The Point Zero: The Kindly Ones marks the first performance in which Janusz Opryński drew on Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. Later, he was invited to take part in the Mikro Theatre series curated by Komuna Warszawa during the 2016 Theatre Confrontations. Two of Janusz Opryński’s frequent collaborators – Eliza Borowska (Polski Theatre, Warsaw) and Sławomir Grzymkowski (Dramatyczny Theatre, Warsaw) – worked on the production with him. A radical limitation of form was at core of the project – none of the performances could exceed 16 minutes. The piece presented on that occasion will now be integrated into Everything Flows.

The play’s protagonists, Anna and Jan, present a report from hell. She witnessed the Holodomor in Ukraine, while he was a long-term prisoner of Soviet labour camps. The performance attempts to address the experience of hunger, to tackle experience of the Soviet gulag, and to find space to speak the heaviest words about humans.

***

Janusz Opryński

Founder of the Provisorium Theatre, which has been operating since 1976; for 25 years, he served as Artistic and Programme Director of the Centre for Culture in Lublin. Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Theatre Confrontations Festival. Co-author of the most successful performances by Provisorium – together with Kompania Theatre, he staged Ferdydurke by W. Gombrowicz, Bite the Dust by T. Różewicz, and Trans-Atlantyk by W. Gombrowicz. He went on to direct The Brothers Karamazov, a play based on F. Dostoevsky’s classic in a new translation by Cezary Wodziński, Ice, based on his own adaptation of the novel of J. Dukaj, and Zero Point: The Kindly Ones, based on the novel by J. Littell – with excerpts from W. Grosmann’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows. Janusz Opryński also directed his adaptations at the Polish Theatre in Bielsko Biała – St. Idiot, and at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw – Under Western Eyes. Currently, the he is working on F. Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which will be staged in 2019 at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw, as well as on the adaptation of M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (J. Kochanowski Theatre in Opole), which will combine traditional theatre with elements of the new circus. Everything Flows (Soho Theatre in Warsaw) will premiere during the 24th Theatre Confrontations.

Winner of the Konrad Swinarski Award, Gold Medal of Gloria Artis, and the Conrad’s Laurel [Laur Konrada], which he received at the “Interpretations” Festival of the Art of Directing in Katowice.

***

This tremendous book has the power to make you weep at man’s inhumanity to man and, at the same time, rejoice that freedom does not die. 

The Independent