Premiere: 15 November 2009

Author: Homer

Homer’s Odyssey – one of the oldest texts in the European culture. Almost eaten by worms. So classical that nobody considers it a source of aesthetic experience or cognitive values, even though its plot is perfectly familiar to everybody who has learnt to write and speak. All novels’ matrix, great-grandmother of modern narration, the Odyssey copes with the very notion of storytelling – it loops itself infinitely, concealing its contents in ever multiplying boxes.

Who wrote the Odyssey – and how – still remains uncertain. All we have is indirect information. We have seen the ancient cities reconstructed, this simulacrum: a cardboard projection of our fantasised view of antiquity. How should we explore this substance dump? While reciting the songs of Telemachus and Odysseus, the Aoides were not confined to the limits of the canonic version. They changed the form of the epos according to the need of the moment, so that the action movie imagined by the audience could be more touching, deeper, more poignant. Therefore we tap on a fossil and hope that it resounds at some point. We rewrite its poetry, in order to induce fear, pity or joy.

We tell the story of a boy who was brought up without a father, at the same time being boosted with hormones of his growth, grandeur and legend. (You meet him the moment when he starts listening for the voice that would tell him who he really is). The story of a woman who sews and tears her despair over and over again in the infinite repetition of endless waiting. The story of a man who recounts his journey, which in fact had never happened, and even if it had, it would only have been in his imagination. The story of an odyssey, which is NOTHING but life itself. Of a performance that makes us arrive at the following conclusion: yes, Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest texts in our culture…

Marcin Cecko, Krzysztof Garbaczewski

Direction, adaptation of the scripts, scenography: Krzysztof Garbaczewski

Adaptation of the scripts and dramaturgy, music, video: Marcin Cecko

Costumes: Anna Maria Karczmarska

Choreography: Mikołaj Mikołajczyk

Lights: Wojciech Puś

Trailer

Reviews:

„Garbaczewski does not clear the text in order to get to the heart of the matter. He intentionally chooses the most excessive in form and tedious episodes and has the actors recite them in extenso. He focuses on narrative gesture understood not as an attempt to recreate or thematise the epic narration, but as the action of storytelling, with narration as the main theme. “High class” merges with “low class”, sacrum with sewer. What Homer’s Odyssey really is and what it means to us is of no importance here. What really counts is the manner in which we derive cultural references from its contents, the intricate construction created by the director.

The Odyssey is a thicket of discourses wrenched out of their context and analysed separately, without any reference to their original source, so that they clash and resound in unexpected configurations which elude the rational, academic logic. They are merely sparks of remembrance, blurry memories, and allow the quotations to remain unrecognised and unassigned to anything we know. All we have to do is to understand the action of quoting, of borrowing. A very disobedient, illicit action, little short of theft.”

Żelisław Żelisławski, Didaskalia

„Garbaczewski displays desperate bravado. In every production he radically renegotiates the contract so long ago made between the stage and the audience. He subverts all the habits (of the actors and spectators alike), sanctified by tradition and practice. Not a single character in Odyssey is plain, nor settles for being himself or herself only. They are even deprived of the bond that a common world would normally give them. No sooner does any whole emerge, than the spectator allows it to happen, but – what is significant – he is by no means obliged to take this effort. The space and freedom bestowed upon the audience are painfully vast, not for a single moment are we supposed to feel comfortable, no doubt about that. We are compelled to make choices, as Bauman would put it: either freedom or sense of security.

Garbaczewski is perfectly aware that this choice is not going to be easy and obvious. He stakes everything on one roll of the dice. And he wins.”

Joanna Wichowska, dwutygodnik.com

„A three-hour-long vicious circle of associations, hell of exegesis, of squeezing multitudes of meanings out of the minutest details. At some point we may even start to feel sorry for words and objects: exploited, abused, turned inside-out. Bathtub? It is much more than a bathtub! Leave the bathtub alone! Just let it stand there. Do not let it burst with references to Burnt by the Sun, Oresteia, Marat/Sade. But no. Here everything bursts. Everything refers to something, evokes, explains. Everything has its place in this meticulous report on the subject of a young man who is straining himself to grow up. But try as he might, he cannot. (…) This Odyssey takes account of every character’s point of view. It also presents us with a half critical, half ironic commentary, for which the authors have chosen the form of footnotes, quotations, borrowings. (…) The performance denies any kind of story, biography or coherent collection of memories. A dozen climaxes. Incessantly recurring introduction. Endless unfolding. Impossible ending. The experiment that Garbaczewski and Cecko ventured cannot even be called post-modern. Some border form, rather. Fascinating. Devilish in its consistency. Utterly unbearable.”

Joanna Derkaczew, Gazeta Wyborcza

„The formula Garbaczewski seeks is one of non-linear theatre, liberated from the necessity of storytelling. He wants to experiment with narration and shatter our perceptive habits. It is by no means a coincidence that for each of his four premières (Jelinek’s A Sport Play, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Possessed by Gombrowicz) he chose a text almost impossible to put on stage. Instead of simplifying – he complicates even more. What we see between the beginning and the end of play, is a mixture of loosely connected scenes, elements of an academic lecture, graphic-emotional installations and apsychological situations. The acting itself is understood often as an arrangement of associations. (…) Garbaczewski strives to show the impossibility of silencing the cacophony of a myth and its pop-cultural transformations, the modern confusion in the library of texts, images and sounds. He discovers the rudimentary truth: a myth is like Aeolus’ bag full of winds. Once it is opened, we get blown away by a violent gust struggling to escape. The theatre is incapable of taming it.”

Łukasz Drewniak, Przekrój

„Garbaczewski weaves his theatrical meta-world out of borrowed words and images, he assembles quotes, allusions, associations and references. Eventually he arrives at the conclusion that – according to Barthesian notion of “the death of the author”, so up-to-date in the World Wide Web era – a text is a tangle of discourses, not so much fatherless, but rather conceived by countless fathers. The Odyssey as a literary text, an epos created by Homer? But the director is right, claiming that one may search high and low for those who really have read it… Or maybe Odyssey as a cultural text, a myth rewritten, transformed, modified, quoted, deconstructed ever anew by Dante, Joyce, Freud, Bataille, Godard, Tarkovsky, Pasolini and Kantor, Debussy and The Doors? Never-Ithaca, the object of the characters’ longing, is a labyrinth, a Gordian knot of memory – neither individual nor common: nobody’s memory, virtual, surpassing the boundaries of tradition and culture, resembling a hydra with its infinitely regrowing heads.”

Anna Burzyńska, Tygodnik Powszechny