In the Solitude of Cotton Fields is a low-key play about the art of love and the power of conversation. Its protagonists, the dealer (Wojciech Niemczyk) and his client (Tomasz Nosiński) meet in some dark corner somewhere on the outskirts of the city. The two men engage in a highly allusive conversation about what they can offer each other. ‘They speak thousands of words which to us seem like an alibi for meeting with each other’, as the director explained before the show premiered in Kielce in September 2009.
The play is experimental. The actors are accompanied by video projections by Marta Stoces and live club-trance music by Natural Born Chillers. The director speaks of his show as ‘hysterical theatre’. He further explained:
The frequent use of amplitudes is crucial to me; from a transitory or zero state to a state of high acting risk.
According to Joanna Targoń, a critic for Gazeta Wyborcza, Rychcik translated Kotlès’s language into a wild, condensed concert.
The actors – Wojciech Niemeczyk (the Dealer) and Tomasz Nosiński (the Client) – are the soloists of this concert. In identical black suits they stand next to each other in front of the microphones. The dialogue between them happens with barely any eye contact involved – the connection with the audience becomes more important. Each of the actors is selling himself: his words, his character, his body launched to dance wildly, his effort. The deal, whose objective is ambiguous or even abstract in Koltès’s drama, here becomes (literally) embodied, as sexual tension emerges between the Client and the Dealer. But Rychick doesn’t seek to explain the meeting of the two characters by means of desire. They appear as immanent parts of every contact between human beings.
The efforts and talents of the actors were appreciated by Beata Frysztacka. Having seen the show at the Boska Komedia festival in Kraków, she wrote that they burn in the ninety-minute-long performance of trance, emotion, and moving text.
Niemczyk and Nosiński stand next to each other on the stage. The microphones are in front of them. Behind them – the Natural Born Chillers band with instruments. A guitar, drums, keyboard, computer. Koltès’s text is being shouted in the direction of the audience even though the utterances are a dialogue – they’re a conversation between two men who want to complete a transaction. They behave rapidly and obstreperously, or even aggressively. Nevertheless, no interaction between them occurs. What is the deal about – drugs, sex, or simply the human need of being close with another person? We don’t get an unambiguous answer to this question.
The show has also been adapted as a film prepared together by TVP Kultura and TVP Kielce. As Wojciech Macherek, the director of Teatr i Literatura TVP (the Theatre and Literature editorial department of Polish public television), explained the choice:
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields is particularly interesting, because this show is exemplary of the new aesthetics in contemporary theatre, which are so strongly present in the works of young directors. It’s worth getting to know it, even if it engenders resistance.
sources: Stefan Żeromski Theatre w Kielce, Culture.pl, Gazeta Wyborcza, www.e-spot.pl, TVP Kultura, written by AL, translated by NS June 2016