4/01/2007

What: FERDYDURKE by Witold Gombrowicz
When: 13-17 February 2007, all performances at 7.30pm
Where: The UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AH
Tube: Euston, Euston Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street
Tickets: £17.50, £12.50, £10 (UCL)
Box Office: 020 7388 8822
Further information: www.thebloomsbury.com

FERDYDURKE has been captivating audiences worldwide since 1998, when Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr debuted their production in Lublin, subsequently performing the play in Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Romania and elsewhere in Europe. The celebrated Polish critic Jan Kott was instrumental in bringing FERDYDURKE to the U.S., where it was given its American premiere at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, followed by productions in Philadelphia, New York, San Diego, and Los Angeles prior to traveling to the U.K. and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In his review of FERDYDURKE last year at Raw Space, Village Voice critic Charles McNulty wrote that this production “provides a dizzying theatrical enactment of the novel…like the vertiginous offerings of Richard Foreman or the Wooster Group, all you really need to do is strap yourself down and enjoy the ride. In his review last year of FERDYDURKE in the Los Angeles Times, critic Philip Brandes praised the company’s “raucous presentational style of Polish avant-garde theater” and its “highly physicalized expressionistic style, which renders unfiltered emotions with impressive, universal precision.”
FERDYDURKE is based on Gombrowicz’s first novel, a satirical work and cult classic since it was first published in 1937, and described as “one of the forgotten treasures of 20th century literature”. “Ferdydurke” is a Polish nonsense word for “fiddle-faddle”, and as Allen Kuharski puts it, the play celebrates “the nasty inner child” whose sheer lack of manners allows an assault on personal and political convention.
In FERDYDURKE, a repressed 30-year-old writer is sent back as an adult to re-experience his school days, his first crush on another boy, and other episodes from his past. The crazy schoolboy antics disguise a deeper attack on bourgeois convention.
Having won many international awards including Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival “Ferdydurke” by Witold Gombrowicz comes to the Bloomesbury Theatre.
Adapted by Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr, FERDYDURKE’s English version is by Allen Kuharski, based on Danuta Borchardt’s award-winning new translation of the novel, published by Yale University Press. FERDYDURKE is co-directed by Witold Mazurkiewicz and Janusz Oprynski.
The cast of FERDYDURKE includes Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr company members Jacek Brzezinski, Witold Mazurkiewicz, Jaroslaw Tomica, and Michal Zgiet. Scenography is by Jerzy Rudzki; music is composed by Borys Somerschaf; light and sound design is by Janusz Oprynski and Jan Szamryk.

source: http://www.polishculture.org.uk/

J.S.