Life is made up of small activities, funny little things. Walking the dog. Renovating a house. Feeling the child kicking in the womb. This bliss can be suddenly interrupted in an instant.
This is what happens in the polyphonic drama of Malina Prześluga. A sudden bombardment knocks the characters out of their rhythm, disrupting the seemingly inviolable order. All "problems of the first world" cease to matter. Someone's husband doesn't come home, a dog dies, cinemas and cafés are closed, buildings turn into rubble. The war continues at full strength. And it gets worse and worse. The average middle class becomes refugees. But Prześluga does not mention about, e.g., Syria - she writes about hypothetical Poland from the future, torn apart by military conflict.
Seemingly privileged citizens are effecting a massive exodus abroad. This escape is preceded by a scene of an absurd course of being a refugee (which "helps" to get into the mindset of the upcoming decline). Not everyone will succeed in this journey. But a person in an extreme situation can develop an unbreakable will to live, like "wasps in a tea glass, trees that grow on concrete, a two-year-old potato that sprouts in a basement without light"... It is precisely this power that makes yet another person sail on overcrowded pontoons towards the borders of Europe, despite being aware of the great risk. This problem may once affect us too, even if for now we are seemingly untouchable and alienated.
"After all, all those everyday events that seem insurmountable can lose their relevance from one day to the next. And suddenly all our mental well-being, this carefree mindlessness ends just like that". - says the author in an interview given to the monthly magazine Dialog (9/2019).
Prześluga has created a work of art in which she masterfully changes her tones - first she puts the viewer in a state of comfort, puts them to sleep and then attacks with all her might. In the finale, the fate of man is commented on by a tree and a stone - silent inanimate structures which ultimately gain more importance than a degraded, crushed man. And the leitmotiv words 'Everything's fine', although for the most part of the play they appear as a mantra, a self-affirmation and then a kind of prayer to help us survive the nightmarish war - in the final song they turn against those who turn their eyes away from tragedy.