While Poniedziałek is most widely recognised to Polish audiences for TV series including M jak miłość / L like Love and Na Wspólnej / On Wspólna Street, his full range of skills come into play in his theatre work. With lead and supporting parts in pieces by Krzysztof Warlikowski and other renowned directors, he also creates scripts and translations for the powerful Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, which he helped Warlikowski establish in 2008.
Nowy Teatr plays Życie Seksualne Dzikich / The Sexual Life of Savages from the 11th to the 13th of January. Director Krzysztof Garbaczewski and the writer Marcin Cecko adapted their piece from Malinowski's controversial private diaries from the early 20th century, when the founder of structural anthropology did field research for landmark volumes including Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Wilfully enigmatic, Savages suspends in a force field of ideas, with an ominous black sculpture by Aleksandra Wasilkowska above the audience, shifting and contracting. Caution is shed in the improvised finale, which Marcin Cecko generates from a laptop and printer at the side of the stage. The original cast included Poniedziałek in the lead, and the stellar Nowy company including Maciej Stuhr. After Savages premiered in 2011, it was awarded for scenic design and musical score at the Divine Comedy Festival's showcase of new Polish productions, and Garbaczewski received the prestigious Passport Award from the magazine Polityka.
Krum with TR Warszawa plays from the 24th to the 27th of January, with English subtitles on the 25th. Poniedziałek is charismatically soft-spoken with a fascinating quality of projection, through almost three hours about the unsettling effects of returning home to tiresome Tel Aviv. The piece hinges on his fluid intensity, with an enthralling cast, an expansive, open set by Małgorzata Szczęśniak and Paweł Mykietyn's evocative score. The actor translated Israeli writer Hanoch Levin's play for the production, which received an Obie Award for its 2008 run in New York City, for Warlikowski's direction.
The core group that left TR Warszawa in 2008 began Nowy Teatr with the production (A)pollonia, written by Warlikowski, Poniedziałek and dramaturg Piotr Gruszczyński. Adapted from Aeschylus, Euripides and the contemporary Polish writer Hannah Krall, the sprawling 4.5-hour piece premiered in 2009 in Warsaw and at the Avignon Festival. It will be the title play in a new anthology of recent Polish drama translated into English, published in autumn 2013 by the University of Chicago Press and Seagull Books, and prepared by Joanna Klass, theatre director at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. (A)pollonia's overlapping tales of human atrocity are forceful to read, while on stage, Poniedziałek was blade sharp, exuding a steely ferocity (he did not play one of the good guys).
Nowy Teatr then turned to Tennessee Williams' work for Tramwaj / A Streetcar, co-produced with the esteemed Odeon-Theatre de l'Europe. With Poniedziałek's Polish translation from the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tramwaj premiered in Paris in 2010, starring Isabelle Huppert and Andrzej Chyra. The translation led to a request by Znak, a top publisher in Kraków, for Poniedziałek to translate a book of Williams plays. The project occupied him intensively for a year, in the midst of his performing and touring schedule. The collection Tramwaj zwany pożądaniem i inne dramaty / A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Dramas came out in autumn 2012, with essential plays including The Glass Menagerie and Night of the Iguana.
"Each generation deserves its own translations of the great theatre plays", Poniedziałek said in a conversation in Kraków in December 2012. There, at the Divine Comedy Festival, he played Antonio in Nowy Teatr's Opowieści Afrykańskie Według Szekspira / African Tales by Shakespeare, which took the prize for best production. He said that if his career holds a magnum opus thus far, the book of Williams translations is it. Asked which of the translated plays he's most eager to see produced in Poland, he said Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With Scarlett Johannson currently playing Maggie the Cat on Broadway—where James Earl Jones starred as the play's racist Big Daddy in 2008—it's intriguing that an imaginative Polish company might now take on Williams' favorite among his remarkable plays, in Poniedziałek's contemporary rendition.
Jacek Poniedziałek (born 1966) studied at the National Academy of Theatre in Kraków, where he worked with the director Krystian Lupa and with fellow student Krzysztof Warlikowski. During five years with the renowned Stary Theatre in Kraków, he worked with the legendary directors Jerzy Jarocki and Jerzy Grzegorzewski. At the National Theatre in Warsaw, he played in Grzegorzewski's Ślub / The Marriage by Witold Gombrowicz and in Tadeusz Bradecki's staging of Saragossa, adapted from Jan Potocki's remarkable novel. He moved to TR Warszawa to join Krzysztof Warlikowski, playing the lead in the director's Hamlet and featured in his dynamic production of Angels in America. His work with Nowy Teatr in Warsaw includes Enter, a piece derived from blog exchanges that he co-wrote and co-directed, with live music by the Sen Zu band.
For more on The Sexual Life of Savages at ATM Studios in Warsaw in January 2013, see www.nowyteatr.org
For more on Krum, also at ATM Studios in January, see www.trwarszawa.pl
For Tramwaj zwany pożądaniem i inne dramaty, the Tennessee Williams collection in Polish, see www.znak.pl
Sources: culture.pl