Kielce Showcases Poland’s Contemporary Theatre
Asen Terziev*
7th Kielce International Theatre Festival, 12 to 26 October, 2025, in Kielce, Poland.
Located between Krakow and Warsaw in south-central Poland, Kielce is a beautiful city with roots dating back to the Middle Ages. It is ideal for restful, contemplative walks along the long central Sienkiewicza Street and the sights of the opulent 17th-century Bishops’ Palace, the soaring Kielce Cathedral and the nature reserve Kadzielnia with its impressive central hill. The city hosts the Kielce International Theatre Festival. Organized by the recently renovated Żeromski Theatre, the festival featured, as usual, some of the best current Polish theatre productions, presented alongside specially invited international works (this year from Romania, France and Lithuania), and a program of parallel events, featuring post-show talks between artists and spectators, readings of plays, debates, workshops and even a yoga class with the participation of one of the actresses. The shows are presented with subtitles in Polish and English, which makes them suitable for both local and international spectators.
The festival opened with the Żeromski Theatre’s own documentary production, provocatively titled The Kielce Protest. Who owns Kielce?. It tackles the tricky issues surrounding the difficulties of owning real estate in the city, but it also signaled the problems which face the festival itself and its uncertain future existence, triggered by the resignation of Michał Kotański who had been director of the Żeromski Theatre since 2015. Despite the challenges, the festival took place, and I had the chance to witness four of the shows from the program compiled by the festival’s artistic director Marcin Zawada, consisting of a total of fourteen productions. The full annotated program is available here, but even the four shows I caught were so compelling, topical and urgent that they left me convinced: if Kielce ever abandons this festival, the city will forfeit a cultural lifeline it can’t afford to lose.
My Kielce festival experience started with a show for which I had no preparation, but which left me very moved. Dream Merchants, scripted, directed and choreographed by Anna Sroka-Hryń, had begun in 2022 as a multidisciplinary work blending theatre and music, part of the educational activities with her students at the Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. One of the basic aims of this type of production is to showcase the various singing, dancing and acting skills of the young performers who are soon to leave their alma mater and enter the turbulent world of the professional stage. But Dream Merchants had become very popular and had found its home at the Roma Musical Theatre in Warsaw, where it still runs. Its presentation in Kielce triggered an immediate standing ovation in the audience, and in the end I also found myself rhythmically clapping, surrounded by excited people who were singing together with the performers a song in Polish, which I could not understand, but I could feel with my whole body. Later in the evening I found the original on Spotify and got hooked. I could not stop listening to it, over and over… It is a catchy, dreamy song—you could try it for yourself.
This song is one of the greatest hits of the cult Polish rock band Myslovitz, which had resonated with the emotional frequencies of several generations. Born in the town of Mysłowice (hence, the band’s name), guitarist and singer Artur Rojek started the band at the beginning of the 1990s. Its music attracted the attention of the British producer Ian Harris (who had worked with such legends as Joy Division and New Order), and he helped the band record their debut album. Myslovitz’s sound brims with energy and melancholy. Its expansive, atmospheric arrangements of hazy guitars, percussion and electric keyboards create an intimate feeling of emotional depth. Dream Merchants is a tribute to the music and poetry of Artur Rojek. It is an ensemble work for 8 performers (6 girls, 2 boys) and 3 musicians (piano, percussion, double bass), all dressed in white, who blend in a collective soul and body.
The next festival evening offered a change of direction from meditative daydreaming back to the harsh sights of reality. The production of the Jan Kochanowski Powszechny Theatre in the town of Radom, I Miss Home, written and directed by Radosław B. Maciąg, offers a deep, unsentimental but loving look at ordinary life in a provincial former industrial town in Poland. The play is structured around the universal dramaturgical trope of the estranged son coming back home to his dysfunctional family, which dramatizes the powerful grip of the past and the inescapability of one’s own roots, but with a local Polish touch. The impressive naturalistic set design of Dominika Nikiel recreates with cinematic detail and precision the shabby interior of an old house, which looks as if conserved from the socialist era. The plot follows a day in the life of a family of six (grandmother, mother, father, two sons and the wife of one of them) on the brink of disintegration after the inexplicable suicide attempt of the father. All the six actors give an excellent and truthful performance in full command of the verbose dialogue, in which confession often rapidly escalates to blame. It is a dramatic but at times very funny story, where people are always complaining that there is never time to talk and listen to each other, while at the same time they never stop doing exactly that—talking and talking, listening and listening—but with no feeling whatsoever of being understood. Sounds familiar, right?
The highlight of the festival program was the new staging by the internationally famous and critically acclaimed Belgian director Luk Perceval of one of the modern classics: Eugene O’Neill’s disturbing masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, produced by the Stary Theatre in Krakow. As all theatre connoisseurs know, this play is also a story about a dysfunctional family, and it is considered one of the best ever written. This time, though, Luk Perceval has condensed the famous one-day plot into approximately two very intense hours. He has also stripped it of any naturalistic detail. The play’s instructions describe in lavish detail the home of the Tyrones, but, instead of this, the viewers see shifting planes of emptiness. A vast white screen, creeping waves of fog and a lot of air. No house furniture—only one worn-out armchair center stage. This play’s action involves a lot of drinking of liquor, but the only glasses on the stage are never in the actors’ hands. They stand by the piano, filled with water, and only the family maid sometimes makes gentle rounds with her fingers on their rims, creating ghostly musical sounds. The acting is a tour-de-force of pure presence and energy. Instead of psychological verisimilitude the actors play with sharp, expressive gestures—sudden eruptions of long contained emotions. The actress Małgorzata Zawadzka stands out in the demanding role of the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone. She delivers her long monologues in cascading crescendos with the rhythm and sound of her voice expressing something truer than the words. Her somnambulistic frenetic dance is the overarching image of this new reading of the play by Perceval which puts the stress on the universal human, all too human, theme of addiction as avoidance of pain and escape from truth.
The final festival evening for me was with a theatre show based on the works of one of my favorite contemporary writers: David Foster Wallace. The brilliant and reclusive American author had become a cult not only for his forbidding masterpiece Infinite Jest, but also for his suicide by hanging at the age of 46. Foster Wallace’s writing is famous for its deep insights, complexity and labyrinthine trains of thought. Overall, it may not seem suitable for the stage or the screen, even though it has sometimes been taken there. The director Yana Ross with the National Theatre of Vilnius, Lithuania, offers her own theatre reading of his famous essay Consider the Lobster, which in the form of a review for a food festival tackles heavy questions about consumption, greed and killing. The performance is in the postmodern Brechtian style of non-illusionistic presentation, direct engagement with the audience, and mixture of genres with the earnest aim of inciting a discussion on empathy. At times it worked, but at times it seemed to me that the show subverted its own agenda with too much and too calculated self-irony.
*Asen Terziev (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the National Academy for Theatre & Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. His interests are in theatre theory, history and theatre management. He is the author of two books: Theatricality—The Language of Performance (2012) and The Drama and English Romanticism—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley (2019). He has many publications (reviews, theoretical articles, interviews, translations) in various specialized outlets for theatre and culture. He is a co-founder and main coordinator of the Via Fest Foundation.
Copyright © 2025 Asen Terzie
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
