PREMIERE: 07.01.2022 MAIN STAGE
TIME: 125 MIN
THE WEDDING by Stanisław Wyspiański seems to be a perfect touchstone for Polish public moods, as well as for the power and condition of the actors’ team. It is important to challenge the team with the task, which has been, undoubtedly, the most important for many seasons.
The performance is the attempt of telling about a current Polish reality in Wyspiański’s words. The director, Wojtek Klemm, the artist with Polish roots, permanently residing in Zurich, together with his co-workers and the team wants to ask if the world shown at Wyspiański’s is not lost before it had begun.
A wedding is the ceremony of joining opposing forces to create something new: a transformation of them. After the marriage a joyful celebration, a connection resulting from marital duties begins. We witness love, which wants the birth. The epic WEDDING by Wyspiański refers to wedding ceremony, but tells a completely different story. Why do the feasters who want a joyful change, got frozen in a lethargic dance? Why does this unusual feast in Wyspiański’s work wake up demons and bring destruction to an unconscious community?
Remaining in a Polish context, a national myth and historical drama reads, the creators put an equates sign between a wedding and a wake. THE WEDDING is for them, first of all, a story about a tribe, who sacrifices love to feed the hungry deities. Everyone here thirsts for blood.
– It is the anti-Polish drama, but the text itself is, first of all, very critical. Wyspiański shows our worst national features – says Wojtek Klemm, the director – We have here excessive drinking, sex in corners, seeing ghosts in opiate stupor, and, at the end, organizing a rebellion, which shall not succeed. It cannot be said that THE WEDDING WESELE describes Poland in bright colours. It shows it rather as a country in a fog, in smog, where everybody wrangles with each other.
A sharp interpretation of THE WEDDING presented by the authors is confronted on stage with poetic images, which invite us to take part in the insane wedding. A refreshing reading of Wyspiański’s drama shows simple meetings of wedding guests, conflicts arising under the influence of alcohol, an explosive mixture of national tempers – and all that embedded with a beautiful but evil scenery.
– The subject of a wedding in THE WEDDING misleads us – says Tomasz Cymerman, a performance’s dramatist – Wyspiański depicted conflicts of Polish people in the context of the party. He showed, first of all, a picture of a Polish lout, a character who further stands for a major part of our society. This lout is worth to be told about.
The authors show a contrarian and not an obvious story about our national vices and myths. They do not try to avoid auto criticism though, and describe our quarrels in perspective and with a joke.
Szaniawski team with four quest actors from a dance theatre confront themselves not only with the director’s vision and a stage world construction, but also with a tradition of showing Polish arch-drama on stage and with the whole heritage of creating main roles. All of that gives the Wyspiański’s text wings and a drama ‘we all know and love’ become a true stage story about us here and now.