Wroclaw Mime Theatre named after Henryk Tomaszewski
Apart from the novel’s plot and natural light, which was a major source of inspiration, the starting point for building the structure of the performance was the concept of a journey by ship. The performance began and ended on the narrative shore, while the climax took place somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Dramaturgically, we also worked on finding the brightest and darkest moments, both in the context of the hope, goodness and love present in individual scenes, and in relation to the rhythms of nature, which was incorporated into the script not as a backdrop to the characters’ actions, but as a kind of non-human actor.
Miszka, the stage manager Kasia’s dog, appears in the performance. For a long time, Miszka, her scene partner Janek Kochanowski and I searched for solutions for lighting their shared scene. In the end, we decided on muted, warm backlighting, a separate playing area for Miszka (we were very keen to avoid training her), and raising the light levels above the first rows of the audience, because Miszka enjoyed contact with the spectators, and looking attentively at their smiling faces clearly made her feel more comfortable on stage. We also took care to measure very precisely the amount of smoke in the scenes before and after her appearance, as well as the sound levels and the lighting at the
curtain call.