Teatr Montownia is one of a very few independent, young, professional theatre companies working at their own responsibility and winning the growing recognition and acclaim of the audience. Their first premiere, ‘The Fun’ based on Mrożek, realised soon after the actors graduated from the Warsaw Theatre Academy, was an extremely successful debut, making the group a part of the visible live element of the Warsaw theatre scene.
What is characteristic for these four young actors is that they really want to perform. ‘The actors from Montownia (An Assembly room) as the name suggests are real workers of the stage. They will bathe in perspiration to make the audience laugh, they will give their souls away for a good joke, they will play two parts at the same time and they will be simultaneously engine-drivers, scene painters and directors of their performance’. – writes Roman Pawłowski.
‘Montownia company have in access what others lack: improvising skills, an ability to identify with a character they act, physical fitness and a sense of rhythm.(…)
The performance played on an empty stage, in the neutral black costumes, starts and ends with a fragment of Hamlet’s dialogue, who instructs the actors from a travelling troupe how they should act. In order to say this dialogue in a Shakespearean performance the Montownia actors would have to wait in a state theatre for many years. Having founded their own company they can experience how difficult it is to meet the expectations about which the Danish prince says: combine actions with words, use gestures sparingly, speak fluently and freely, avoid exaggeration which does not agree with an objective of theatre – and what is most important – do not gesticulate with hands!
Hamlet would be satisfied with this group.”