Both creators take a decade collaborating and shut the Fall Festival with two committed bets
Krystian Magnifying glass 75 years old, Polish nationality, and is considered one of the totems of the european theatre. Lukasz Twarkowski is 35, the same passport, and some of the criticism you see as the future of the theatre. Both have been held for nearly a decade collaborating and are in permanent exchange of ideas. Twarkowski has been an assistant of Magnifying glass in several of its productions and ensures that working with him has changed his way of seeing the world and the scene. “For me, it’s like the Dalai Lama of the theatre”, he says with a pinch of humor. For its part, Magnifying glass considers him “a young artist with talent and aware of their capacity to create languages. I am pleased with the brilliant development of his artistic trajectory”.
somehow, both creators represent the past and the future of the scene in poland, a land with great tradition in the avant-garde theatre, thanks to legendary names such as Tadeusz Kantor or institutions such as the influential Grotowski Institute. The Festival of Autumn of Madrid has chosen both to close its 36 edition. Magnifying glass will show in the Abbey Theatre (from 29 November to 16 December), the Spanish version of Before retirement, a piece of his well-loved Thomas Bernhard, which already premiered in Catalan to the festival High Season. For its part, Twarkowski debuts in the capital with Lokis (Teatros del Canal, Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 December), an ambitious adaptation of the fantastic novel of Prosper Mérimée.
On his return to Berhard, an author who has ridden pessimistic texts such as Deforestation, Extinction, or The calera, Magnifying glass explains that he is a writer that never ceases to surprise. “Your persistent and fanatical passion for exposing our hypocrisy cultural reveals every day new contexts both in the change of social climate as a politician”. In Before retirement, starred by Pep Cruz, Mercé Aránega and Marta Angelat, three brothers bourgeois show to what extent the roots of nazism are rooted in our current society, something that is full of despair the master of the Polish, who confesses to be “terrified” by the rise of fascism in Europe. “I live in a country where this is taking a monstrous shape.
he firmly Believed in the possibility of a rebirth democratic, an increase of civic consciousness, a progress humanist of the generation of young people. He believed in the momentum of the new release. Eastern europe had the opportunity to take advantage of this momentum, not to fall into the tired and consumerism and emptiness of western societies. He believed in the quickening energy of the culture. I felt part of this drive. However, for the first time, I had the opportunity to see with my own eyes what is surprisingly easy and fast you can collapse. An incredible and devouring speed of social crisis and cultural”.
Lokis, the thriller metaphysical of three hours in length that presents your transgressor disciple, also delves into the darker side of the human soul. On the homonymous novel by Mérimée, a man who transforms into a bear, loses consciousness of his acts, and, for its adaptation to stage, Tarkowski has been inspired by the photographer Lithuanian Vitas Luckus and the singer Bertrand Cantat. The first one jumped through the window after slashing it to a friend of his wife at a party; the second killed his wife, the actress Marie Trintignant, and even today ensures that you do not know how it happened. “I thought we had to find a beast contemporary and the case of Cantat I was interested especially by the coverage which the media did for him. I’m not interested in what happened, the assembly is not about it, but in what way were created the monster in the newspapers and the television.” In that sense, Lokis, where the audiovisual material has a great weight, also reflects on the concepts as current posverdad or the fake news. “Attracts Me so much the power of the image. We are subjected to a bombardment of them every day. I think that images have their own lives and influencing our. Not only are things moving that we see, we want to say something and somehow converse with us.”
Both Twarkowski as a Magnifying glass, they see the theater as a form of resistance in his country, ruled by the extreme right-wing Kaczynski. “In the past few years, the map of theatre of Poland is a desolate landscape. The government premeditated sweeps one by one, the theaters, until now, free and committed,” explains Magnifying glass. Twarkowski shows something more hopeful. “There are local institutions that keep the theater search that has characterized Poland. We have a strong tradition in avant-garde theatre, there is a public that keeps these shows critics the power.”
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