This review is from the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw in May 2024.
Poland’s prestigious TR Warszawa was a regular visitor to these shores in the late ‘00s/early ‘10s, back when the company was a byword for bombastic European director’s theatre: as I recall, former artistic director Grzegorz Jarzyna’s production of ‘Macbeth’ used more munitions than some armed conflicts. But he was never the whole story, something we finally get proof of here as TR Warszawa returns with the UK premiere of Kata Wéber’s hit 2018 play ‘Pieces of a Woman’.
If the name is familiar, it’s because it was adapted into an Americanised film, which bagged Vanessa Kirby a best actress Oscar nomination in 2021. Wéber’s husband Kornél Mundruczó directed both and it’s not hard to see why Netflix was happy to have him do the screen honours: the gut wrenching opening section that follows the traumatic miscarriage of Maja (Kirby in the film, Justyna Wasilewska here) is a virtuosic piece of on-stage filming, a single continuous take performed live every night by three actors and a camera operator. I think the British can be sceptical of such methods – it can feel like you’re watching a film not a play – but I can confirm that it was so intense when I saw it in Warsaw in early May that the show had to be stopped after two audience members fainted (treat that as a recommendation if you want).
The much longer second part, set six months later, is a classic family-gathers-for-a-meal-harsh-words-are-spoken-secrets-are-unearthed scenario. It’s the sort of set up very familiar in American theatre, and on screen it was tidied up, smoothed down, given a US accent and fell a bit flat.
Here the sequence is slower and weirder, hovering between a skewiff naturalism and Lynchian creepiness. Tracing an eventful gathering at the house of Maja’s ailing but cynical mother Magdelena (Magdalena Kuta), it’s a complex web of family grudges, schemes and dreams that’s beautifully spun by TR Warszawa’s in-house acting ensemble. Booze, drugs, dementia and Maja’s PTSD haunt and complicate the gathering.
If it feels palpably tonally different to what you’d expect from a British or American play on the same subject, but at the same time it is intriguingly closer to the Western domestic drama than the company we’ve seen in the past. Its final message, about accepting pain as part of life, feels gracefully understated.
‘Pieces of a Woman’ is rather absurdly playing just two London dates, midweek, during the busiest May in the theatre calendar I can remember. It would be a real shame if you blinked and missed it, especially as it’s at the very affordable Battersea Arts Centre. I can’t promise you’ll faint, but it’s powerful stuff.
