Nothing. Sketches for King Lear

REVIEWS

Silent revolutions. MFSP A PART
Marcin Herich builds the whole spectacle on the tension between “nothing” and “something”, “nothing” said by Kordelia has a mass of black hole from which the old, decrepit Lear emerges for a moment just to be absorbed by her again in a moment. Nothing here is the opposite of “something”, it is its integral part, just as the dark side of the moon is part of its visible part. Perhaps the most important idea of ​​”Sketches” is to include the real, contemporary stories of the three actresses/heroines of the performance. These three stories seem to double back, refer to real memories but also – I have the impression – to the show itself; relationships between adult women and men at Lear’s court (scene 5) are just a variation on the daughters’ basic relationship with their fathers. All matrices have already been saved, embossed, one would like to say (on the other hand, I recall the scene from “My Nikifor”, when the film daughter – sic! – Marian Włosiński on the question who she would like to be, answers “I would like to be nothing” – it’s nothing but words of Cordelia herself, like “I would prefer not to” by copyist Bartleby, an extremely rare but repetitive act of refusing to participate in history.)
None of the earlier and later festival performances turned out to be so expressive in narrative sense. But this is of course no complaint. And the A Part as a theater has already accustomed us to the repertoire volts (from open air to a chamber monodrama, from an epic story to an allusive and allegorical spectacle).
Radosław Kobierski, www.rueboutdumonde.blogspot.com, 26/06/2018