THE WEDDING. Director Radosław Rychcik

Radosław Rychcik, who lately has become a specialist in theatrical adaptations of canonical Polish plays, re-imagining them in new and surprising contexts, stages the action of the Stansiław Wyspiański piece in Northern Ireland, a country divided by a war that’s been going on for decades between the Catholics and Protestants, Loyalists and Republicans, the British and the Irish. In this socially, politically and culturally torn landscape, where hatred and violence have been an everyday reality, a group of newlyweds decided to establish The Northern-Irish Association of Mixed Marriages. And although more than four decades have passed, local and official institutions are still governed by the rules of religious segregation. During this time there has been a significant increase in the number of mixed marriages. So perhaps a wedding, both the staged one, taking place in an Irish Pub, and the symbolic one, just like in the literary original, will change the country and the nation forever.

“The cast of the Silesia Theatre in Katowice convincingly balances the characters from the well-known Wyspiański play and the members of the Irish community. Rychcik uses protest music, punk rock songs and wild dance sequences as well as a linguistic polyphony mixing Polish, English and Irish words and accents, drawing attention to the anarchic potential of the original text. The set design by Anna Maria Karczmarska takes the audience to a precisely re-created Irish Pub pulsing with angry music and rage stemming from the brutality of segregation. In this interpretation, the finale—a famous Chochol dance—takes on a subversive meaning and becomes a prophecy of the new order to come and a broad social transformation.” (from the theatre’s archive of reviews)