The Eastern Europeans are maestros of miserabilism.
They can turn common or garden gloom into epic come-dies of self-absorption. Or, in the case of Polish writer Tadeusz Rozewicz's 1960 absurdist drama, a hectic bedroom farce of self-absorption.
Rozewicz's delirious play is about a man who cannot get out of bed. He is an everyman aged somewhere between nought and 40. The traffic of people through his grotty boudoir turn it into a busy cattle market.
Amid the hubbub, he claims to be "having difficulty turning into a human being" and is in the grip of extreme psychological alienation. He looks at his hand as if it were someone else's and, amazed at his ability to
control it, plunges it under the sheets to massage his flagging libido.
A product of the post-War period, following Nazi occupation and Stalin-ist rule, Rozewicz's riotously iconoclastic play has no truck with classical convention.
Although he employs a self-righteous chorus who emerge from the hero's closet, Rozewicz soon has his hero kill them off - having first failed to kill himself. At a personal
level - with his bickering with parents and dismissing lovers - the play is the fantastical daydream of a sham-bolic idler. At a political level - where he is harassed by meddling bureaucrats and wounded partisans - it is a sinister nightmare reflecting Polish history.
Nor is Rozewicz above ridiculing Germans on the way - particularly his brother was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944.
Peter Czajkowksi's direction and Adam Czerniawski's translation not only recapture the original spirit of the Theatre of the Absurd, they also re-cast Rozewicz's play in a contemporary British idiom. Steve Wilson's dingy design is off-set by Mark Doubleday's urine-coloured lighting. An ensemble of 10 creates a chaotic procession of characters who would be tiresomely capricious, but for the innate comedy of the situation and the variety of the acting.
Paul Mooney's hero is a steady dramatic locus as an exhausted, indolent, anxious, guilty spectator on his own life. He is inclined to agree with the character who says, "people are a herd of animals slithering on shit".
The brilliance of Czajkowski's production is that it milks the pathos and comedy of this farmyard formulation for a post-BSE generation.
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