A Side of Blossoming Girls is an attempt to translate Proust’s novel into a language of theatre. In this case the adaptation is not reduced to selecting fragments of the text and dialogues. The scenario is based on the actors’ improvisations, therefore we are offered an original text of a drama inspired by Proust’s novel. You do not have to know the novel to understand the spectacle.
All artistic means, stage design, music, the action developing with subtlety, acting are subordinated to grasping a very special moment when what is real and imagined get confused and penetrate into each other. Therefore the rhythm of the performance becomes as if slowed down. The dialogues are intertwined with the images, accompanied by evocative music. It introduces us into the atmosphere in which we can spend the summer together with Marcel in the trendy Balbec.

‘The Grand Hotel in Balbec, a spa in Normandy. Summer. It is the place where Marcel meets a young aristocrat Robert de Sanit Loup (A Guermantes Side) and Albertyna (A Side of Blossoming Girls). We enter the scenery of the young narrator’s most obscure experience. In this extraodrinary story of the writer’s ‘vocation’, of regaining the reality of himself and the world, which is A la recherche du temps perdu, the shadow of Balbec will be one of the most difficult and painful to recognise: the obscure shadow of fascination, desire, inversion and deep wound inflicted by exclusion: the shadow of corrupting degradation and disintegration of personality. Beckett is right saying ‘…the summer is not alive. The sea is hardly a veil which cannot cover the horror…’ Marcel will not regain himself, he will not find the time as long as he remains a prisoner of this shadow. Can theatre face this negative experience? Can it be a medium? Can it demonstrate our lack of transparency? Can it draw us into the turmoil of the lost time? It appears that this most sublime ambition of theatre is a guiding principle of the performance’ – wrote Piotr Kłoczowski.