Kings Theatre
4 stars
Seven men and women of a certain age sit side by side at the front of the stage, lights up on the audience. Each of those gathered tells a story, weaving a web of shared history passed down the ages. As the final tale is told, the room darkens as one man’s pent up anguish spills into a torrent of incantatory purging. This is the first point of an emotional arc in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s take on the Jewish/Polish experience that melds together Szymon Anski’s 1920s play in which lost souls possess still living flesh and blood, with Hanna Krall’s contemporary short story of the same name. What emerges by the end is a series of ceremonial attempts at expunging a painful past, followed by a final acceptance of every holocaust that’s shaped a society forever in exile.
This manifests itself in turn in a possessed bride on her hen night and a man whose half-brother cries inside him. Where the first half is explosive, with Magdalena Cielecka’s bride Lea throwing herself into a landscape bordering on horror film imagery, her wedding veil a contrary pictorial to an already manic edge, what follows is starker, more bunged-up by late twentieth century angst. The two worlds are conjoined by coitus, where, at its purest, the physical and spiritual can either transcend or disappoint. Afterwards comes a raging calm of acceptance.
Warlikowski’s dynamic, thoroughly modern approach to a nation’s pain takes in not just Judaism, but Buddhism and other pan-religious ritual, emblazoned by animations of sacred creatures that belie a very human heart. Its pulse, though, is set by Cielecka, a spellbinding blur of a presence in a haunted world.
The Herald, August 11th 2008
ends
4 stars
Seven men and women of a certain age sit side by side at the front of the stage, lights up on the audience. Each of those gathered tells a story, weaving a web of shared history passed down the ages. As the final tale is told, the room darkens as one man’s pent up anguish spills into a torrent of incantatory purging. This is the first point of an emotional arc in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s take on the Jewish/Polish experience that melds together Szymon Anski’s 1920s play in which lost souls possess still living flesh and blood, with Hanna Krall’s contemporary short story of the same name. What emerges by the end is a series of ceremonial attempts at expunging a painful past, followed by a final acceptance of every holocaust that’s shaped a society forever in exile.
This manifests itself in turn in a possessed bride on her hen night and a man whose half-brother cries inside him. Where the first half is explosive, with Magdalena Cielecka’s bride Lea throwing herself into a landscape bordering on horror film imagery, her wedding veil a contrary pictorial to an already manic edge, what follows is starker, more bunged-up by late twentieth century angst. The two worlds are conjoined by coitus, where, at its purest, the physical and spiritual can either transcend or disappoint. Afterwards comes a raging calm of acceptance.
Warlikowski’s dynamic, thoroughly modern approach to a nation’s pain takes in not just Judaism, but Buddhism and other pan-religious ritual, emblazoned by animations of sacred creatures that belie a very human heart. Its pulse, though, is set by Cielecka, a spellbinding blur of a presence in a haunted world.
The Herald, August 11th 2008
ends
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