Szawul, Ewa

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. 

The Loop starts with a simple activity: SHE goes to her husband to the hospital with a packaged meal in hand. The LPG fuelled mini-bus, two stops in the forest, and then the hospital. An ordinary route turns into a bodily and worldly dysfunction at once: the smell, the nausea, the cramp, the lack of air, the panic. The heroine gets off the bus too early, kneels beside the road, and breathes as if not only making it to the hospital depended on it but also holding herself together.

It is a drama about a mechanism, not “action”. The drive is repetitive as if it were a symptom: the breath starts a signal, the signal starts an escape, the escape starts a comeback, and the comeback ends with going down. The hospital, the bus stop, the shop, the arrows, the water distributor, the elevators, and the corridors are not the background but a labyrinth that acts as a live organism. The horror lays in the infrastructure: in what was meant to guide and help and starts to lead astray, turn back, suffocate.

The text is of polyphonic nature. One character is split into a choir of daily roles: a lady with a Pekingese, an aunt, a buddy, a nurse, a guy, a boyfriend, a shopkeeper, a therapist, a neighbour, a masseuse, a “woman” from the bar, and voices coming from the TV on top of that. Everyone is saying “for goodness”, “normally”, “please breathe”, and their language turns into another form of pressure. Humour is what’s operating the most efficiently: dry, cruel, enjoyable, when the tragedy must buy potato dumplings, marshmallows, and water and the world has no other metaphysics for it aside from a receipt.

The Loop has the precision of a dream that doesn’t want to end: the same places come back from another angle and the body is a compass that always shows fear. The water becomes an amulet, number 13 sticks to the prices and gestures, and a stone under ones hand has more truth than all those calming formulas. It’s a theatre where daily life is not realistic but ruthless: everything is “normal” until somebody doesn’t try to get some air. And it is a play about how a person starts to live through every day only when they start pretending to control the map: the elevator, the arrows, and the water distributor aren’t natural but they have their own character, their own violence. The greatest terror doesn’t have sharp teeth. It has rules and a voice that says: “please breathe”.