III Furies is a punk-style show: edgy and harsh, full of grotesque humour. The play evokes yet another discourse about Poland from the town of Legnica through a new contemporary text created especially for this stage, written by Sylwia Chutnik, Magda Fertacz and Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk. The live music of Moja Adrenalina (known for the soundtrack to Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing) gives a powerful sound to the Sirens of War.
The plays starts off with Apollo (Rafał Cieluch) heading for the Polish countryside right after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. It is there that a greedy peasant woman (Joanna Gonschorek), desiring an elegant coat of a professor's wife who have been cast out of Warsaw (Ewa Galusińska) - will give its owner away, sentencing both the coat's owner and her daughter to death at the hand of an SS soldier (Robert Gulaczyk). In all that is happening, the warnings of Cassandra (Katarzyna Dworak) fall on deaf ears.
Such wartime sins have their consequences. Many years later, the peasant woman's daughter gives birth to Dzidzia. Dzidzia, both physically and mentally handicapped, is a limbless creature with hydrocephalus and all sorts of other possible ailments. Such is the punishment for the sins of the past, and at the same time, a revenge and accusation of Polish history. Not only history for that matter, as the child's little torso will also become a symbol of crippled contemporary times and helplessness in the face on an existing situation. Neither the gods of Olimpus, nor the Holy Mother can help.
"The main characters of the play are women, and their traumas date back to the war and a sense of guilt," director Marcin Liber says of his show. The little monster's mother is one of the main characters: a primitive Danuta Mutter, who strangled her other three children so they wouldn't disturb her and her husband's TV time - before she had the fourth - which she ends up selling at the marketplace. Simultaneously the story of a sadistic executioner of the AK (National Army) begins to unfold. In the play, the character appears as Stefan Markiewicz aka Hercules (Mariusz Sikorski). Hercules is based on the authentic figure of Stefan Dąbski, whose memoirs were recently published by the "Ośrodek Karta" (Karta Centre). This hero-and-criminal-in-one describes with graphic detail how he performed executions on informers, spies, traitors and common crooks - but also how he murdered innocent civilians, including women and children - and, how much pleasure the job gave him. These two monstrous figures are in a way two sides of the same reality, along with other forms representative of a national idiocy and atrocity, hideousness and primitivism. It could be said that the performance is a painful and cynical catalogue, constructed with perverse Witkacy-like fantasy through the means of language, which, much like a vacuum-cleaner, sucks in all kinds of shades of the stylistic palette, and blends them together into a wild mix.
The title of the production, as well as the trio exposed in it, is no coincidence. The Three Furies were born out of the blood of Uranos - goddesses of anger, revenge and hatred, and the number three is a repeated motif in the production. There are three main female characters, and there are three authors of this furious, emotion-saturated script: Sylwia Chutnik, Magda Fertacz, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk. Through the mode of expression the authors imposed on the text, atrocity blends with surrealist grotesque.
Here is a rapacious vision of ourselves and our neighbours, our hidden, disgusting thoughts, our stupid actions, our grudges held against the world. III Furies breaks all possibles taboos with the power of a hurricane, which can have both a destructive and cleansing effect.
The point is to give the depicted tragedies a larger meaning, and to give sacrifice a value… It's a text which could be treated like a desperate call for a normal Poland. A Poland without the burden of piles of corpses, a sea of blood, sins and punishments.
-director Marcin Liber.
The play premiered on March 8, 2011, with repeat performances on March 10-13, 17-18 and April 7-9, 2011.
Helena Modrzejewska Theatre in Legnica
Rynek 39, 59-220 Legnica
Director: Jacek Głomb
tel. (+48 76) 72 33 500
fax (+48 76) 72 33 501
www.teatr.legnica.pl
Source: pl.teatr.legnica.pl, www.e-teatr.pl