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Edward Pasewicz's novel — multithreaded, intertextual, erudite, combining biographical and historical elements — seemed a material impossible to adapt to the stage. However, it fell into the hands of an artist who specialized in stage essays that spread a wide spectrum of references, questions and contexts in front of the audience. Katarzyna Kalwat and her collaborators — author of the novel and Krzysztof Szekalski — at Pulverkopf invite us, together with the main character, Patryk Verhunt, to make an attempt to assemble a biography from matter that falls apart in our hands. We know the fate of Patrick from his childhood and adolescence, which he lived in the multicultural Międzyrzeg, through growing up to the role of writer and struggling with the creative act. We also see him in an existential entanglement with the composer Norbert von Hannenheim, whose tragic fate represents a certain possibility towards which Verhunt's life gravitates — and with which he constantly faces.

Pulverkopf is thus a biography on which the nightmares of the 20th century are imprinted, a story of the transmission from generation to generation of war traumas, but also an attempt to understand the life of an individual through art — story, music, performance. It is a monumental work whose intellectual scale is complemented by the installation scenography of Aleksandra Wasilkovska, who created for the actors a scattered territory of the play — the topography of the memory of the main character. At the heart of the show is the creation of Jack Mondayek, who in the role of Verhunt takes turns organizing and disrupting the world around him. In his role, irony is intertwined with despair, and bodily excess with intellectual discipline.

Sensitive content: experience of the First and Second World Wars; war violence, including against persons with mental illness; sexual abuse of minors in wartime realities. The performance features: sex, nudity, blinking/strobe light, smoking on stage (herbal cigarettes — stage), use of a fragment of a Nazi song (in a historical context).

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Fig. Maurycy Stankiewicz