, you will find last year’s newspaper in the waste basket and you can see what you could not afford buying last year.
Most of it sounds like the nonsensical Radio Yerevan propaganda jokes yet the director managed to lead the audience along the paths of history into the psyche of the burnt out nation.
Christiane Kühl, die tageszeitung
Jarzyna grasped the soul of this text and uncovered its surreal core: he approaches the play not from its humorous side but allows it to shine as a tragic and comic farce, devoid of any realism. The three screens, the buzzing music, the animated props and the acting based on ironic allusion make the play wonderfully and ambiguously oscillating between seriousness and joke.
Dirk Pilz, Berliner Zeitung