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1.Your two plays will be staged during the festival. As I know, this will be your first meeting with people from Turkey. I wonder what your expectations and ideas are about the audience you will meet.
I am always excited to meet new audiences and confront myself with their reactions. I have no preconceptions about the public. Despite all the differences, Poland and Turkey have much in common – both countries were at a time great empires, both have now lost some of their importance despite still being large countries, both are situated on the outskirts of Europe, both have a large diaspora abroad (among others in Germany). I must admit I am very curious about the reaction of the Turkish public.
2. The audience will meet today's Polish family in your play of No Matter How Hard We Tried which is written by Dorota Maslowska. What would be the hints you can give audiences if you were to make a reading of the play through the perspective of "Poland"?
Although at first the play may seem very Polish, it has many topics or aspects that are transferable – the illusion that “the grass is always greener on the other side” is quite universal. In her play, Dorota Masłowska confronted generations, languages, ways of thinking and functioning, different everyday realities in order to bring out the discord, the non-existence of so called ”statistical Pole”, the lack of a common ground where all this could meet and could be described by the word “we”. Everything in the play is rather gruesome and exaggerated but at the end of the day, the message is positive and affirming. We do not say: “Oh, what an awful country we live in, how drab!” On the contrary, this play is an affirmation of being a Pole and of Polishness –which is not always obvious for the generation of people in their thirties.
3. There is a collaboration between TR Warszawa and Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz for the play, No Matter How Hard We Tried. Could you tell us more about this collaboration?
Cooperations are very interesting as they add another dynamic to the creative process. From the outset we have to think about a larger and different audience, we have to organize our performing schedule in order to incorporate foreign trips. Collaborations give a chance to expand. At TR Warszawa we are quite used to cooperations both with Polish and with foreign partners – Nosferatu as well has been co-produced with Teatr Narodowy in Warsaw and with several partners such as Barbican Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival, Adelaide Festival. Apart form artistic and exposure reasons, there are also financial ones – everybody is struggling for funds nowadays and collaborations, especially with such renowned partners like ours allow to produce quality performances.