Dialog Festival
Farewell to Autumn
based on Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s novel, adaptation: Tomasz Kireńczuk, Piotr Sieklucki, set and costume design: Łukasz Błażejewski, choreography: Mikołaj Mikołajczyk, music adaptation: Marzena Ciuła, lighting design: Marek Kutnik, dramaturgy: Tomasz Kireńczuk, Aneta Cardet, premiere: April 2011
cast: Bolesław Abart, Zdzisław Kuźniar, Maciej Tomaszewski, Michał Szwed, Krzysztof Zych, Krzysztof Boczkowski, Marta Malikowska, Katarzyna Z. Michalska, Jerzy Senator, Aleksandra Dytko, Irena Rybnicka, Dariusz Maj, Piotr Łukaszczyk, Edward Kalisz
“Individual everyday revolutions for which Witkacy’s protagonists live give them a momentary sense of freedom, aesthetic pleasure and intellectual or sexual fulfilment. In a world doomed to extinction, this morbid devouring of a semblance of life begins to command respect. And seems very relevant today. For, despite different historical, cultural and social circumstances, are we really so unlike Witkacy’s protagonists? Is their everyday motto, “make money anyhow and enjoy it”, really so distant from our experiences today?”
Tomasz Kireńczuk
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote his novel Farewell to Autumn in 1927. Although the novel can be read as a metaphysical tale about the end of the old world and fear of an upcoming revolution, or as a love-themed tragicomedy which is a parody of classic romances from the early 20th century, the authors of the Wrocław staging break with these stock formulas. Witkacy’s political revolution finds its equivalent here in individual revolutions, i.e. transformations of the protagonists, which in turn means that their relationships go far beyond the level of a metaphysical tragicomedy. This strange group of people, full of contradictions and boiling points, functions somewhere on the margins of the normal order, tries to build something new, and experiments with sex, drugs and alcohol. They use their whole energy for actions that are to make them feel something extreme, even if only for a moment. And these individual revolutions lead to a rebellion, which in Sieklucki’s production replicates history’s ever constant and every returning model of revolution.
“Beautiful nude young men frolic in a bathtub. This is also where a naked Zosia commits suicide. Łohoyski, stark naked, dances solo and skips joyfully. The nudity of beautiful bodies is neutral in this production; there is no vulgarity nor pornography. (…) The director’s clever idea was to introduce a group narrator: a chorus of three old men in wheelchairs. Like a Greek chorus, they stay on stage till the end and make very funny and sometimes nasty comments about the on-stage events. They’re not unlike the two elderly hecklers sitting in the box in The Muppet Show.”
Mirosław Kocur, Teatr
Wrocławski Teatr Współczesny is one of the most important theatre companies in Poland, led for 12 years by Krystyna Meissner. Founded as a private venture shortly after WWII in the then completely ruined Wrocław, the theatre quickly won nationwide acclaim, thanks to which its collaborators included such distinguished playwrights as Helmut Kajzar and Tadeusz Różewicz, as well as the greatest Polish directors, such as Jerzy Jarocki or Józef Szajna.
Today Teatr Współczesny is regarded as one of the most thought-provoking and most interesting theatre companies in Poland. It has won the hearts of spectators and critics with its clearly defined repertoire, serious approach to its audiences and, first of all, excellent choice of directors. Each new production involves well-known and established artists as well as representatives of younger generations and debutants. Its risky, ground-breaking productions now considered “classics” of contemporary Polish theatre (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski or Transfer directed by Jan Klata) are still triumphantly received all over the world. Since 2001, every two years, the theatre has been holding the DIALOG-WROCŁAW International Theatre Festival, the most important international theatre festival in Poland.