First preview of "Come Back" at the Festival

It  was our second preview during the 25th edition of International Festival of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. On Friday, 29 March, on our Small Stage we presented „Come Back” by Przemysław Pilarski. In 2018 he received Gdynia Drama Awards for this play. „Come Back”, directed by Anna Augustynowicz, has been a co-production of Powszechny Theatre in Łódź and Współczesny Theatre in Szczecin. 

Przemysław Pilarski’s „Come back”  is a story of a man with the knick name Bobby Kleks who returns after many years to post-war Radom. He tries to find himself in his own home which has already been inhabited by other people. But the plot, the time and the place are only a pretext for presenting universal truths and observations about man.

- I would read „Come Back” not only from the historical point of view. After all, the other patron is David Lynch and the quote from „Twin Peaks”: „We are wanderers who once left their home. But – where is it? Does it exist at all? Or maybe it never did?” And then, because there can never be too many questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? What do we miss? – says Przemysław Pilarski.

- There is no literalness in „Come Back” – it is the play with mysteries that should be resolved in each spectator’s soul. It is interested from the point of view of building theatrical language. Its meanings are neither in psychology nor history but somewhere behind the actors – says Anna Augustynowicz.

Łukasz Drewniak, who moderated the meeting with the spectacle’s creators concentrated on the historical aspect of the play from the point of view of Holocaust. He noticed that „Come Back” was probably the only play on Holocaust in which there was no word „holocaust”. The creators told about the process of making „Come Back” and their own memories that had some influence on the form of the spectacle. The discussion, with an active participation of the audience, touched the problem of lack of settling in the places we lived and of traumas we had not been able to cope with. The play becomes very important from the Polish point of view – places and history. Przemysław Pilarski pointed out that it was a very interesting experience to take part in rehearsals and thus finding out new meanings hidden in the play that he had not been aware of.      

Przemysław Pilarski
„Come Back”
Co-production of Powszechny Theatre in Łódź and Współczesny Theatre in Szczecin
Director: Anna Augustynowicz
Set design: Marek Braun
Video: Wojciech Kapela
Lightning director: Krzysztof Sendke
Music: Jacek Wierzchowski
Costumes: Wanda Kowalska
Cast: Maria Dąbrowska, Anna Januszewska, Monika Kępka, Małgorzata Goździk, Adam Kuzycz-Berezowski, Jakub Kryształ
Fragments of „Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Franz Schubert’s „Erlkönig” (arranged by Jacek Wierzchowski) have been used in the spectacle.

Photo Kasia Chmura