The letters of the 38-year-old Franz Kafka to the 24-year-old Milena Jesenska, a Czech journalist and translator living in Vienna, are a record of a deep understanding, impossible love and, at the same time, a mirror in which the author of “The Trial” looks at himself. The fire that consumed the writer in his relationship with Milena also brought about the most luminous fragments of his prose.
“Letters to Milena (Franz Kafka);
Premiere: ,,Gardziencie” Centre for Theatre Practices 30.09.2017
Musicians: Bart Pałyga, Anna Bochnak – Fryc
Adaptation: Kajetan Mojsak, Maciej Gorczyński;
Set design / projections / photos: Iwona Bandzarewicz;
Music: Bart Pałyga, Marek Główczyk, Łukasz Sabat (premiere)
Directed by: Maciej Gorczyński
Review
Rhythms of Love, Steps of Death. Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka directed by Maciej Gorczyński, /Bogna Paprocka-Podlasiak – “Konteksty” no. 1-2 (320-321) 2018, vol. LXXII/
Katarzyna Gorczyca
Aleksandra Nowakowska
Karolina Placha
Sabina Romańczak
Dominika Wiak
Krystian Łysoń
Kajetan Mojsak
Letters to Milena” directed by Maciej Gorczyński is an intelligent and sensitive production. The intimate correspondence between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska, the translator of his work into Czech, is a poetic and dance-like record of imagined love, full of imaginary passion, illusions, hopes and doubts. […] Letters to Milena condenses everything that Kafka was in his lifetime – grotesque, enslavement, uncertainty, conviction. Despite a certain innovativeness, Gorczyński remains partly in the sphere of Gardzienice’s search for Greek theatre, concentrating the whole composition around the coherence of body and voice rhythms. The director and the whole cast, both actors and musicians, created the theatre of the naked body, possessed by the passion of love, which, burning the remains of common sense, absorbs the lovers, leaving them naked and possessed, on the border of illusion and consciousness, who, in the nonsense of their relationship, try to return to… themselves?
Review by Natalia Brzozowska
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