Ewa Szawul’s Afterglow starts with a silly thing on the staircase and ends in a place where funny things don’t fit anymore. Aurelia has an apartment, a TV, and the second room where somebody died – three things that pretend there’s an order when there’s none. The residents’ committee wants “design”, the daughter wants some peace, and the mother wants the world to finally stop moving her as if she’s some kind of furniture.
It is a drama about mother-daughter relationship but with no consolation and no pedagogy. Aurelia isn’t “poor”, she’s instrumental, snarky, alluring, and frightened that desire is her last proof that she’s real. Ida isn’t “cold”, she’s exhausted because she works two jobs: in the office and in somebody else’s fear. There’s an old mechanism that links them: care as a form of blackmail, love as a form of receipt, the phone as a form of umbilical cord.
Szawul’s stranglehold is based on mixing reality with fantasy with no warning signs. The mailman doesn’t come and so Carlos comes in his place, the telenovela becomes a mirror, and the “afterglow” turns the apartment into a revelation sighting. It’s not a decoration. It’s a precise record of how the brain saves itself from the fiction when the world becomes incomprehensible.
The second engine is the community, so the choir made of neighbours, committees, and the “benevolent” experts on the life of others. Everyone is speaking of Aurelia as if she were an object to carry around, sign, and protect. The empathy quickly becomes a procedure, and the procedure turns into a decision that nobody wants to make. Even a catastrophe in Poland can be organised in a “who has the key” mode.
From a theatrical point of view, it is a rhythm- and light- based text. Two rooms, door, phone, TV, and a few reoccurring impulses: a whisper, a clamour of the committee, a blue-tinted glow, a liturgy-like list of medicines. The roles can be doubled, the masks of the guardians can be shown as a series of incarnations, and the “other room” can be the black box of the stage. Minimalism isn’t the question of aesthetics here. It’s a tool of oppression.
Szawul writes of the greyness and dementia without sentimental blackmail, but also without cruelty that poses as courage. The horror is not that somebody “forgets” but rather the fact that the others start to speak for them and later – about them. Ida remains the centrepiece – she wants to be a model daughter but she holds a real person in her arms, not just an ad. The model is no more when she has to stay overnight.
Afterglow was made for a theatre that likes intelligent filth: a laugh that sticks in your throat. It’s a drama about a house that suddenly is no longer a home all because somebody asks: “can you get me home?” and you’re no longer sure if home is a place or a function. And then it gets quiet. Finally not out of politeness.