Fear and loathing in Poland

Polish literary phenom Dorota Masłowska has received high praise for her novels as well as her first attempt at playwriting, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians. However, Benjamin Paloff's translation of the play currently on display at Divadlo na Zábradlí is a poor and lazily constructed article, fraught with continuity issues and nonsensical ranting. It's purported unmasking of post-modern prejudices in Polish society can't redeem what amounts to a festival of repulsiveness and banality.

Before continuing on to an itemization of the failings of director David Peimer's production, a brief summation of its plot must be attempted. Be warned, even a cursory description of the storyline predicates some plot spoilers.

Two drug-addled Poles take off hitchhiking under the guise of being Polish-speaking Romanians after going on a bender at a costume party. For most of the first act, their ruse is undertaken at the expense of the audience, and it is only at about the 40-minute mark that we learn the pair aren't really immigrants with bad teeth and no means, but are actually a single mother and a television actor who have only just met. Their antics include kidnapping, assault and deviant behavior, and they eventually find themselves stranded in rural Poland in the middle of a particularly chilly night. Things go downhill from there.

Beyond the inanity present in much of the text, certain technical problems persist at na Zábradlí. Chief among these is aimless, amateurish blocking. Much of the activity takes place within the confines of automobiles, for instance, and the characters' activity defies plausibility insofar as miming the actual interior of a car. This seemingly minor point has disastrous effects and transforms several sequences from absurd to incomprehensible. When out of the confines of the car, the cast ambles about in a stagey, choreographed (though practically unmotivated) manner, more like synchronized swimmers than realistic individuals.

Peimer's cast is earnest and energetic, but poorly used. Jiří Mádl and Teresa Branna have their work cut out for them as the leads, in what would amount to demanding roles under any circumstances. Alas, they have either been wrongly encouraged or inexpertly restrained when it comes to overacting. Peter Hosking is either guilty of acting in the cracks or struggling with his lines (or both). His halting delivery adds to the general tedium. The remainder of the cast is passable, with only Bruce Davidson standing out as possessing noteworthy stage presence and charm.

As if to underscore the bizarreness of this production, the audience on the evening I attended was blessed with the burblings of a deranged heckler, issuing forth with ill-timed giggles, applause and Tourette's-like bursts of "shut up!" and "no!" Whether this troubled soul was mentally challenged, inebriated or just breathtakingly rude is unclear, but the effect on the proceedings was something like surround sound, leaving one feeling trapped in a sort of twilight zone between the chaos onstage and the disturbed ramblings in the rows.

If the message buried underneath all the nonsense in A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians is that modern Poles are bigoted, self-absorbed and hypocritical, then Masłowska ought to have even one character somewhere in the play with enough redeeming qualities to highlight the rest of the characters' shortcomings in contrast. As it stands, the play is little more than a litany of excess. The lives of the characters bear little resemblance to any real people, and merely perpetuate the stereotypes that the author is seemingly out to lampoon.

The company's choice to stage the play in English is commendable, if a little peculiar. Considering the almost uniformly native audience, one wonders why they didn't opt for the Czech version. If nothing else, this choice would have spared one expat an evening of agonizing theater.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com