Wow factor – Hunter S Thompson meets Sex Pistols
Wow. Dorota Maslowska’s new play A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians starts off with a really big whoosh. Two drug-fuelled and vodka-soaked individuals, the ghastly motormouth Parcha and the heavily-pregnant Dzina, hit the road, commandeering cars and zooming across the Polish landscape, tearing up tarmac and downing every drug the can get their hands on.
Written in a truly unique style that feels like a weird, wild and wonderful cross between Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols, this play is a feverish mix of hippie and punk, vulgarity and poetry, the modern and the post-modern. Phew. But, underneath the glittering façade of the high-octane lingo, what is the play about?
To begin with, the two poor, Polish-speaking Romanians are clearly not all that they seem. Gradually, despite their mad antics, it emerges that they aren’t poor and they aren’t Romanian either. They do speak Polish, of course, but Lisa Goldman and Paul Sirett’s excellently idiomatic translation means we can be in no doubt about what they are saying. In fact, they are a pair of nice and harmless individuals who have met at a fancy-dress party - an “extreme poverty” do – and taken off in an irresistibly manic haze of drug-induced euphoria. The amazing thing about this tall tale is that Maslowska breaks all the rules by starting her play on an epic high. The clever thing is that she brings her two characters down very gradually – and reveals their characters and their true identities with equal skill.
In the process, her play paints a vivid picture of Poland today. It is a society in which everyone is so unsure of their changing identity that they adopt whatever casual fantasy that comes along – even if it means slumming it and behaving outrageously. It is also a society that is paranoid about strangers, deeply racist, utterly selfish and unfriendly. Here, capitalism and greed have clearly destroyed the social fabric.
Maslowska conjures up this lurid nightmare of injustice by using a rich verbal tapestry that offers up a cornucopia of linguistic devices, from puns and parodies to deliberate grammatical mistakes, syntactical anomalies and parodic elements. Throughout the text, breathes the eastern European tradition of surrealism and criticism. There’s even a moment when the piece flips over into dreamtime.
Lisa Goldman’s production is a bit static for a road movie, but her designer Miriam Buether, delivers a superbly atmospheric stage set, which exudes poverty and paranoia in almost equal measures. As Parch and Dzina, Andrew Tiernan and Andrea Riseborough lead a cast that positively exult in the chance to play with funny voices and regional accents. They also deliver the punch at the end of the play when the loneliness and lovelessness of the main characters turns around to slap you in the face.
Soho Theatre should be congratulated for serving up this dark gem. This is international theatre at its most contemporary and an exciting work that screams of the now.
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.
Maslowska offers a bitterly comic take on post-Communist Poland, presenting it as a world where new wealth fails to take notice of the destitution and where identity is established by differentiation from undesirable strangers. This makes the black joke at the play's centre particularly apt. Having pretended to be poverty-stricken aliens, the pair become the victims of their own fiction as they emerge from their drug high into cold, uncooperative reality. Even Parcha's face becomes a millstone: far from convincing people that he's the amiable TV priest, it makes them suspicious that he's a wanted villain.
Lisa Goldman (who translated the script with Paul Sirett) directs this powerful English premiere. Played out on a bleak iron set, the piece unfolds like an unholy cross between a road movie and a twisted fable. The production succeeds in imparting a vivid, atmospheric distinctiveness to each of the episodes, from the chaotically hilarious ride with a wealthy dipso (Ishia Bennison) to the charity-free zone of a soulless road-side diner. Andrew Tiernan brings an engaging, desperate energy to the role of Parcha, and the excellent Andrea Riseborough unnerves to brilliant effect as his psychologically precarious and terminally lost sidekick.
