2018-06-22 18:30:00
Red Dwarf - Small stage
Theatre
Born in 1979, Michał Walczak trained as a director at Warsaw’s Theatre Academy. Building
on the tragi-comical rough-and-tumble between the sexes, with the cruelty and humor of
mutual misunderstanding, Walczak is considered one of the most prolific Polish playwrights
of the younger generation.
Walczak made his debut with The Sandbox in 2001, in which he conveyed the story of a
man’s and a woman’s inability to articulate emotions, and their human need for love. In the
play, a young man addicted to television and all-things Batman, struggles as he is only able to
express his emotions through the language of the cinema. A young girl which appears on
stage alongside the masculine character is nostalgically attached to her doll, bringing the toy
with her wherever she goes. The characters’ paths cross in a sandbox. There they discover that
with the memory of childhood innocence, comes the ability to communicate, and the comical
confrontation and a battle of the sexes unfolds from here.
The Sandbox was staged at 11 different theaters across Poland and the US, and translated into
German, English, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian. Walczak's dramas was also staged by theatre
directors including: Tomasz Man, Paweł Miśkiewicz, Jarosław Tumidajski, Giovanny
Castellanos and were translated into English, German, Lithuanian, Italian, French, Hungarian,
Serbian, Latvian, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Belorussian
and Estonian.
