For two weeks in September, an area of the Tate Modern will be transformed by Paulina Ołowska into a living room. Wallpaper will be hung up, and tables, chairs and cupboards laid out. During the day, the space will function as an installation, while on certain evenings, it will become the stage for The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue, a play originally written by legendary Polish polymath Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (also known as Witkacy).
The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue is a psychological parody of a family drama, written by Witkacy in 1924. Full of sarcasm and biting humour, the play’s action is focussed around the relationship between a mother and son. Janina Węgorzewska (literally “Eely” in English), an aged and ruined widow of an aristocrat, earns a living through needlework. She still supports her twenty-something son Leon, a philosopher and thinker obsessed with the end of civilization.
“The Mother is a particularly disturbing play, one that Witkacy called ‘unsavoury’,” writes Jan Błoński in the introduction to the 1974 edition of Witkacy’s Wybór Dramatów (“Selected Plays”). “Rarely do works appear in which everybody’s feelings – especially their most sacred ones – are equally drastically mocked and disparaged.”
BMW Tate Live is a series of evening performances in which artists create groundbreaking works that cross the borders between artistic mediums.
Paulina Ołowska
The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue
Tate Modern, Bankside, London
14th to 27th September 2015
Performance dates:
- Monday 21st September, 19:30 and 20:30
- Wednesday 23rd September, 19:30 and 20:30
- Friday 25th September, 22:00
Reservations can be made through the Tate website.