Tadeusz Kuta's Wigilia (Christmas Eve) is a play that begins as a comedy of manners but ends with a question that no one wants to ask: is the empty seat at the table really for a stranger, or just for our alibi? Words bounce off the walls of a modern apartment like reflected text messages. She and He — a couple from the IKEA catalog, with discounted souls. He thinks life is Excel. She still remembers Christmas carols that were not sung for likes. A Guest enters — uninvited, uncomfortable, with a suitcase like something out of a dream. Something about him doesn't fit. And then it fits too well.
This is a play about how much we pass each other by, even when we are sitting right next to each other.
About how the most silence is at the Christmas Eve table, and how it hurts the most when we already know who has left and who has stayed — and why.
We have farce and emotion here. Clarinet and impunity. Lidl and Norwid. And this absurd, scratchy truth: that the warmest moment of Christmas can only happen after the lights are turned off.
This is not a play about Christmas. It is a play about everything that Christmas tries to cover up. About how, in the modern world, morality mixes with plastic, love with marketing, and loneliness with a Wi-Fi router.