XVII MFG Trans-Atlantic

Competition performance of the XVII International Gombrowicz Festival. Juliusz Osterwa Theatre in Lublin

In our adaptation, Gombrowicz returns years later to the Trans-Atlantic and to Argentina. He returns a few decades older to relive his “one such spring in life”, to ask about youth and old age, taking up another struggle with form in the name of the individual. But that is not all, he also returns to answer the question about his attitude towards Poland and the Poles, to account for the attitude he adopted after 1939. As he wrote in 1954, “The Trans-Atlantic is the most patriotic and courageous piece I have ever written. And it is he who accuses me of being a coward and a bad Pole.” Today, when the questions “to fight or not to beat” are unfortunately becoming relevant again, it is worth returning to Gombrowicz's dilemmas. The grotesque element he used in this novel should not obscure the tragedy of the situation in which he and many of our fellow countrymen found themselves during and immediately after the Second World War. For the author Ferdydurke, it was not about the apotheosis of desertion or a simple escape from Polishness, but about a serious, albeit far from patriotic tromtadration, about what it means and how to be a Pole when history breaks off the chain.

The show was created in cooperation with the Cultural Centre in Lublin