Farewell to Autumn at Wrocławski Teatr Współczesny

Farewell to Autumn by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz directed by Piotr Sieklucki will premiere at Wrocławski Teatr Współczesny this Saturday (2th of April).
As the play’s dramaturg, Tomasz Kireńczuk, says, Farewell to Autumn is very up-to-date – not historically speaking (the communist revolution is very unlikely to repeat itself), but in the human dimension. Sieklucki and Kireńczuk strip the novel off its political and social contexts, leaving its most important features, that is, the experiences of individuals. Witkacy’s protagonists are young and bored – their lives are devoid of meaning, nothing is interesting, nothing prompts them to action. And so they begin to experiment, with drugs, with alcohol or with sexual relations, in search of novelties in their existence. I think that the generation of let’s say 30-year-olds today experiences a similar problem, says Kireńczuk.
The plot is set neither contemporary nor historically, the set design and costumes are very formal, aesthetic and unrelated to any historical context. The experiences of the protagonists are very universal, they occured before, they occur now, and will occur unceasingly in the future. The search of meaning of life is a recurring experience. The play does not point out to any particular social group and only according to our own needs and experiences we will either find our own selves in this work or not.
The stage adaptation of Farewell to Autumn was a challenging task. The novel is a theatrically complex masterpiece and the main task was to choose those protagonists and those events that would be most interesting. Sieklucki and Kireńczuk worked on the adaptation separately. When comparing the results it turned out that they were almost unanimous in the way of thinking about the adaptation. We introduced the characters non-existent in the novel, an elderly men choir. It plays a role similar to a Greek choir – these men have seen everything, they know everything, they’re sometimes frightened, sometimes amused by the action on stage, they constatly comment on the protagonists’ actions. That is what enabled us to introduce superb fragments of narration into the play. But when we were working on the Farewell to Autumn, it turned out that the translation of the work to the stage wasn’t that difficult – the desriptions are so vivid and fruitful that the stage adaptation was a mere technical task. Everything that is said on stage belongs to Witkacy, however some quotes come from his other works, so besides Farewell to Autumn, we used fragments of his prose, poems or essays.
Since the play is deprived of its historic context, the communist revolution had to be replaced by revolution of different sorts. We were wondering what could stand as a contemporary revolution, what would make us experience this horrific fear, the fear so frightening that it makes us lose control over ourselves. I think that there is no threat like that in the place we live right now – Poland is so insignificant that even terrorist do not mind it. We live in a safe and developed country. There is no threat that would radically change our lives. So for us, revolution in the play is revolution of the individual. Each proganist does something in order to change something. These individual revolutions come to a culminating point and then comes the madness of liberating oneself – this of course leads to a disaster. In our play the individual revolutions lead to major explosion, destruction, self-destruction – the question is what remains afterwards. And the answer to this question lies within the final scene of the play, concludes Tomasz Kireńczuk.
Farewell to Autumn at Wrocławski Teatr Współczesny
directed by Piotr Sieklucki
adaptation by Tomasz Kireńczuk and Piotr Sieklucki
http://www.wteatrw.pl/

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