The show premiered at Warsaw's TR theatre in November 2011 to favourable reviews. In the Rzeczpospolita daily, critic Jacek Cieślak called Jarzyna's staging a 'hypnotic film' in which the audience experience "every bit of silence flowing through the consciousness" through the music, imagery, colours and rustle of the heroine's dress, her nudity and her sensuality. Cieślak considers the play a surreal circus of sorts, in which the vampire hypnotises Lucy and takes her to a place beyond earth.
While the vampire motif has been present in folk literature long before the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, it was this very novel that has become an everlasting source of inspiration to creators of all arts. One of the most significant works it inspired was F.W. Murnau's 1922 Expressionist film masterpiece Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror, which in turn, impressed Werner Herzog so much that in 1979 he created his own version of the vampire myth entitled Nosferatu The Vampyre.
A refined visionary, director Grzegorz Jarzyna presents a spectacular multimedia production featuring the German actor Wolfgang Michael, with whom he collaborated earlier at Vienna's Burgtheater on the The Lion in the Winter. The actor had read the famed book by Stoker at the age of fourteen and since then has been fascinated with the subject, studying it thoroughly. He recognises common ground between the worlds of vampires and humans. Michael remarks:
The problems they have are not very different from ours. We're lost in the universe just as they are, we don't know where we came from and where we are heading; we're always searching for some kind of sense to it all, for God or the absolute.
Michael calls the director's approach intuitive and instinctive, who is capable of creating a special new space between the reality and the area one is not able to name.
Working with Jarzyna is like a flight to the Moon. He opens new spaces, almost new cosmic spheres in front of the actors; ones they never touched or experienced ever before. So when I got the proposition to participate in "Nosferatu" I boarded that spaceship with no doubts whatsoever.
Rzeczpospolita's Jacek Cieślak writes that the
vampirical seances carried out by Nosferatu and Lucy have a sexual subtext of venereal disease and AIDS. In these trick scenes narcotic visions appear: the vampire and his prey are nothing but a demon and an angel among the green shrubs that rise into the air.
The co-production made possible by TR Warszawa, The National Audiovisual Institute, London's Barbican Theatre and Dublin Theatre Festival. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is a strategic partner to the foreign presentations of the performance.
Nosferatu, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
Direction and text: Grzegorz Jarzyna
Stage Design and Costumes: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
Video: Bartek Macias
Music: John Zorn
Dramaturgy: Rita Czapka
Cast:
Sandra Korzeniak, Katarzyna Warnke, Wolfgang Michael, Jan Englert, Jan Frycz, Krzysztof Franieczek, Marcin Hycnar, Lech Łotocki, Adam Woronowicz
The show premiered on the 12th of November, 2011 at the National Theatre in Warsaw. It was staged in TR Warszawa in late January, 2012. The showings in April take place from on the 27th and 28th at 7 pm.
Nosferatu is scheduled to be shown at the Barbican Theatre in London from the 31st of October until the 3rd of November, 2012.
National Theatre Executive Director: Krzysztof Torończyk,Creative Director: Jan Englert.
TR Warszawa
ul. Marszałkowska 8
00-590 Warszawa
tel. 022 480 80 00
www.trwarszawa.pl
Source: www.narodowy.pl, www.trwarszawa.pl, www.e-teatr.pl, www.kulturaonline.pl, rp.pl