16/03/2024
In the previous post we briefly introduced you to the ‘Sunflowers’. However, if you’d like to know more about the play, we are kindly encouraging you to read the following review on the performance written by Professor Piotr Spyra.
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W poprzednim poście pokrótce przedstawiliśmy wam naszą pierwszą sztukę „Sunflowers”. Jeżeli jednak chcielibyście dowiedzieć się więcej na temat inscenizacji, serdecznie zachęcamy was do zapoznania się z poniższą recenzją spektaklu napisaną przez profesora Piotra Spyrę.
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The choice of Wordsworth alongside Ukrainian and Polish Romantic poets for a performance that marks the creation of a new student theatre group is certainly a bold one. It seems even bolder when one considers that The University Playhouse is affiliated with the Institute of English Studies at the University of Łódź, which has a rich history of student theatre but one that rather revolves around Shakespeare and twentieth-century drama. In fact, the Romantic period has long seemed somewhat sidelined in the Institute, both in terms of the research conducted and the curriculum. With the successful performance of Sunflowers, The University Playhouse has brought Romanticism to everyone’s attention and highlighted the inherently dramatic nature of Romantic poetry.
The powerful performance of Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” or Mickiewicz’s “Romanticism” proved that while some poetry is meant for reciting, Romantic verse offers a potential for action. The Old Man bursting onto the stage in “Romanticism” or the narrator’s annoyance at the young girl’s logic in “We Are Seven” made it clear that Sunflowers was more than just an opportunity for a poetry reading and while the the kind of theatrical experience it offered was text-based rather than physical, it still managed to convey the powerful emotions and drama underlying the words of the text, showing that the Romantics knew well how to instil their ballads with the sense of dramatic tension so typical of earlier, popular balladry.
The dramatic tension was, in another sense, heightened by the Ukrainian context. In a particularly clever and moving touch, the poster of the show and the title itself gave us yellow Sunflowers under a blue sky - the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Putting twentieth-century Ukrainian poets and not just the renowned Taras Shevchecnko alongside Wordsworth in a performance by students of English Studies is a powerful statement that Ukraine has always had its roots in Europe, whatever the evil forces of this world may think about that. The train station in Boryspil that formed the background for some of the performance looked eerily familiar and very much like the Tsarist stations we know from around Łódź. The stations in Pabianice, Zgierz, Zduńska Wola, Łask or Sieradz remind us that just like Boryspil in Ukraine what is today central Poland was part of the Russian Empire. The sovereignty of Muscovy over these lands was a political fact, but Romantic poetry will have its say lest anyone forget that Shevchenko and Mickiewicz were part of thriving national cultures that, sooner or later, would break free from the tyranny of the Kremlin. Staging this play as this process reaches its final stage with Poland firmly supporting Ukraine in the current war was particularly poignant.
Let’s just hope that the next performance moves to a larger stage. The experience of the small, windowless cell certainly played well with the context of shaking off the shackles of Muscovy, and the breath of fresh air that everyone felt as they left the performance was a pleasant touch, but the kind of intellectual forethought that went into creating the show and the TUP’s proficiency in handling difficult texts deserve both a larger stage and a larger audience.
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