The New PAN TADEUSZ — Only Make It Rap

Polish Theatre in Poznań

PPA production: Małgorzata Stobiecka

direction, script: Kamil Białaszek
music: Mateusz Augustyn, Nature 2000 (Maksymilian Śliwiński, Agata Zygmańska, Bartek Klimek, Wojciech Pindur, Stanisław Śliwński, Tomasz Śliwiński)
set design: Łukasz Mleczak
multimedia: Michał Mitoraj
choreography: Bartosz Dopytalski
costumes and make-up: Jola Łobacz
make-up: Magdalena Chrzuszcz, Zuzanna Bartel

Cast: Mariusz Adamski, Alan Al-Murtatha, Piotr B. Dąbrowski, Michał Kaleta, Piotr Kaźmierczak, Denis Kudijenko, Jakub Papuga, Aleksandra Samelczak, Paweł Siwiak, Ewa Szumska, Kornelia Trawkowska, Oliver Woodcock, Ryszard Zajączkowski

This is not a show for fossilized (in spirit) Polish literature teachers.

Kamil Białaszek a.k.a Koza: rapper, theatre director, may be half-vandal, may be half-prophet. Considering Poland’s national epic is ready to smash its narrative flesh with a meat tenderizer, and slice it up with a razor blade, he cooked something other than a ceremonial staging. He could have well expected thunder from the patriotic heavens and “wanted” posters issued by the philological inquisition. Instead…

Wearing both hats — playwright’s and director’s — he reads Mickiewicz’s poem as a multi-storey nostalgia machine: about lost glory, where characters obsess over the past while comparing it to a second-rate present. He pulls out the thread of cultural decline and paints a portrait of people deprived of agency, squeezed by political pressure, frozen in the face of brutal civilizational change.
(Paweł Wodziński)

The band storms the stage, blends into the in-house acting ensemble, and the mix “digests itself” into a brand-new quality — like a proper, solid, and hot Sarmatian bigos. This is as much a concert as it is a theatre show.
(Witold Mrozek, Gazeta Wyborcza)

A no-mercy portrait of Polishness, drawn with a thick marker — sharp, unsentimental, but never patronizing. Smart, funny, and refreshingly unpretentious. Hard not to fall for a version that skips the sacred Invocation and opens instead with: “Shout-out to the good boys from Lithuania!”
(Aneta Kyzioł, Polityka)

You’ve been warned.

Photo: Michał Mitoraj