DOLL

Love, money and social conventions define the axis of Bolesław Prus' “Doll” — one of the most important stories about ambition, advancement and disappointment with the modern world. It is a penetrating portrait of an era in which Warsaw becomes the scene of a collision of dreams with ruthless class and social mechanisms.

In the new production in Dramatic, Mikita Iłynczyk (director) and Goran Injac (dramaturgy) read this legendary novel through the prism of the political reality of the end of the 19th century: a time of partitions, a time of subjugation, a time of adaptation to a culture that was not their own. The authors raise questions about the experience of an individual living in a reality of subordination — in a world where the idea of “Polishness” turns out to be not so much a community as an unfulfilled promise.
The starting point for the performance was a copy of “Dolls” from 1897, found in the director's family — a book full of pencil underlines, belonging to the director's grandmother, who was a Polish citizen for only six years until 1939. This material trace forms the framework of the spectacle: Polishness as an experience inherited not by institutions, but by a memory that has not yet come to fruition.
In this interpretation, Wokulski becomes a figure who, with his biography, exposes the mechanisms of adaptation and opportunism of the elites. Returning from exile, he observes a world in which the Russian ruble circulates, the war business shapes fantasies about the future, and the society for which he risked his life is ready to fit into the new order in order to preserve the status and semblance of continuity. Wokulski is not part of the system — he tests its limits, revealing how class and capital displace values.
Iłynczyk's “Doll” is a story about the desire for recognition and about trying to fit into a world where every encounter becomes a test of social position, and intimacy loses to the logic of class. The 19th century is a kind of laboratory here, in which mechanisms returning to modern times are revealed. The past and the present intersect without pathos and sentym