AleksandraPopławska
New
When the snow melts
Katarzyna Minkowska and her regular collaborator and scriptwriter Tomasz Walesiak created an original script for the play – a portrait of a family in multigenerational crisis.Tragedy brings members of a family to the family home. For some, it’s a difficult return after a long absence, whilst others have lingered there…
| Termin | 08.02.2024, 19:00, PRE-PREMIERE, Induction loop |
| Premiera | 09.02.2024 |
| Miejsce | Marszałkowska 8 |
| Typ | New |
| Rodzaj | Spektakle |
| Wydarzenie | Performance |
Obsada
JanDravnel
JustynaWasilewska
MagdalenaKuta
MariaMaj
MirosławZbrojewicz
RafałMaćkowiak
TomaszTyndyk
Katarzyna Minkowska and her regular collaborator and scriptwriter Tomasz Walesiak created an original script for the play – a portrait of a family in multigenerational crisis.
Tragedy brings members of a family to the family home. For some, it’s a difficult return after a long absence, whilst others have lingered there for decades. How should they talk about an incident that cannot be acknowledged or accepted? How can you make an uplifting connection with someone who, in theory, is close to you but who you know so little about? As the characters struggle with the suicide of a teenage girl they invoke more and more narratives about her. They revisit the past and mutually meddle with the webs of their own memories. They create successive layers of dreams and illusions of the unbearable reality. The fuel of their hopes and nightmares, as well as an escape from their emotions, are fear, fairytales, videogames, and religion. The mixed-up inner worlds create a vortex of images in a family gathering observed by the audience.
photo: Wojciech Sobolewski
Partner
Media partners of the performance
Recenzje
In this performance, we are given all the information directly. There is no traditional exposure. The family does not explain what everyone already knows. You can read some things from allusions, gestures, glances and abruptly stopped utterances. Thus, the play’s strongest points are the dialogues, which are very natural, attentive, and insightful, highlighted by the excellent acting developed over the years in one of the best theatre companies in Poland.
In “When the Snow Melts”, we also flow behind trivial and everyday events, picking up emotions that emerge from irrelevant chitchat or embarrassing (and all the more painful) arguments. With its emotional intensity, the heartrending finale is a bit like theatre. Except the stakes for Minkowska’s and Walesiak’s characters are closer to life, though this doesn’t mean that they are less dramatic. They are definitely worth our time.
Katarzyna Minkowska’s play hints at some clues, but certain questions remain open. For example: Do conventional family models still work? Do we perhaps need a revision of the basic social unit and new answers? Is the modern family different from that of ten, twenty or thirty years ago, though we try hard to pretend it’s not? Is it an obligation to maintain relationships with people who don’t give us a sense of safety and understanding?
When the Snow Melts is one of those (few) plays that stays in your head long after you leave the theatre. It won’t let you sleep as it confronts you with various situations in your own family and among your loved ones. Though, probably, the circumstances are not so dire.
Minkowska and Walesiak portray a typical family on the border between realism and stereotype. The older generation, which has not been thought to talk about problems and emotions, is convinced that they have given all they could to their children, who not only don’t respond with gratitude, but are always dissatisfied. The younger have their own strategies for survival and self-protection: running away, avoiding confrontation, or being a support or disgrace to the family.
A poignant study of a family trauma. A family tragedy uncovers deeply hidden problems, resentments, and disputes. Taken straight from life, the text combined with extremely suggestive, natural acting, as well as strongly emotional and realistic films from family archives projected on several screens, creates a mood of unusual and moving authenticity. Watching the performance, you may have the impression of arriving at your own family gathering, where the participants drag up serious problems and go on about them forever.
Another successful play by Katarzyna Minkowska created in tandem with Tomasz Walesiak. […] The convention invented for this show allows you to penetrate, without prejudice or preconceptions, the inside of a family in crisis, seeking an answer to the question of how to carry on. The result is an ensemble performance: a thought-provoking tale about who we are to ourselves and our loved ones, who in fact are often unfamiliar.
When the Snow Melts is a dense, unpleasantly touching and subcutaneously irritating performance because it shows how we can sweep many uncomfortable things under the carpet, hide them for years, and how we are unable to talk to our loved ones.