Elizabeth Costello

7 Lectures and 5 Moral Tales [original: J.M. Coetzee Elizabeth Costello.

 

Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski

Composer Pawel Mykietyn

Designer Set design and costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak

Photographer Magda Hueckel

 

Durations: 240 minutes, including 1 intermission

 

Cast:

Mariusz Bonaszewski,

Andrzej Chyra,

Piotr Polak

Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik,

Maja Komorowska,

Hiroaki Murakami,

Monika Niemczyk,

Maja Ostaszewska,

Ewelina Pankowska,

Jacek Poniedziałek,

Magdalena Popławska

 

ABOUT PERFORMANCE:

Elizabeth Costello is more than a made-up literary character. She might be said to be Coetzee's artistic alter ego: someone who speaks in his name and bears the criticism and anger of his readers and academic polemicists. Costello has also come to be a recurring character in Krzysztof Warlikowski's theater. She has appeared in five of his productions to date – sometimes speaking under her own name, sometimes being quoted by other characters. Now, in placing Elizabeth Costello firmly at the center of his production, Warlikowski is taking the next logical step in a process whose development he might not have foreseen when he first gave her a platform on his stage.

 

PRESS:

"The outstanding theater maker has constructed an extraordinary and erudite labyrinth that requires a knowledge of history, literature and art (...). His latest piece is (...) a stunning theatrical experience that some will approach as they would a painful ontological dilemma while others might struggle to decipher its complex universe of connotations, intertextuality and synecdoche.

Elizabeth is an ever-changing intellectual enigma. Perhaps that is why Warlikowski has enlisted six actors (five female and one male) to

performatively depict her character development. These successive reincarnations are vehicles for exploring the situation and spiritual condition of the individual in Western civilization and the dual nature of personality, split as it is between the spiritual and the real, between agency in the public sphere and turmoil in personal life.

In our complex post-digital age Krzysztof Warlikowski offers theater that speaks to our spiritual needs and dilemmas and brilliantly serves its purpose at the present juncture in human civilization.

He has given us a multi-faceted, well thought-out, exquisitely conceived and executed production with a demanding rhythm, one that requires tenacity and receptiveness to appreciate.”

Heleni Koutsilaiou

 

"Warlikowski invites us back into a familiar theatrical world, complete with spectacular costumes and Małgorzata Szczęśniak's elegant, minimalist set where a tiled bathroom serves as the private space in which characters can be free of social pressure, and where the multi-purpose Plexiglas hothouse-cum-cage is a domestic interior, an exhibition case containing two stuffed albatrosses, a stage on a cruise liner, as well as a portal separating the world of the living and the dead. We are not surprised. to hear Paweł Mykietyn's disturbing score and see Kamil Polak's dazzling projections of a melting glacier as well as Felice Ross's lighting that makes the on-stage temperature range from tropical heat through laboratory coolness all the way to the freezing cold of the Antarctic.

This time, however, Warlikowski has used these familiar elements contributed by his regular collaborators to create what is perhaps his most unexpected work to date: a piece without a dominant theme, whose meanings keep eluding even though we see its protagonist in a variety of situations, at different ages in her life, and interpreted in many different ways. While what is implicit here is no less important than the scenes themselves – all the crumbs scattered throughout the performance that allow us to put together the puzzle and also find subtle connections with Warlikowski's previous work – the finale leaves us with a still incomplete, and thus, perhaps, all the more intriguing portrait of Elizabeth Costello.”

Magda Piekarska

 

I (…) believe that Elizabeth Costello is Krzysztof Warlikowski's most personal production. I can see him in each of the Elizabeth Costellos; I hear him saying "I am Elizabeth Costello," even though those words are never actually spoken. This is perhaps the first time Warlikowski has so openly broached the subject of old age: he touches upon the fleeting nature of existence and describes how it affects him. In the finale he might be looking at the world through the eyes of Elizabeth Costello, played this time by Maja Komorowska: terrified, and yet hopeful, his gaze focused on something – because there is something out there, after all.

Jasek Wakar