Nothing! It's just that nothing... because nothing, that's exactly what a person does all his life. The little man stands, sits, talks... and nothing. A person sits on a tree - and nothing. To work? But yes! As if not! Of course! Banker! Bančička... a monster, a whale! Hmmm. Thirty two years! And what? Nothing! It leaked between the fingers. It will overflow. You won't catch a second like that. It will overflow. He will run away. And what am I? I am a certain number of seconds that have passed. Result: Nothing. Nothing.
The words from the book by the writer Witold Gombrowicz probably best describe the legacy and philosophy of the production Kosmos, which was premiered by the National Theater in Prague just recently on the stage of the New Scene. The production team around the Slovak director, a graduate of the Brno JAMU and at the same time the artistic director of HaDivadl Ivan Buraj, brought to Prague a dramatization of the disturbing novel Kosmos by this original Polish author. The entire performance, according to the book model, takes place in the head of the central character Witold, and for this the director used live camera footage, which during the production is projected onto a large screen placed above or in front of a wooden house in the spirit of the folk architecture of the Polish town of Zakopane. The viewer thus has the opportunity to glimpse into Witold's inner world not only through the monologues taking place between his younger alter ego and his older ex post double, but also thanks to the illusion of characters that the protagonist perceives as if from the perspective of a view directly from his head. The story, which begins with an essentially banal plot, is about two friends who stay in a boarding house in Zakopane during the summer and find a sparrow hanging in a bush, later resulting in an exciting exposition of the deep crisis of communication with the outside world that the human world has fallen into. And despite the fact that Gombrowicz wrote the novel already in the sixties of the last century, it is a more than current topic. With their concept, the directors used the available means to the maximum extent in order to convey to the audience this philosophy of the relationship between the inner and outer world. In the course of the storyline, the form, which may be incomprehensible to the viewer at the beginning, slowly begins to fold like a Rubik's cube, where individual moves make sense and make Witold's world more and more comprehensible. It is important not to give up at the very beginning and get carried away by the protagonist's subjective view of the world until the end. Only then can the viewer, together with him, survive the apocalypse of the crumbling world, its subsequent revival and purification from rebirth. At this point, the acting performance of the young actor Matyáš Řezníček in the role of Witold, who was very convincing in this challenging psychological character, must also be highlighted, but also the performance of Ondřej Pavelka, who in the role of Leon acted comically and over the top, exactly as he would from this characters expected. It is gratifying that even our "first scene", whose dramaturgy sometimes has a reputation for a certain reserve, gives space to young creators and alternative titles. For the viewer who expects a little more from the theater than just light entertainment, the production Kosmos is exactly what will surely fulfill his ideas about how to spend an evening in a useful and enriching way.
Text and photo: Vladimír Dubeň