A scene from The Damned, photo: http://teatropole.pl
The Jan Kochanowski Theatre from Opole takes two of its performances to major theatre festivals in Georgia and Korea. Following the late September showings of Maja Kleczewska’s Zmierch Bogów in Tbilisi, Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s production, The Odyssey, is shown at the Seul Performing Arts Festival from the 13th of October
The head of marketing and promotion of the Kochanowski Theatre, Łukasz Kustrzyński stated that the productions were selected by the organisers of the two festivals themselves and also revealed that Garbaczewski’s play is to be staged three times at the Korean festival. According to Kustrzyński, the theatre from Opole has began its international career followings a very strong and enthusiastically received presence at the World Shakespearian Festival in London.
Our Macbeth was received very well at the festival and the word about the theatre from Opole began to get around. We have been receiving more and more offers and invitations since then. (…) It’s great if we can show our work, and through it, present Polish culture across the world. The director of the theatre, Tomasz Konina has worked very hard to make the company noticed on an international scale, and this work now bears its fruit
Both the trips constitute a major logisitic challenge. The cast of Maja Kleczewska’s performance includes 40 people, and the local conditions of the stage necessitated a special adaptation of the sets. The stage design of The Odyssey by Garbaczewski has already set out on its journey in the beginning of August this year, and transporting it to Korea will take a total of two months.
The performance by Maja Kleczewska, Zmierzch bogów (The Damned) is a theatrical adaptation of Essenbeck family story, known to the fans of films from Luchino Visconti. The head of the family, Baron von Essenbeck is secretly murdered, and his kins set out on an uncompromising battle for power. Maja Kleczewska has shifted the original setting of the story in a Nazi-dominated Germany of the 1930s to a contemporary reality.
The performance at the 4th International Festival of Theatre in Tbilisi met with unprecedented acclaim. The actors received 11 rounds of applause, and still hadn’t left the theatre 40 minutes after the play had already concluded. The Georgian audiences thus commented on the significance of the play:
For us this kind of theatre that you presented - honest, genuine, uncompromising, and willing to take up the most difficult and painful issues means so much more than you can imagine. We probably experience this much more strongly than the Polish audience. We are still at the beginnings of a threshold that you have already been confronting for a few years.
The director of the festival, Ekaterina Mazmishvili thus commented the experience after the showing on the 21st of September:
Your stay here is much more than a performance, a festival, a theatre. The Damned has inscribed itself very sharply into our current situation, into our socio-political reality, and both the private and public lives of Georgians. Thanks to this beautiful play, we felt that our broken up and divided society became one at least for a moment – that we united against evil, violence, and against the questioning of basic human rights.
In The Odyssey, Krzysztof Garbaczewski tells the story of Telemach, the son of Odysseus who was brought up fatherless, but always heard stories of the father’s mythical deeds. The hero of the story wrestles with the myth of his own father as he sets out to find his own identity.
The organisers of the festival have released the following text about the performance from Garbaczewski:
Homer’s Odyssey – one of the oldest texts in the European culture. Almost eaten by worms. So classical that nobody considers it a source of aesthetic experience or cognitive values, even though its plot is perfectly familiar to everybody who has learnt to write and speak. The matrix of all novels, a great-grandmother of modern narration, the Odyssey copes with the very notion of storytelling – it loops itself infinitely, concealing its contents in ever multiplying boxes.
(...)
We tell the story of a boy who was brought up without a father, at the same time being boosted with hormones of his growth, grandeur and legend. (You meet him the moment when he starts listening for the voice that would tell him who he really is). The story of a woman who sews and tears her despair over and over again in the infinite repetition of endless waiting. The story of a man who recounts his journey, which in fact had never happened, and even if it had, it would only have been in his imagination. The story of an odyssey, which is NOTHING but life itself. Of a performance that makes us arrive at the following conclusion: yes, Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest texts in our culture…
Editor: SRS
Source: press release, teatropole.pl, www.spaf.or.kr, tbilisiinternational.com