Review: I LOVE CHOPIN at Wroclaw Mime Theatre

I like to confront and challenge existing icons of life and art, you know, monuments that can't be moved with a bulldozer. Such a monument here (in the shape of a nose) is Chopin, both the great and the unsurpassed. And it will be like this, probably forever. It's good, we have our all-time artist, although we may fight for him with the French. What the theater offers us is a story with unknown nuances about the composer’s life and some new guesses. How do cemetery flies, students, lesbians in idyllic countryside, scientific fanatics, professors, and people who chose to play his works as their last before committing suicide perceive him?

The Piaskowski/Sulima duo showed us their vision of the associations with the Great Chopin but I was not able to grasp the essence of it. I couldn't fall for the sequence of more or less linked stories brought to the stage and linked by the character of the obsessed professor played by Sara Celler-Jezierska (mainly because I missed pantomime so much).   Chopin was a great artist and the Wroclaw Mime Theatre ensemble is too but I lacked their know-how, their movements, the world without words, and the accessories but with imagination because instead, we have an animated version of the thesaurus on stage. 

Some important questions are raised here, such as who is responsible for "explaining" the art and performance of music. Everyone sees what they want after all. What I loved was the moment of the piano lesson when Karolina Paczkowska couldn't be stopped in a mad rush, she pushed an old professor in a wheelchair onto the stage only to suffer a series of unfair evaluations and feel helpless not meeting someone else's unhealthy expectations. Anyone who has been to music school knows what I'm talking about and Paczkowska is a perfection. Her energy, movements, and exaggerated expressions are brilliant, she doesn't limit herself, she is the flow. Her duet with Jan Kochanowski, which has the amazing style of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is fantastic! His comment: you exercised your left hand for 4 hours yesterday, that's not enough, an F, makes you laugh while suffering. When Paczkowska plays two songs at once in a crazy trance, you just want more (and then you realize how cruel you are…)! A+ for both of them!

From this point the show is running more freely when the teacher leads a rhythm class, you feel the energy of the group and it's a great moment! At the end, Eloy Moreno Gallego in a huge wig, whom I desperately love (Eloy and wig too) appears and introduces a color along with a really good (and sad) story, but I still felt a lack of the supreme pantomime movement that we know so well.

I admire the idea, the courage, and lots of patterns, brooms, soil, flowers, piano, wigs, flies, dramas, sequins, candles, and many other things, but I missed the pantomime and the beauty of the movement as simple as it can be, at some point looking at the stage I felt like looking at the Ferrari stuck in a traffic jam. As every cloud has a silver lining I loved the music, the willingness to rewrite the Polish Heritage and to play with it freely (and Eloy’s wig of course). We all love Chopin after all.

Photo: Natalia Kabanow

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