XVI MFG Ślub B-Biała - Teatr Lalek Banialuka im. Jerzego Zitzmana, Bielsko-Biała

The producers tackle Witold Gombrowicz’s naughtiest and most metaphorical work. Are the shadows surrounding Henry, the protagonist, responses to some traumatic occurrences? Nightmares? Or perhaps some prophetic portents of more revolutions to come? We’re taking part in a sort of rite, a world being created by the protagonist, where hopes and expectations clash against the figure of the family. We see the world we create – that’s what Gombrowicz is trying to tell us. The producers debate the classic, building an extremely plastic, post-apocalyptic reality somewhere between one military conflict and another, finding there a person, an individual, a victim of these storms ‘I am a son of the war!’, Henry cries to his family, or the spectres created by his fatigued mind. This self-definition carries a great manifesto and plenty of pain. It’s a key to the production.

‘The adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s The Marriage by Agata Biziuk; for the show she directs at Bielsko-Biała’s Banialuka Pupper Theatre, she has stripped the text of many side-plots, intertextual references, and some secrets, has made it simpler and less vague. An ambiguous masterpiece can be said to have been reduced to a well-done play for nine characters and five actors. This was enough, anyway, to build a striking theatrical show whose subject matter remains what is of paramount importance to Gombrowicz: interpersonal relations, their randomness and sacralisation, their necessary and voluntary, conscious, emotional, and formulaic nature. … Placing one of the weightiest works written in the Polish language in the repertory has proved a refreshing gesture to both the theatre, its older audiences (unlike in Bielsko-Biała, often neglected by many puppet stages in Poland, wrongly oriented exclusively at the little ones), and the text itself.’ Michał Mizera, e-teatr.pl