The last flight of the hummingbird

This story could not happen in Gdynia! Witold Gombrowicz suspected of murder. A corpse in a hotel room. Summer 1939. Idyllic beach landscape, dancing atmosphere, literary disputes. In the background, the armed conflict is becoming more and more dangerous. The writer's last day in our city, just before leaving for Argentina. A dark police station, bustling cafes (coastal pubs?), Singing beautiful ladies (port gulls?), Suspicious eloquent gentlemen of different sexual orientation. Tango milonga and the Gdynia underworld, a classic crime story with the history of the city in the background.

From press reviews:

Witoldo, played by Dariusz Szymaniak, is a synthesis of the entire Gombrowicz. From his youth in the manor house in Małoszyce, where Gombrowicz, a writer who was about to pursue his career, learned what in human and social life mean superiority and inferiority, or youth and maturity; by "Ferdydurke", "Cosmos", "Operetta", "Diaries" - many sentences of the play sound like quotations from these Gombrowicz's books; up to "Kronos", his most personal notebook, published many years after the writer's death.
(...) The most interesting in Witoldo, however, are not his or other views, taken from Gombrowicz's books, but his whole person. A man who is intellectually overgrown with his surroundings, and at the same time strangely helpless and lost in the interpersonal world. Szymaniak, a midget figure, showed this duality very well. Dressed in a shabby, gray, double-breasted suit, he seems to be a small, boisterous man. But it is also someone who has a keen eye for other people and the surrounding reality. He can treat others with intellectual superiority, but - on the other hand - is attached to them, and at the level of the sometimes vulgar need. And since Szymaniak's physiognomy slightly resembles Gombrowicz, one could sometimes get the impression that he, Witold Gombrowicz, appeared on the stage with all his internal complexity (...)
Jarosław Zalesiński, "Dziennik Bałtycki", January 20, 2014

(...) "The last flight of the hummingbird" is an art - a tribute to the interwar period, the atmosphere of the epoch and the people who created it. The recurring theme of the title bird resounds on many levels of meaning. Huelli's hummingbird shimmering with rainbow colors is Gombrowicz, his personality and creativity, multicultural Poland of the 1920s on the threshold of another war turmoil, and finally the interwar period itself.
(...) "The last flight of the hummingbird" is one of those shows that must be watched not only because of its aesthetic value, but above all because of the atmosphere it creates with itself. The introduced local color, thanks to the choice of the place of events, adds to the story of a familiarity. Interwar Gdynia gives it a full mouth.
Anna Kołodziejska, www.teatralia.com.pl, February 12, 2014

photo by Bernie Kramer