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“The staging of The Crazy Locomotive by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (or Witkacy as he named himself) demands a lot of artistic courage on the part of the artists. A play without a thesis in two acts and an epilogue written by Witkacy under the influence of his avant-garde programme entitled An Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in Theatre rejects any type of a priori performative solution and takes us on a ride to unknown and untrodden ways. On the one hand, Witkacy’s artistic ideas in the time we live in are a curiosity of a special kind, but they are worthy of being reconsidered from the point of view of a modern artist as the author is one of the 20th century artists who managed to articulate his reformist ideas with all theoretical clarity and consequently realise them in practice.

The performance of The Crazy Locomotive takes us on a ride with Witkacy’s steam locomotive, which is in fact a metaphor of theatre and life that after almost one hundred years seems to be regaining its exciting core. We come aboard the locomotive just before it is set in motion. The fireman Mikołay Wojtaszek and the engineer Zygfried Tengier are saying goodbye to their fiancee Julia and wife Sophia. The Crazy Locomotive may begin like a performance in the scope of psychological realism, portraying the subtle relationships which here and there resonate in unrefined cues. It shows the image of a captured, false life, but at the same time it reveals the image of theatre in which the tension increases and needs to be released by the crazy locomotive in order to develop its metaphysical potential.” Eva Kraševec

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Main programme

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