It’s Only the End of the World, by Jean-Luc Lagarce
Director: Anja Suša
Translation: Anders Bodegård
Dramaturgy: Marie Persson Hedenius
Set design: Ulla Kassius
Performers: Erik Borgeke, Anna Carlsson, Moa Silén, Logi Tulinius, Elisabeth Wernesjö
Venue: Uppsala City Theatre
Running time: 1h 45min

Not a day too early! What else is one to say when “It’s Only the End of the World” by Jean-Luc Lagarce, one of the most performed French playwrights, is for the first time put on a scene in Sweden. Lagarce managed to write 25 plays before he died in 1995, only 38 years old.

“It’s Only the End of the World” describes one family’s painful incapability to communicate. Words are flowing, but extremely little is being said. In the center of this ranting emptiness, we find Louis, a 30-year old big brother who, after many years of absence, suddenly shows up. His return poses a threat to the family’s emotional hierarchy. All of a sudden, the relations between mother, siblings and their spouses shift. Elisabeth Wernesjö’s little sister is electrical, like a rabbit in Duracell commercials, and Logi Tulinius’ little brother is authoritarianly jealous. Moa Silén’s sister-in-law fights in vain to mitigate this.

But almost everything is being hidden behind the uptight politeness. The façade is so thick that Louis never succeeds in breaking through and telling the real cause of his rare visit – he is dying of AIDS.

Like refrigerator magnets, family members stick firmly to each other and to the scene’s austere background walls, in which a horizontal gap represents an opening for memories and details.

For example, an opening for a car described by Anna Carlson, who plays the mother. A metaphor for that which did not come true, but is nonetheless pretended to be true. The family car was black, but it should, of course, be red, as the feelings that were never expressed.

“It’s Only the End of the World” is composed of a long, twisty series of monologs, in the past, present and future. The impression is next to hallucinatory, a stoned theater grammar that circles around a sinkhole that nobody dares to look into.

That which is not formulated in words seeks its expression in the body. The ensemble crawls, dances, twists itself in slow motion around Erik Borgeke’s Louis. These are the movements of grasping for air, painfully comical.

Directed by Anja Suša, with the set design by Ulla Kassius and choreography by Damjan Kecojevic, as well as the ensemble’s razor sharp expression, “It’s Only the End of the World” is definitely ingenious theater.

Pia Huss

French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce died in 1995, only 38 years old, from AIDS. It was only after his death that his plays started to be performed seriously. His play “It’s Only the End of the World” has now had a Swedish premiere at Uppsala City Theatre, directed by Serbian director Anja Suša.

Louis is 34 years old and has a terminal disease. He is visiting his family – his mother and younger sister that still live in their home, together with his brother and his wife. The contact between them is poor, with mixed messages, composed of denying and averting babble.

Pay attention – this sounds like a middle-class play with a naturalistic performing style, among fine pieces of design furniture.

But Anja Suša, who has previously directed artistically headstrong performances at Backa Theatre and Helsingborg City Theatre, does of course something completely different. She takes Lagarce’s already hiccupping, twisted and turned dialogue, in an effective translation by Anders Bodegård, and together with set designer Ulla Kassius and choreographer Damjan Kecojevic, transforms this play into a mechanical toy, a comic strip.

The lamps are swinging, the cake is made of plaster, the gravel is crunching and the Alpes are peeping through the window – and all of this somewhat childishly obvious setting, as if it was drawn by thick pieces of chalk, is despite that not at all superficial nor mechanical.

On the contrary, Suša has constructed a very clear form for the actors to take off from, and the cast is superb: Anna Carlson, Erik Borgeke, Elisabeth Wernesjö, Logi Tulinius and Moa Silén – they all succeed in filling these frames with feeling and will and expression.

And it is exactly like this: a dysfunctional, denying, disappointed, longing, angry and loving family, around a wound and sorrow. Anja Suša surprises us once again with her ability to play with the theater toy box, without tampering with emotions nor presence.

Maria Edström

Serbian director Anja Suša contributes with something thrilling in her visual direction of Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play about a dying man.

It’s Only the End of the World

Genre: Theatre
Director: Anja Suša
Cast: Erik Borgeke, Anna Carlson, Moa Silén, Logi Tulinius, Elisabeth Wernesjö
Venue: Uppsala City Theatre
Text: Jean-Luc Lagarce, translation by Andreas Bodegård
Set design & costume: Ulla Kassius. Light design: Mats Öhlin. Original music: Igor Gostuski.
Choreography: Damjan Kecojević

A young man, who is dying from a disease that is never mentioned, comes home to his mother after a long time and (maybe) wants to marry his sister. This is the basic plot of Ibsen’s play “Ghosts”, which I hear echoing in this play by the French, young, dead playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, “It’s Only the End of the World”, which is now playing in Sweden for the first time.

In his homeland, Lagarce’s plays are now more and more put on stage. He is well-known for his dense, expressive language, where complications are hidden under every-day babble. But in spite of Anders Bodegård’s translation, the language is not what Anja Suša focuses on in this production; instead, it is whole-heartedly focused on the visual.

Ulla Kassius’ set design consists of an abstract room with cleverly chosen concrete features: the Alps in the background, a heavy, rolling carpet, a swinging lamp, a transformable ball, a small ball, etc. The relations between actors are reflected in costumes and hair styles that are changed more than once during the course of this short (1h 45min) production. Erik Borgeke’s Louis is often left alone on stage, talking directly to the audience, and he stands out from the others in many different ways.

The rest of the characters: Anna Carlson’s linguistically expressive mother, the brother Antoine with his wife Catherine (Logi Tulinius and Moa Silén) and the little sister Suzanne (Elisabeth Wernesjö) at first appear as a collective, but this is gradually broken by the various turn of events. Louis influence on family dynamics becomes most obvious when he throws the boll towards the others, lined up in a row as if he was bowling. All of them fall like ninepins, except for the mother.

It is these images that get stuck in one’s head: Suzanne that for a short while appears in a Pussy Riot hood, the children that sensually lick their ice-cream cones. A couple of sound elements suddenly connect it all to the present day: the announcement of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, Donald Trump that calls for national unity, David Bowie that calls for Major Tom from the ground control (and yes, it mostly becomes a reminder that we have just lost him).

In the very end of the play, we are taken by a strong feeling of loss. I don’t know quite how it actually comes about, but I believe that the audience has completely individual experiences. For me, all of the fragments of images, voices and sound become a reminder of everything imaginable, from dead actors to French design hotels with impractical lamps.

Anja Suša from Serbia is called “a star director” and she contributes with something thrilling in her stylized production, but she does not give us a story to be drawn into. We ourselves are the ones that must help in telling that story.

Sara Granath

”It’s Only the End of the World”
By Jean-Luc Lagarce
Translation: Andreas Bodegård
Director: Anja Suša
Dramaturgist: Marie Persson Hedenius
Set Design & Costume: Ulla Kassius
Assistent scene and costume designer: Hedvig Ljungar
Light design: Mats Öhlin
Make-up and wig design: Johanna Rönnbäck, Ella Carlefalk (trainee from STDH)
Original music: Igor Gostuski
Choreography: Damjan Kecojević
Swedish premiere at Uppsala City Theatre, Small Scene, December 3, 2016

There is no defence against Jean-Luc Lagarce’s “It’s Only the End of the World”. It is a powerful settlement against the false ideals of the nuclear family. Louis comes back home to visit his family, which he has not seen in over ten years. He is ill and knows that he is going to die soon, and he believes or hopes that he will be able to meet his nearest kin. He dreams those false dreams, which we are constantly lured into by society, about how blood and family ties are, after all, that which we belong to and a place where we are loved.

Louis does not get an opportunity to tell about his death sentence. All the members of his family are occupied with their own problems and fears, nobody is prepared to listen to him, and everybody takes it for granted that he sees himself as superior to them. Louis has, of course, succeeded as a writer, while they just go on living their ordinary, working class lives. Each one of them is caught in their own life grieves and nobody is open to listen to what Louis may have to say. Nobody is even open to the idea that Louis may have something to say.

It is an extremely terrifying and dark take on the confined family life. Louis family is a normal one, nobody of its members has social problems or addictions – it is precisely such a family that is hailed as the meaning of life. I almost get a stomach ache from how accurately this production depicts our endless human loneliness and the bluff of family love. It is, however, at the same time liberating to see that somebody was able to describe it so accurately.

The fact that this drama premieres in the middle of Christmas preparations in Sweden is precisely what hits the spot. Christmas that is celebrated in the West as a grand family holiday is nothing more than one big illusion. This production does not mention Christmas, nor does it contain anything Christmas-like, it is I who is drawing this parallel. Christmas, as it is celebrated in the West, is a time of great anxiety for all of those who lost their near and dear – because it is at Christmas time that we should meet our next of kin and are expected to feel the family love.

But is it really there? Does it really exist, when so many are left lonely and out of it all? When families get together and do not allow any outsiders in, how loving is it then, if it is enough just for themselves? The family in “It’s Only the End of the World” is joined together more by a habit and cowardice, since the members do not dare go outside of this circle, then by some special kind of love – in fact, nobody there listens to anybody else. This is powerfully depicted and conveyed in Anja Suša’s production.

We celebrate Christmas because Jesus was born – and his birth is perhaps far from the traditional Christmas nuclear family. His father Joseph is not his biological father, Jesus was born in a stable because his mother and father were forced to leave for Bethlehem, in order to be accounted for and pay their taxes, since they had their roots there. This means we can assume that they had relatives there. Relatives who did not welcome them. They had to seek shelter in a stable, and the shepherds, who must have been seen as some sort of an underclass, were the first who welcomed this newborn baby. Then came foreign men from other countries, with different culture and religion, and celebrated the little one – and then the parents had to flee to a foreign country with the child. This is fairly far from the holy nuclear family that Christmas is dedicated to in modern Sweden. Although Jean-Luc Lagarce does not in any way refer to the false Christmas celebration, my opinion is that his powerful, dark drama can be applied to Christmas in the highest possible degree.

This production is played in a way that is almost impossible to describe – body language and speech are far from naturalistic, they are some sort of a dance-like mime – it must be seen. The physical way in which this drama is played speaks to me as the spectator through many different channels, with feelings, with language, with body language, with mime, with sound. Uppsala City Theatre describes in the following way:

From the perspective of Louis, we get to participate in a different kind of a reunion. This production tests the theatrical limits with its poetic wordiness and does not resemble anything that has previously been played on the Small scene.

Jean-Luc Lagarce is today one of the most performed modern playwrights in France and is widely recognized as one of the most important French dramatists of the late 20th century. There are presumably quite a lot of his personal experiences in this drama. He himself died before the play had its premiere. After his death in 1995, the interest in his work picked up and his plays were set up on stage, debated on and translated in wider and wider circles. During his lifetime, Lagarce was first and foremost known as a director and his productions of plays by Molière, Ionescu and Marivaux achieved great success. Only a few of his own plays were put on stage during his lifetime – “It’s Only the End of the World” was performed for the first time in 1999, that is to say, four years after Lagarce’s death.

French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan has made a film based on this play. His version of “It’s Only the End of the World” premiered in May 2016 at Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix.

“The Ridiculous Darkness” at Helsingborg City Theatre becomes in Serbian director Anja Suša’s hands an immensely moving and artistic theater.”

Ultimo in Mogadishu wants to become a fisherman, but he soon discovers that the seas off the Somalian coast, which have previously been rich in fish, are now depleted of fish and barren. British, Dutch and other fishing fleets have fished out everything that lived in it. He decides to switch careers. After being “educated” in piracy, his boat is run-down by a Dutch ship. Ultimo manages to save his skin on the board of it, seizes the chance to capture it – but is then caught and arrested.

A half-an-hour long prolog of “The Ridiculous Darkness” on the small scene of Helsingborg City Theatre consists mostly of an incredibly intense monolog, the arrested pirate’s defense speech in court. Gustav Berg in baggy overall and a black mask displays an intense show of acting in the spirit of Joseph Conrad. He embodies both physically and rhythmically the necessary and hopeless fight against the oppression of far superior forces. “The Ridiculous Darkness” by a German Wolfram Lotz becomes in Serbian director Anja Suša’s hands an immensely moving and artistic theater that speaks to the audience through different senses. We live in times of ever-growing darkness. The darknesses of our age are both ridiculous and foolish. We need art and theater in order to lift our blockages and start a conversation, before it is too late, with blackness and clear sight, but also with some strong humor.

There is a water bucket labeled “The Mediterranean Sea” on the stage. Cecilia Borssén dips wet children’s clothes into the bucket and throws them on the floor – we are spared of seeing the dead bodies of children. Soon Erik Borgeke’s machine gun crazy (American) soldier in camouflage clothing takes over, while the boat of this performance sterns ever more deeply into the river of the Unknown, towards the Heart of Darkness.

Anja Sušaʼs production is supremely artistic, with abrupt jumps between the play’s many pit holes. It is performed as a piece of “arena theater”, which results in rewarding closeness between the performers and the audience. Helga Bumsch’s scene design is exquisite, with the bar at Mr Kurtz’s Club in one corner and a dance pole in the middle, which is being used both for dancing and as a ship mast.

This is a production that should be analyzed less and experienced more, taken in with open senses. Don’t miss it!

Sören Sommelius

The Ridiculous Darkness

Genre: Theatre

Director: Anja Suša

Performers: Erik Borgeke, Cecilia Borssén, Nils Dernevik, Jörgen Düberg

Venue: Helsingborg City Theatre

Set design: Helga Bumsch

Costume Design: Maja Mirkovic

This is not the first time that the theater depicts the world as a night club, cabaret or a carnival. Nevertheless, set designer Helga Bumsch makes a statement by placing the politically speculative liberation war of our time in a suggestive club setting, with bar counters, golden curtains, a DJ and a dancing pole. A sign on the wall shines “Mr Kurtz’ Club” in neon light, as a salute to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, which was one of the inspiration models for Wolfram Lotz and his play “The Ridiculous Darkness”.

For a successful 35-year old playwright, Lotz, who is now being introduced to Scandinavia by Helsingborg City Theatre, there is no doubt: the age in which we live, the age of moralization, violence and interfering in each other’s business, is nothing more than the sum of parts of a ridiculous entertainment culture. We are playing police, soldiers, victims and the oppressed in a value-relativistic international game of power and supremacy. The bricks are just being moved around, in new conflict constellations that constantly arise.

Director Anja Suša and the excellent cast frame Lotz’ pessimism with a certain reckless, theatrical richness of ideas. Two “heroes”, Erik Borgeke’s yelling officer Pellner and Nils Dernevik’s Carl Bildt-like diplomatic envoy Stefan Torsk, are about to travel up a river in order to seek the disappeared lieutenant colonel Deutinger. They are in a middle of a war, supposedly Afghanistan.

In fact, this is a play about all the possible hotbeds of conflict, both past, and present, where the big Western powers march out, with guns, in idealistic and clumsy attempts to change the fighting and suffering “savages”. They meet a decadent Italian aristocrat, played by Tobias Borvin, who attempts to make the villagers refined and presentable. Borvin reappears in yet another scene, like wreckage from the 1990s Balkan wars, a man that lost everything in the NATO bombings.

Certain episodes and tricks continue to burn on throughout this joyful description of the apocalypse: when Cecilia Borssén, dressed as a nightclub hostess, sits with a water bucket labeled as “the Mediterranean Sea” and washes small children’s clothes, which she then nonchalantly throws onto the floor. Or the anecdote of a sloth bear that rapes and falls in love with Anja the prostitute – Gustav Berg in a languishing pole dance. She is dressed in a mermaid attire and held captive but is then cynically dumped by the bear. In such scenes, this play’s dark critique of contemporary injustice becomes quite clear.

Otherwise, Anja Suša mostly draws attention to the text’s drastic language, abrupt throws, meta comments and grotesqueness. Nobody is in this play stuck in self-pity or sympathy for others. Maybe this is the realistic image of what the reality actually is. Frightening.

Theresa Benér

“Blood on the Cat’s Neck or Marilyn Monroe vs. the Vampires” (photo by Monika Stolarska)

The title itself “Blood on the Cat’s Neck or Marilyn Monroe vs. the Vampires” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder promises that this is not a typical play. With every minute of the play directed by Anja Suša in the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz it is drawn into the logic of the absurd. And violence.

It begins as a typical section of the political theater, a belated echo of a counterculture. The protagonists speak in the following order: the Soldier, the Policeman, the Teacher – guarantors of the order, gears of the social discipline machinery. There is also the Lover – the titan of love, which here also embodies the oppressive regime.

However, we concentrate very quickly to other aspects. Actors and actresses of the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz in the first scene form a gigantic organism, where drama characters suddenly move from one actor to another. They embody all other roles until achieving apparently complete chaos – though skilfully orchestrated.

They talk to an invisible person: Phoebe Zeitgeist, alien, that comes from “some other planet”, with the task to write “an eyewitness account on human democracy”. She is having difficulties with understanding the human language. Initially invisible, she confronts physical and emotional violence. She gets lost in the relations of power and the brutal sexual or economic dependence. Black slapstick generates commonplace common situations, e.g. marital arguments, which often end up in mutual shooting from rifles.

In Antitheater

 “Blood…” certainly would not be so great, if it were not for the actors of the theater in Bydgoszcz. Anita Sokolovska, Małgorzata Witkowska, Małgorzata Trofimiuk, Martyna Peszko, Beata Bandurska, Maciej Pesta, Konrad Wosik and Jakub Ulewicz make a perfectly tuned orchestra of absurd, performing misses, punches, and gags so convincingly and accurately, as it’s Bach Concert.

Fassbinder, German revolutionary director (1945-82), is known in Poland for his filmmaking. Meanwhile, towards the end of the sixties, he became an actor and a director of the Munich so-called Antitheater, which drew inspiration from both the leftist Brecht’s dramaturgy and Warhol’s performance. Many Fassbinder’s radical films were initially created as theater plays, although the director used other texts as well, as in “Querelle” – homosexual criminal melodrama adapted from Genet.

Insane situation cabaret

First staging of the “Blood…” play in Poland, written in 1971, was enabled by the director, Anja Suša, from Belgrade (who often works in the Scandinavian countries) and the playwright, Agnieszka Jakimiak, who as the author of essays and film connoisseur, specialized in the field of Fassbinder’s work. The excellent translation was done by Iwona Nowacka.

In the premiere from Bydgoszcz, the most important is not what is being said, but above all how it is said. And what is being done on the stage? Full freedom of theatrical imagination, acting perfection and completed form make “Blood on the Cat’s Neck” one of the most interesting and most original Polish performances in recent years. This is not a theater with a thesis – this is more likely an insane situation cabaret and playing with the form.

Obscene or drastic scenes typical of Fassbinder’s filmmaking are here transformed into a kind of the stage convention ridicule. Not only of the petty bourgeois theater but also of the “avant-garde” and “experiments”, constantly revived and sold through theatrical marketing. While in the psychological theater, we are under the pressure of sentimental clichés, in the clashes of these grotesque living marionettes something worrying and attractive suddenly appears.

Last but not least, Suša’s play extraordinarily involved the work of amateurs. They are the ones who accept the perspective of Phoebe, the alien, creating a general picture of the stage chaos. At the end of the play, in rare moments, they have the opportunity to say something in their own voice, and thus determine their role in the play.

Anna Jazgarska

Teatralny

A woman comes to her husband’s mistress. She begs her to end the romance that is destroying her family. Her pleading “please, give him back to me” is at first a deeply moving scene, however, it quickly becomes miserably banal, then transforming into astonishingly incredible accusation, conspicuously unnatural. The individual components of language, common and “convincing”, are arranged in a conglomerate of affected clichés that seems to exist along with the characters who utter them.

Impossibility or rather the inability of communication goes far beyond the borders of the absurd. The mistress (Maciej Pesta) is sitting stiffly at a long table, the wife (Małgorzata Witkowska) is standing behind her. Their words flow like a cold torrent, followed by absurd gestures – marked slapping, slapstick clapping, synchronized with brocade dust blowing. Blunt summary of the communication failure that crowns the scene is contained here in mechanically articulated, previously disclosed fragments, problems with words of Phoebe Zeitgeist, alien, who in Fassbinder’s drama documents the life of Earthians.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder mastered this particular ability to locate, identify and stimulate the most sensitive points of the social tissue; those that are most strongly hidden, the timidest ones, those that are consciously avoided in everyday narratives. This merciless vivisection provoked even more because it occurred with the use of the most typical, everyday, banal, seemingly the most transparent organisms. Respected, admired, accused of unimaginative scandalizing, kitsch, plagiarism – during his short life, organized through the compulsive need for continuous work, Fassbinder created over forty feature-length films, over twenty stage dramatizations, seventeen plays, and four radio games. All of them, regardless of the selected convention and stylistics, are filled with disagreement with petty-bourgeois, consumerist and conformist reality, provoking controversy and throwing a challenge to Fassbinder’s closest, after the war soothed, Wirtschaftswunder society.

Written in 1971, and not dramatized on Polish stage till now, Blood on the Cat’s Neck has a dramatic open-ended design (similar to the famous Preparadise Sorry Now, one of the most dramatized Fassbinder’s works, adapted in Poland in 1993 by Grzegorz Malecki for Studio Theatre in Lodz). In the play, alien – Phoebe Zeitgeist, comes to Earth with the journalistic mission to describe “human democracy”. Her observations include typical everyday, trivial situations and conversations between people that are mutually connected under most widespread relation models. The Teacher (Jakub Ulewicz), the Policeman (Małgorzata Trofimiuk), the Girl (Beata Bandurska), the Model (Martyna Peszko), the Soldier (Konrad Wosik), the wife of the deceased soldier (Małgorzata Witkowska), the Butcher (Anita Sokołowska), the Lover/Mistress (Maciej Pesta) are live costumes, holders of the “spirit of the times”, stereotyped citizens of a modern democratic society. All of them are also average, representative types, used by Fassbinder to revive his texts and pictures, condemning them to the tireless reincarnation and painful repetition of destiny. There is also auto-thematic figure of gender-undefined Lover/Mistress, that grows out of the need of changing his own identity, present in the entire work of the dramaturge and director. Blood on the Cat’s Neck is the record of conversations, confessions and complaints, most frequently incomplete, without any finals. They are weaved of hackneyed, trivial, and often tiresomely vulgar phrases.

Anja Suša places the characters, which resonate a defective “voice of the people”, in a space that recalls an obscure canteen or more likely a scrappy dummy. Public space, “any”, but also outlined in the manner of a temporary created place. Set designer, Zorana Petrov, built on the stage of the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz a claustrophobic box in neutral beige color, with a long table covered with a tablecloth, which initially was placed under one of the side walls, but quite soon it was pushed to the middle of the stage. The depth of the box is occupied by a narrow stage with prominent doors – the place taken by the observer, Phoebe Zeitgeist. The protagonists accommodated in this space initially resemble a solid, colorless mass. A huge, many-headed body, which after some time, is broken down into separate entities. Neutral beige costumes done by Maja Mirković transform into much more distinctive and individualized forms – military coat, widow’s black dress, butcher’s work apron. Inviting them to the existence, the actors were given an enticing proposal to let their imagination run wild. It should be recognized that they readily used the opportunity, and the effects of their work are mesmerizing in most of the play.

The protagonists, established by agreement, are alternately approaching each other and moving away from each other in the chaotic rhythm of exaggerated, caricature-perused gestures and poses. They face a series of differently configured situations, where each of them, without exception, is based on emotional, physical, economic violence. Nobody is immune to the status of victim, regardless of the balance of power in a given relation. Phoebe Zeitgeist, interpreted in Suša’s spectacle by a group of alternating amateur actors (Jagoda Długosz, Grażyna Grzelak, Maria Jazel, Halina Kanarkowska, Sławomir Majczyk, Emilia Malczyk, Teresa Perlik, Monika Skorobohata), at first silently watch this network of human dependences. After a while, each of the following fragments of the spectacle ends with her brief statement, built of fragments of sentences that had been previously heard. The formation of phrases pronounced by the alien gives the impression of a random structure, composed of randomly selected words. However, these mechanical, often clumsily articulated abstracts in the play are the instrument that exposes the most painful, the most unpenetrated and sheltered spots on the social body. Towards the end of the spectacle, Phoebe speaks more frequently. After a while, she leaves her space in the depths of the stage. Anja Suša is bringing her among the Earthians who are destroying each other. Phoebe stares at them, touching them, but after the final self-destruction of people, she takes their place.

Dramatization of Blood on the Cat’s Neck from Bydgoszcz, with the title here expanded to Blood on the Cat’s Neck or Marilyn Monroe vs. the Vampires, is guided by the language derived from Fassbinder’s search and doubts. “Maybe we wanted too strongly to connect theater performance with social diagnosis and we drew the conclusion too quickly that theater play has the same instruments as well as opinion journalism”. This is interesting, because the Polish Theatre logo clearly integrated in the scenography design, reminds us that we are dealing with the stage that is known for its highly formalized, but at the same time, it is clear even without words, often political performances. The ultimately absurd, even monstrous shape of each of the hyper-realistic scenes of Suša’s play, colourful variety of theatrical gestures, mixed sequences and styles have a strong impact – as is the case of Fassbinder’s art that compromises theatre and film form, distanced in relation to languages – on the mechanisms that construct the modern theatre, expose to doubt their communication capabilities and reveal their manipulative properties.

Anja Suša seems to end her play by double gesture. The limit of “democracy” is too prominent here, and in the fairy tale staffage – all “human” protagonists, established by seven dwarfs and a terrorist version of Snow White, drop dead. They are replaced by Phoebe Zeitgeist, multiplied into eight characters with “cosmic” lights on their necks. Off-speaker voices of the animators, who participate in the show, provoke discussion about the spectator’s place in a contemporary theater, and discussion about contemporary theater in general. Regardless of the social, political, existential or artistic context, for placing an outstanding play directed by Anja Suša, and although it is paradoxically contrary to the mighty burden of suspicion and distance written in Fassbinder’s text, the director leaves us with the assurance that “something will happen tomorrow”.

Divided into eight amateur actors in the Blood on the Cat’s Neck play from Bydgoszcz, the heroine, Phoebe Zeitgeist, is sent to Earth to find out more about the world. She should, first of all, learn about human democracy and write an eyewitness account of it. However, she faces major problems, because even though she has learned the words, she does not understand human language.

“Society Is Mean” – sang Dorota Masłowska a few years ago, and a similar conclusion had been reached forty years ago, though using different means of expression, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The author, also known as the enfant terrible of German film and theater, was a brilliant observer and critic of the reality that surrounded him. Pessimistic diagnoses made by the author, who worked in many fields of art, although presented with humor and grotesque, continue to represent the perfect type of lens in which a society is reflected as mired in hypocrisy.

Long, though intriguing, a title of the Fassbinder’s drama was nothing but a joke, public ridicule, toying with kitsch, applied by the author, who was often considered arrogant. “Cat’s neck” is not a metaphor, and it would be futile to look for Marilyn Monroe or vampires in a world that he had created. Taken from the American comedy The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, the name of the heroine more likely underscores the absurdity of her experiences on our planet than it resembles the intertextual relations. It seems that the only horror are the alien’s observations, illustrated on the stage, on the subject of democracy and human diagnosis. The reflection of reality presented by Anja Suša, even though distorted, still seems true and close to us.

Pleasant words are not used about humanity and its problems in the play from Bydgoszcz. For instance, in order to achieve our goal, we must above all adapt ourselves to the rest of society – seems to be suggested by the creators of the play. If we find such a perspective unsatisfactory, we can just as well shoot ourselves in the head. We should not think that somebody will drag us away from that idea, but they will more likely hold a glass of water for us with which we will take a pill for the eternal sleep. The literalism of these statements is essential because the text and theatrical interpretation of Blood on the Cat’s Neck make us understand that we are overcrowded in this society. This is depicted by the protagonists closed in the box-like theater space, that from time to time enter the bright yellow wall or absurdly bang their head against it.

Before the stage characters are shaped and become concrete protagonists, the actors take a long time to move in a group on the stage. Dressed in nude tone clothes, they outrageously gaze and then laugh towards the audience. Holding hands, they stretch their limbs in different directions, as if unable to separate from the body. They look like a homogeneous organism from which they will be separated the very next moment. Now as individuals, they come into the world full of irrelevant conversations and meaningless events, with no possibility for any cooperation, and where it is too boring to listen to each other’s stories.

The spectacle, directed by Suša, is free from pathetic dialogs and with the engaged music, discussing the existence, ontology or philosophy. The Soldier, the Policeman, the Butcher, the Teacher, the Widow, the Lover, the Model and the Girl, at one moment, sit at not so lavishly set a table and are having a dinner, not depicted from the commercials or trite television series, but rather from a nightmare family. You can hear the stepfather say: “Your mother is a street-walker”, while the wife can say – “I don’t want to see you again, I’m with someone else”. In that world, an employment contract is terminated with a bullet, and the only way out of a difficult situation, which represents life, is a vial filled with pills or knife that slits the wrist or, as mentioned in the title, the neck. Fortunately, the blood is ketchup for now.

“What will I represent when I’m old?” – asks the Model, who raised her nose from “snorting” the next line of confetti. We are witnessing sexual transactions, racist auctions, ramblings on the subject of low wages, unpaid pensions, and unwanted pregnancies. The world of the stage painted in too bright colors, in which the scenes of jealousy or the father who abandons a group of children – provoke laughter, as the strategy of the director who gladly uses the grotesque gags. The actors, who play different characters, switch roles and play with the film, theater, and pop culture conventions, often at the border of deliberate kitsch. It can be said that their stage existence is based on their non-existence. The scenes that follow are exaggerated and have no point nor psychological motives, and represent theatrical clownery, with too many gestures, props, and acting expressions.

Economic problems are intertwined with existential ones. The famous play from Bydgoszcz successfully disclose the mechanisms of creating dependence on another man, mutual subjection, and power. Its creators take the theme of loneliness and feelings of alienation. They do not give ready-made recipes – their story is bitter in its wordiness. Nevertheless, Blood on the Cat’s Neck is watched with ease, which greatly testifies to the director’s awareness of the form. The success of the spectacle is a huge merit of performers. I dare to say that after perturbations in the Polish Theatre in Wrocław, at the moment Bydgoszcz has the best acting company in Poland. Their joint work is almost done to perfection.

The balloon of meanings and social problems inflates to unseen proportions, after which it is pierced with flying colors in the scene of shooting all participants of the caricature dinner. The Butcher starts a series of executions – the feast participants fall one after another to the floor in bent positions. From that moment on, the amateur actors are on the stage, whose previously recorded personal testimonies about the world and theater are truly exciting. Confrontation of their characters with other actors who play the role-schemes leads to a kind of nostalgia, longing for community, desire for sincerity in relationships. Such a feeling can still be an incentive for the action, encouragement to the desire for real change. Thus, Suša’s spectacle is both social and political one, but it is not inspired by a dime opinion journalism. Feelings of alienation and loneliness, present in Blood on the Cat’s Neck, at a certain point is summed up by the Teacher. “Each one of us is afraid” – he says. Often of another man. This primarily generates frustration, but it can also be a cause of depression, alcoholism, suicide. Earth is probably not the best place for living. However, at one moment Phoebe says in a voice of an amateur actress: “Basically, it is good that there are differences in the world”. Perhaps the mysterious alien should take us all to her planet, so we can create a more empathetic and happier community in the new reality.