The production is an adaptation of Jürgen Fischer’s "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" based on a script by Woody Allen.
Imagine the protagonists of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream after years. After they had lived "happily ever after" in the relationships concluded after a stormy night spent in the forest near Athens, after Puck’s spells and potions had worn off, the stifling aromas had evaporated and the poetry vanished due to everyday routine. Then let us take these three couples to the early years of the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud was beginning his work on the disenchantment of love spells, civilizational progress was only gaining momentum, and people were still thinking that the world's all problems would be solved in no time and all mysteries unraveled.
This was the reality created by Woody Allen in his 1982 film "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," which quickly became a basis for a play of the same name. Intense passions and memories of one night are evoked on stage to help three couples sort out their emotional and sexual relationships, all this in a carefree atmosphere of the American countryside from over one hundred years ago. Woody Allen depicts this all in his typical fashion - with humor, irony and distance, exposing love hoaxes and mocking the metaphysics of sex, if not metaphysics in general.
The Osterwa Theatre production was directed by Paweł Aigner, the author of the last season’s acclaimed production "The Prince and the Pauper," based on a Mark Twain novel. Together with the stage and costume designer Pavel Hubicka and the composer Piotr Klimek, he managed to create on the stage in Narutowicza Street a world in which there are no more important things but love and sex. Since the Allen protagonists often lack those things in their life, no wonder that one of them invents and tests his inventions, including a flying machine. All this is happening to the rhythm of New Orleans jazz, in the lavish yet remarkable scenery, creating something which, in the good old days when women wore corsets and men straw hats, used to be called a comedy with spice.
Jarosław Cymerman
Cast:
Marta Ledwoń as Adrian
Halszka Lehman as Dulcy
Przemysław Gąsiorowicz as Andrew
Krzysztof Olchawa as Maxwell
Janusz Łagodziński as Leopold
Lidia Olszak, Hanka Brulińska, Marta Sroka, Paweł Kos as Ariel
Produced by: PAWEŁ AIGNER
Stage design: PAVEL HUBIČKA
Music: PIOTR KLIMEK
Running time: 140 minutes including 1 intermission