Bartleby Copywriter

An existential thriller based on one of the most enigmatic and ambiguous texts of the classics of American literature. For more than one hundred and fifty years, the story of Herman Melville has not ceased to arouse anxiety and provoke subsequent interpretations.

New York office on Wall Street. The clerk hires a new employee, Bartleby, who initially does his job flawlessly. One day, however, he responds to the superior's command with a short: “I would rather not.” This phrase triggers a series of events that gradually dismantle the existing arrangement: work relationships, hierarchies, procedures and ways of understanding responsibility.

In the adaptation of Piotr Fronio and the staging of Tomasz Frizl, Melville's story becomes a study of the disintegration of an order that loses its capacity for action, although it is not questioned. Tension plays out between two people — in a language that does not succumb to the logic of coercion, and in a relationship in which the automatic mechanisms of power cease to function. Every decision — both action and omission — begins to reveal its author. What happens to the relationship between people when familiar roles fail and language ceases to be an instrument of agreement?

Fig. Claudine Schubert