The foretold disappearance’s chronicle

Tomasz Miłkowski, TRYBUNA

At the end the actors do not come back on the stage for applause and the main character (Magdalena Cielecka) simply vanishes. She repeats with almost toneless voice: ,,Validate me/ Witness me/ See me/ Love me". Then she predicts her owns disappearing. Yet one hears the echo of these words.

The actors do not come back to thank for the applause because everything has been already said and these clapping hands seem not to be tactful ones.
The theatre's illusion triumphs because the main character has disappeared, but not the actress herself. Such an identification can lead to false conclusions, the real word and the scene become one. Where is the barrier? The theatre balances on this borderline, which confuses the audience and pulls them into the extra artistic sphere.
The performance being a desperate cry for noticing a man next to us still lasts. This cry does not calm down when the glimmering light is cast on the audience while the scene is plunged in the dark like the main character's soul.
It sounds the more loud as the audience naturally knows that „Psychosis" heroine's confessions are not only a pure creation, but also a recording of the author's experiences, who died in the same way - by committing suicide. Those two things cannot be separated. It is impossible to „forget" about it while watching the performance and listening to the confessions of the main character who vainly fights against the madness, despair and consciousness of alienation coming over her. She defends herself by thinking of suicide - this way she finds consolation and liberation from fear and the unbearable existence. So does the author, who writes in order to avoid death.
Sarah Kane's text is not a brilliant work of literature and comparing her to Shakespeare has, of course, a figurative sense. She was certainly a talented and promising writer who left a significant trace - a recording of an immense suffering straight from, usually neglected by literature, areas of consciousness and unconsciousness. However, it was drama, the acting mastery of Magdalena Cielecka and producer's methods by Grzegorz Jarzyna, which put this text into shape of an artistic manifest, a call for help, for agreement among the people.
It is, as the actors say, „pure" at the beginning. Cielecka does hardly interpret the text at all. She presents, like an indifferent person from outside, the main character's problem: she wants to be seen, heard, loved. Nothing happens so she feels the augmenting solitude and fear of playing the secondary role in the world. The countdown starts: on the walls' surface appear subsequent numbers and an „off-voice" informs which number it is. The audience is thrown into the epicentre of a struggle for life. Its course has no influence on the independent decrease of the number of days left to the foretold ultimate moment at 4.48 - the time of suicides. The main character's emotions grow, she experiences inner vibrations, explosions of anger, neurosis states and greedy life enjoyment.
Her way is marked with meeting the doctors, suicidal attempts and desperate search for contact with the people she loves. There are also visions of her past (a child) and future (an old woman) dreamt or evoked by drugs. When one of her projections - an old, naked, sad and lonesome woman that the visionary will in fact never be - walks on the scene, the existential pain of the tormented main character is anxiously close to us.
The old woman moves away, she plunges into the dark and then comes the moment when the barriers brake and one cannot concentrate. The main character is in terrible torment; she tries to stop her thoughts running madly through her head. So do the suceeding, projected numbers - accompanied by raging music becoming more and more dangerous. There is only one thing left to do: she has to try to forget by torturing her body knoscking herself hopelessly onto a wall and then to pass away. Two days before the suicidal act the countdown stops.
This Performance in Teatr Rozmaitości does not let anyone stay indifferent. Magdalena Cielecka showed, in an extremely shocking way, human's suffering, the truth of the psyche's black side, the pain of solitude in the world of kindly, but strange people, sensibility being a desctructing power, love that destroys. It is more than a performance - it is a voice defending life killed by indifference.