It is good to welcome excellent actors from Legnica on the stage of our theatre. You can see how comfortable they feel here. On Saturday and Sunday, they transformed our stage into a mine shaft. They swore in it like… miners, lived in it, acted and died there. And above them, in the sunlight, the post-war history of the Copper Basin was passing.
The play directed by Jacek Głomb “Orchestra” simply describes the lives of ordinary people – the miners of the Copper Basin. The story itself is not particularly innovative. It begins in the 1960s, when May Day parades are depicted; then come the years of prosperity and the absurdities of the Gierek era, “games” with the secret police and the communist authorities, followed by the times of Solidarity and the free market. The story ends in the 1990s – with an accident at the mine.
The characters created in the play are certainly one of its strengths. They are flesh-and-blood people, lively and genuine, not pretending to be anyone other than who they are – ordinary workers. The character played by Paweł Wolak stands out. His hero opens the play by explaining why he did not join the May Day parade during his school years. The actor constructed his character superbly: a simple, somewhat foolish country lad, a “man of his own kind,” whose best friend deceives him and takes away the love of his life. The play is worth seeing again for Wolak’s performance alone.
The director entrusted Ewa Galusińska with a difficult role. She plays Ivonne, a party activist and repatriate from France. The actress had to make a fool of herself, presumably to convey the stupidity, grotesqueness and absurdity of communist power. But she handled the role excellently—to such an extent that during her telephone conversation with Edward Gierek, one could think that a contemporary local-government official was calling someone who rules Poland today.
An interesting play, worth seeing, although Głomb’s work is still far from the films of Kazimierz Kutz, who created outstanding portraits of the miners and communities of Upper Silesia (“Salt of the Black Earth,” 1969, and “Pearl in the Crown,” 1971). “Orchestra” is, for now, an attempt to frame the history of our region as a work of art, but it is a very good and exceptionally sincere attempt.
(information: GH)