Krakow Festival Office
Divine Comedy 2010
Divine Comedy 2010
Knives in Hens
Director: Weronika Szczawińska
The Olsztyn version of Harrover’s drama, popular on Polish stages, resembles a new linguistic theatrical experiment rather than a study in women’s alienation. Its director discovers a true semantic treatise under the feature and psychological layer of the text. Three actors are placed within an empty, white space. Words and notions are written out on the walls. With the help of letters and pictograms, the protagonists make attempts to decipher the sense of life and the world. What betrayal means, what the constituent elements of jealousy are, what love is, what a woman is, and who a man may be. Emotions become separated from words, the text of the role assumes the form of a complex language code. What notions are taken to form a hero? At the beginning of the play, the Ploughman, deserted by Wife who chose the Miller, uses the wall to writes the fundamental equation: “horse, field, woman = entire me”. In this world, the task of the Miller is to spoil the inscriptions, change the meanings of words by obscene word endings and drawings. In the thus formatted world, love must also assume a written form. And suddenly everything is like in Greenaway’s Pillow Book: a naked man is writing on a naked woman. This means: now you are mine, you are a sheet of paper that I may fill with writing as I want, and once I am done, I will create you anew. Another production by Weronika Szczawińska, where the laboriously discovered, radical and new form affords a different sense to a well-known work.
Photography: Grzegorz Ziemiański
Divine Comedy 2010
Divine Comedy 2010
Knives in Hens
Director: Weronika Szczawińska
The Olsztyn version of Harrover’s drama, popular on Polish stages, resembles a new linguistic theatrical experiment rather than a study in women’s alienation. Its director discovers a true semantic treatise under the feature and psychological layer of the text. Three actors are placed within an empty, white space. Words and notions are written out on the walls. With the help of letters and pictograms, the protagonists make attempts to decipher the sense of life and the world. What betrayal means, what the constituent elements of jealousy are, what love is, what a woman is, and who a man may be. Emotions become separated from words, the text of the role assumes the form of a complex language code. What notions are taken to form a hero? At the beginning of the play, the Ploughman, deserted by Wife who chose the Miller, uses the wall to writes the fundamental equation: “horse, field, woman = entire me”. In this world, the task of the Miller is to spoil the inscriptions, change the meanings of words by obscene word endings and drawings. In the thus formatted world, love must also assume a written form. And suddenly everything is like in Greenaway’s Pillow Book: a naked man is writing on a naked woman. This means: now you are mine, you are a sheet of paper that I may fill with writing as I want, and once I am done, I will create you anew. Another production by Weronika Szczawińska, where the laboriously discovered, radical and new form affords a different sense to a well-known work.
Photography: Grzegorz Ziemiański