Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz directed the complicated story using very simple means. On Thursday, on the stage of the Forum hall, without props or scenery, she used two actresses to tell the story of how a human child survived with a predator in a lifeboat. Wieczur-Bluszcz showed what instincts and strengths a person can awaken in themselves in extreme situations, and explored the concepts of animal nature and humanity within us.
Pi—played brilliantly and naturally by Natalia Zbroja—tells two versions of one story about surviving several dozen days on the ocean after a shipwreck. In the first, she manages to survive by sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, played by the predatory and very feline Agnieszka Gawlik. Pi establishes her territory like an animal, marking the boundary with her own excrement, and gains an advantage over the predator with a whistle. She forms with it an almost human understanding, a strange pact, a bond forged through shared survival, an animal instinct for life. In the second story, there are no animals, only people. Pi survives because she and the cook eat a sailor.
Does God not want to know human nature?
The commission investigating the ship’s sinking, while questioning Pi, the survivor, hears two stories and chooses the first because people prefer to believe in a story involving a tiger and a vegetarian. “God is like that too,” Pi says at the end of the play. Is He truly afraid to get to know us, or are we afraid to admit our nature—the nature He created?
The musical accompaniment for the performance was provided by: Anna Szaja, Wojciech Hetman and Konrad Pieszko.