A couple of two poor polish speaking Romanians

by Dorota Maslowska

First stage production in Bulgaria

Director: Georg Genoux 

Stage design: Lily Dzhagarova

Consultant: Jelena Margo

With the participation of: Ivaylo Dragiev, Irina Andreeva, Blagoy Boychev, Milko Yovchev, Boryana Peneva.

They’re the hitchhikers from hell. She’s a pregnant, glue-sniffing wacko. He’s a shell-suited motormouth with an intimidating leer. Claiming to be poor, Polish-speaking Romanians, Dzina and Parcha hijack a lift to Warsaw with a censorious, middle-class Pole whose reluctance swiftly turns into sobbing hysteria under the onslaught of their provocations. He tries to get himself arrested for speeding, only to find himself the recipient of five grand and an MP3 player – a nutty gesture of fairy-tale munificence from the departing pair.

All is not as it first seems in this pungent debut play by Dorota Maslowska, the 24-year-old Polish literary phenomenon who already has two award-winning novels under her belt. As they trudge through a freezing forest, the couple doff their parodic East European accents in favour of cockney ones. Their cruddy clothes and scrounging-immigrant shtick are revealed as their costumes for a drug-fuelled party on the theme of extreme poverty. Parcha turns out to be an actor known for playing Father Grzegorz, a priest in a TV soap. Dzina is a depressed single mother who blew a month’s child maintenance on the party and is worryingly vague about where she left her boy.

In the version in Sofia the actors are comparing their biografies with the stories of the figures of the play. It gets a very hard confrontation with the own life storiy.

Supported by the Polish Institut Sofia