FILOKTET EX MACHINA, NASTIA, IMAGINE and ORLANDO

New titles at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw

Ahead of the premiere of FILOKTET EX MACHINA, directed by Agata Koszulinska, I spoke to Paweł Sztarbowski, Deputy Programme Director.

Tomasz Ostrowski: We are ahead of the premiere of FILOKTET EX MACHINA. A performance about the complex human condition. The performance is prepared jointly with the NEW EPIFANIE Festival. Is this your first collaboration with this festival?

Paweł Sztarbowski: We have already collaborated on previous editions, but they were never co-productions. It was done on the basis of guest performances. This time the plan is that we create the play together and it will enter the repertoire of the Teatr Powszechny.

What is this performance about?  

Agata Koszulińska - this will be her directorial debut - has proposed one of the most important themes that art in general can talk about: the theme of illness, suffering and death, juxtaposing this with the eternal human dream of liberation and overcoming suffering. Agata is interested in the world of cutting-edge technology and scientific discovery. At times, therefore, it will be a strongly futuristic or post-humanist vision about how our lives and deaths are influenced by scientific discoveries. And at the same time, the theatre offers a chance to show very concrete people who, in taking up this struggle, transform themselves into cyborgs, doing everything to go beyond the limitations of their crippled bodies. Technology becomes something like a new god here. The framework for the entire performance is the mythical tale of Philoctetes.

Archer, mortally wounded by a snake.

Yes, he is injured in full force and does not accept his suffering and illness.

The production features actors from the Powszechny Theatre, but not only? 

Yes, because this is, as I said, our co-production with the New Epiphanies Festival. When Agata Koszulinska and Paweł Dobrowolski and Maciej Omylak, the directors of the New Epiphanies Festival, came to us, this project was already partly ready in the conceptual and casting sense. We were joined by actors from our ensemble, Aleksandra Bożek and Oskar Stoczynski.

Agata Koszulinska invited her friend Kinga Chudobinska-Zdunik for this performance. Going into the details of the script, her presence is very obvious for this performance.

It seems to me that the crux of Agata's idea and this performance is precisely the participation of Kinga Chudobinska-Zdunik, who has been struggling with multiple sclerosis for several years. In the performance, she talks about her personal experience, her obscure diagnosis, her anxiety, her suffering. She does not shy away from humour in all this, making her confession all the more moving. Suddenly, the acting scenes associated with the story of the myth of Philoctetes are no longer abstract, they find their roots.

He tells his story on screen in a video broadcast?

No, Kinga is present live on stage, reading extracts from her diary. The whole world around created by the actors becomes a series of mirror images in which her story will be seen.

We are talking about the play that will premiere this Saturday, 19 March, but more premieres are coming soon. Already on 7 April, it will be NASTIA.

Yes, this is a performance that has already been partly shown as work in progress. As part of an artistic residency funded by the Theatre Institute, artists from Belarus who fled the persecution of the Lukashenko regime worked with us. They were supposed to realise a reading, but the result was actually a finished performance. Thanks to a grant from the Warsaw Office for Culture, for which cooperation and support of migrants is now becoming a key theme, it was possible to turn NASTIA into a full premiere. The director is Yura Dzivakou, previously associated with the Free Theatre of Minsk. This is a very powerful short story by Vladimir Sorokin about a family who celebrate their daughter's sixteenth birthday with a sumptuous dinner where the main course is to be a roast of that very daughter. Especially today, against the backdrop of war and Russia's aggression against Ukraine, this resonates shockingly. It is as if Sorokin, who has been a long-time resident in exile as an opponent of Putin's Russia, has turned out to be a cruel prophet of the whole situation.

In the context of these events taking place beyond our eastern border, do you have plans to collaborate with Ukrainian artists?

We work with them all the time. This has been part of our mission actually since the beginning of our directorship. Recently (13 January) we had the premiere of the play RADIO MARIIA directed by Roza Sarkisyan, a Ukrainian director. The theatre company includes Oksana Cherkashina, we have Artem Manuilov working with us on an ongoing basis, and as part of the international project "Face to Faith" we collaborate with the Jam Factory from Lviv. For 8 years now, we have been tackling topics related precisely to the situation of our neighbours from the East. The current war is also our common cause, which concerns the shape of democracy in Europe.

On 23 April, as part of the International Festival of Pleasant and Unpleasant Plays in Łódź, the world premiere of the play IMAGINE directed by Krystian Lupa will take place. The production is a co-production between the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw and the Teatr Powszechny in Łódź. The Warsaw premiere is scheduled for 7 May.

The PROSPERO - Extended Theatre group should also be mentioned as a co-production partner. This is a European group of the best European theatres, to which we were invited a few years ago after the international successes of 'The Curse', 'Mein Kampf' and 'Capri'. The play 'Imagine' is therefore being produced as part of a major international collaboration. Of course, times are so uncertain that it is hard to say what will happen, but we are planning a major European tour in the autumn.

One trip has already been cancelled. To Moscow.

That is the question, what will happen and what will be possible? Krystian Lupa has this idea for a story about the future, about designing the future, about building a utopian vision, but also about what remains of the countercultural utopias of the 1960s and 1970s. The starting point is John Lennon's song IMAGINE and its extremely poignant words, which today resound like a utopian manifesto.

But IMAGINE it won't be the final premiere of the 2021/2022 season?

Already in April we start rehearsals for ORLANDO directed by Agnieszka Blonska. The performance will feature actors from our company and non-professional transgender actors. Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO, which is the starting point for this performance, deals with this very subject. I think it will be a very original form, also in the context of attacks on minorities and on the LGBT+ community. And that it will send an important political message against discrimination.

The Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw remains true to the motto of its patron Zygmunt Hübner: "Theatre that interferes".

We try all the time to meddle in different subjects, in different spaces, although unfortunately I feel more and more. that the current reality surprises us too much. And is capable of leapfrogging our imagination in cruel, often unexpected ways. For when we stage Mein Kampf directed by Jakub Skrzywanek or Capri directed by Krystian Lupa in 2019, which deals with the Second World War, did we expect that the context for these performances would be the contemporary war that is happening right next to us, in which our friends and their loved ones are suffering?

ORLANDO premiere just before the theatre's summer break?

Yes. This premiere is scheduled for the end of June and with this premiere and RADIO MARIA's trip to Israel we will end the season.

The end of the season promises to be impressive. All that remains is to invite the audience to these four premieres in the next four months. First up is FILOKTET EX MACHINA directed by Agata Koszulinska as part of the New Epiphanies Festival. Premiere on 19 March, with further performances on 20 and 21 March and 21 April.

CREATIVES
directing – Agata Koszulińska
drama and text – Amadeusz Nosal
real objects – Olga Ryl-Krystianowska
music – Mateusz Korsak
virtual objects (VR) and video projections – Mateusz Korsak, Katarzyna Trzewik
choreography – Michał Przybyła
Light Direction: Piotr Pieczyński
costumes – Sandra Stępień
stage manager - Barbara Sadowska

CAST:
Aleksandra Bożek
Kinga Chudobińska-Zdunik
Sylwia Gola
Bartosz Mikulak
Oskar Stoczyński

Below are photos from the press rehearsal of the performance FILOKTET EX MACHINA