The performance was produced as part of the DEBIUT TR 2015 programme which promotes the most interesting stage directors of the younger generation. The first winner of the award was Jędrzej Piaskowski in 2015.

They were called “traitors to the country”, “collaborators”, and “renegades”. Their crime was maintaining intimate relationships with German soldiers during the occupation. Actresses, singers, cinema and cabaret stars. Did they really deserve the infamy and punishment meted out by the underground? What was their motivation? Do we have a moral right to judge them today?

The play, by director Jędrzej Piaskowski and playwright Magda Fertacz, is an attempt to examine the issue of treason and collaborationism from the perspective of personal memory. The script is partly based on the life of Maria Malicka, a famous pre-war Warsaw actress for whom the theatre at 8 Marszałkowska Street was built. Accused of having collaborated with the Germans, the artist was banned from performing in Warsaw after the war. Another inspiration for the play is Arletty, or Leonie Bathiat, a famous French film and theatre actress of the 1930s and 1940s. She had had wartime liaisons with German officers and was later imprisoned before relaunching her international career. And lastly, the story of Deutsches Filmtheater which operated during the German occupation of Poland in the building of Teatr Rozmaitości, as well as Mon Café, the establishment in Aleje Jerozolimskie before and during WWII frequented by Warsaw’s homosexuals.

Constructing a theatre fantasy about war history, the creators pose a series of questions about the stigmatization, punishment and assessment of people who during the occupation, for various reasons, escaped heroism and the duty to fight and sacrifice one’s life for the motherland. How is historical memory and moral evaluation of past attitudes constructed? What are the limits of interpretation and fantasizing about the history in which trauma and heroism are inscribed? How can we cure the collective memory?

The production was realized as the part of the Debiut TR programme which promotes the best up-and-coming young stage directors. The first winner of the award was Jędrzej Piaskowski in 2015.

TEXT
Magda Fertacz

DIRECTOR
Jędrzej Piaskowski

SET DESIGN & LIGHT DESIGN
Aleksandr Prowaliński

VIDEO
Marta Nawrot

COSTUMES
Hanka Podraza

MUSIC
Jan Tomza-Osiecki

CHOREOGRAPHY
Mikołaj Karczewski

DIRECTOR’S ASSISTANT, STAGE MANAGER
Wojciech Sobolewski

STAGE MANAGER’S ASSISTANT
Katarzyna Gawryś – Rodriguez

PRODUCER
Natalia Starowieyska

 

The authors of the production attempt to undermine the unequivocally negative myth of collaborationism, some of which might, after all, have been a form of anti-Nazi subversion. The point is not to embellish the trauma of war in order to blunt its impact, but to recreate within it life in its multiplicity and ambiguity.
Wiktoria Wojtyra, Kultura Liberalna

This has to be one of the most surprising productions of recent months: a sort of macabre comedy on trauma. (…) Piaskowski’s rendition is at its strongest when it operates in the realm of imagination rather than in a specific historical context.
Witold Mrozek, “Gazeta Wyborcza”