Over the course of eleven days, on Kraków's theatre stages the festival-goers will see the most publicised, interesting and intriguing Polish productions of the past year (altogether around twenty of them are being staged). In the Inferno competition section, nine productions will be competing for the Kraków Theatre Prize statuette. With Maja Kleczewska (the Polish Theatre, Bydgoszcz) as guide, the audience will be paying a visit to the "Brave New World" cemetery. Babel, based on a play by Elfriede Jelinek, employs the notion of an unending "afterdeath" and is divided into three parts: in the first, our senses are flooded with dead heroes' monologues and in the next, we listen to the laments of mothers grieving over the bodies of their sons, fallen in battle. The final part is a parody of a "socially committed anti-war, anti-civilisation pop music" concert.
Jerzy Jarocki from Warsaw's National Theatre will be coming with Sławomir Mrożek's Tango, while Krystian Lupa with a group from the Capital City of Warsaw Dramatyczny Theatre will be staging the second part of the provocative (or even extreme) Persona triptych (the first part - Persona. Marilyn - was showed at the Festival last year). In the psychodrama Persona. Simone's Body the borders of intimacy will be crossed in the company of the philosopher, Simone Weil.
Anna Augustynowicz will be coming to Kraków with Migraine, realised at Szczecin's Teatr Współczesny. Antonina Grzegorzewska based this cruel fable for adults set in a grotesque slaughterhouse on Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset's Motherhood. The jurors will also rate There Was Andrzej, Andrzej, Andrzej and Andrzej by the Monika Strzępka-Paweł Demirski pairing (the Jerzy Szaniawski Drama Theatre in Wałbrzych), an exaggerated and absurd lampoon of Polish reality. It targets the artistic elite, politicians, critics and spectators. It'll be vicious and neurotic! Already a cult figure in spite of his age, the Russian director Ivan Viripayev, who realised the monodrama July at the Na Woli Theatre in the capital will also be squaring up for battle.
Krzysztof Garbaczewski with a group from Opole's Jan Kochanowski Theatre is staging Homer's Odyssey. A somewhat confusing title, as the production has little in common with either Homer or his famous epic - this peculiarly vivid collage of loosely connected scenes is meant to increase our awareness of being lost in a contemporary pop culture mish-mash of myths, images, sounds and lyrics. Productions familiar to Kraków's public have also qualified for the competition section: from the Stary Theatre, The Wedding of Count Orgaz, based on a relatively little known work by Roman Jaworski and directed by Jan Klata and also Maciej Sobociński's reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the Bagatela Theatre.
Paradiso, the section devoted to young artists and new productions, will be showing contemporary "young" Polish theatre at its best. What direction is it heading in? How is it developing? Is it striving for novelty or following the path staked out by the masters?During this year's edition, the organisers return to the classics - we'll be able to watch Chekhov's Three Sisters, directed by Piotr Ratajczak and performed by the actors of the Lubuski Theatre from Zielona Góra or Juliusz Słowacki's prose poem Anhelli, adapted by Jarosław Fret from Wrocław's Zar Theatre.
Meanwhile there'll be no shortage of theatrical variations on the theme of well known works. Weronika Szczawińska from the Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Olsztyn, while deconstructing David Harrower's famous work Knives in Hens, deprives it of its narrative and psychological content. Natalia Korczakowska from Wałbrzych's Jerzy Szaniawski Theatre in Dynasty. Sclerosis multiplex, her version of the once popular television saga about the Carrington family from Denver, confuses tropes and creates a synthesis of motifs from the serial, showing what would have happened if Dynasty had been shot by a director in the Lars von Trier or Pedro Almodóvar mould.
Wiktor Rubin will also be coming to Divine Comedy from Gdańsk's Wybrzeże Theatre with Pier Paolo Pasolini's Orgia - a pitiless study of injustice, violence and power in which erotica is sewn with fear, while intimacy is exposed to public view.
Purgatorio is the realm covering accompanying events. Here we can see Poland (or Polishness?) in a capsule - At Midnight I Arrived at Widawa, or The Description of Customs…, part 3, directed by Mikołaj Grabowski from the IMKA Theatre in Warsaw, is based on the diaries of father Kitowicz. Also appearing in Kraków will be Krzysztof Warlikowski with The End from Warsaw's Nowy Theatre, which is based on Franz Kafka's The Trial, a film script by Bernard-Marie Koltès that never saw the light of day called Nickel Stuff and also extracts from J.M. Coetzees novel Elizabeth Costello.
Also to be found in this section are performances by Kraków's theatres. For example, one could see the latest production by Divine Comedy's artistic director Bartosz Szydłowski, Fakir - shown at Łaźnia Nowa within the framework of the Festival of Mrożek Short Stories, The End of the Halfpork based on texts by Helmut Kajzar and Franz Kafka (directed by Jakub Porcari, Nowy Theatre), Crime and Punishment by Heinrich Hoffmann - a show for children and adults performed in the rarely encountered tintaramesque technique from the Figure Theatre (directed by Filip Budweil) or I'll Sell the House in Which I Can Live No More, based on the life and oeuvre of Bohumil Hrabal (directed by Jerzy Zoń, KTO Theatre).
The Divine Comedy's special guests are representatives of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. The Living Room forms part of the Focused Research Team in Art as a Vehicle under Thomas Richards' care. A concert of poetry, Not History's Bones, and the I Am America show, based the words of Allen Ginsberg and directed by Mario Biagini, are the result of research into the significance of the word in poetry conducted by the Open Program group.
The competition jury is composed of the directors of the world's greatest festivals: Carmen Romero (Festival Santiago de Chile), Meiyin Wang (Radar Festival in New York), David Sefton (Festival UCLA) and Ana Marta Pizarro, the new director of the Latin American Theatre Festival.
The festival will be taking over virtually the whole of Kraków - the Stary, Ludowy, Bagatela and Łaźnia Nowa theatres, the Kraków Opera, the Fabryka Club in Zabłocie and the Pod Gruszką Journalists' Club. At the Wyspiański Pavilion, the public can meet directors, playwrights and directors. It will also be possible to talk with selected artists on an internet chat site on www.interia.pl.
Will the festival indicate the directions in which Polish theatre is set to develop? Will it be able (again) to counter popular beliefs about theatre's insularity? We are bound to find this out!
Programme at: www.boskakomedia.pl