Kobuszewska, Sylwia

The End of The World is a bitter comedy about being disappointed with adulthood that can be described as a poetic drama and is referring to the theatre of the absurd tradition. However, it is set in a concrete reality of Katowice, Warsaw, and Włoszczowa.

One of the main characters, called Bad Child, is a musician by education and a physicist by passion. Together with his singing teacher, Evil Stepmother, he decides to organise an end-of-the-world party. They would like to end it all as only then you can begin a new chapter. There are also Kato and Wawa, not that friendly personifications of the cities, and the titular hero – The End of The World. The End of The World, despite having destructive tendencies and not dealing well with social situations, is an easily relatable character. 

The setting tries to encourage pessimism and persuade us that everything ends and, what’s even worse, we’re done for since we didn’t conquer the world by thirty. 

To Stop the Time is a text written with the puppet theatre in mind – flexible, abstract, full of metaphors and questions with no answers. From its characters we must mark out Second, who wanted to be a part of another minute, Minute, who didn’t want to pass, and Hour, who didn’t want to come. Those characters form an “impossible” but strong friendship – after all, those characters shouldn’t be able to even meet! – and they venture together to find the almighty clock, who will let them be whoever they want to be, to be freed from the power of time.

It’s a play about the difficulty of accepting what is inevitable, about the unfair fight with the thing the fate grants us, so broadly speaking – about the innate human fear of the end, the old, and death. 

The Birds are for Dinner is a play aimed at kids but it stands out thanks to its mature message. The world seen through the eyes of a child unmasks the absurdity of the grey reality of the adults and shows that sometimes it’s worth pondering over seemingly obvious things. For kids, it is a story about the power of dream and imagination and how to function in the society. 

Five-year-old Kalinka dreams of becoming a bird princess. And so she teaches her stuffed pigeon to fly, she organises the meetings for her toys, she talks to random people, and she refuses to play with her younger brother as “he’s just a baby”. But most importantly, she asks a number of insightful questions about the world around us at the same time repeating certain adult-like patterns. 

At night, when everyone is asleep and the Little Princess is all alone in her room, the closet’s door slowly opens... and reveals an Evil Witch standing there. Fortunately, the Little Princess knows exactly what to do in those circumstances – she has to hastily and at the top of her lungs call for Mum. Brutally awoken from her sleep Mum runs to calm her little girl down. And that’s enough to make the Witch disappear because what Mum says must be true... but how will the Little Princess deal with the Witch once Mum’s words lose their power?

Oneiric, twisting the fairy tale patterns, When Mum was God is a play that shows the problems in the relationship between parent and child once the kid starts to grow up. When a child is little, we must be careful what we say as they will deem everything as truthful. However, at one point in their life, the little creatures start to question the credibility of the world around them. Once the parents’ words lose their power, the child is stripped of their protective layer created by their guardians and must face the decision making and problem solving on their own. It is the irreversible process called growing up.