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Polish Theatre Kiel

In 1983 a group of Polish actors, who had fled to the West after the imposition of martial law in Poland, founded the Polish Theatre in Kiel. After the first performance in Polish it was decided to perform in German in order to reach a larger audience. But when the majority of the actors then dispersed again, the actor Tadeusz Galia, who had played in theatres in Wrocław and Opole until 1982, took over as the artistic director. To this day, the Polish Theatre in Kiel has staged 87 plays by Eastern European and Western authors. Galia and his team are not interested in superficial entertainment, but rather in fundamental themes of human existence. A threat to the private theatre posed by a change of landlord has been averted at the last moment.

The Polish Theatre Kiel, August 2018

Porta Polonica 2018

As early as the first minute Tadeusz Galia in the role of Gimpel brings tears to one's eyes. As soon as he wakes up on his straw bed, he stands in front of the audience with his long felt boots, patched linen trousers and a waistcoat knitted from coarse sheep's wool. His face alternates between deep shame at having to make a public confession to the audience about his life and sheer despair about his own botched existence. From the very first moment we are caught up by the language, the fact that he does not hide his Polish accent, and his sometimes frugal, at other times sweeping gestures; not to speak of his changing emotions and moods: fondness, affection and indignation, hope and sorrow, accusation and forgiveness, self-deception and insight, melancholy and fate, which often alternate within a single sentence or turn into the opposite. Gimpel's monologue, which he delivers even while eating and smoking a pipe, lasts exactly one hour, when the audience's perceptible consternation turns into enthusiastic applause.

The three by two metre stage set depicts the corner of a barn made of coarse wooden beams that are sealed with clay and straw. The milking stool with a straw sack, on which Gimpel takes a seat from time to time, the wagon wheel, pitchfork, saw, axe, bowl and jug depict the place he found near a peasant's farm during his travels. His costume has been designed by Meike Neumann, the set by Galia, and the director is Jutta Ziemke. Galia discovered Gimpel (which is in the repertoire of the Polish Theatre Kiel with two other plays in the summer and autumn season 2018), in 1981 and translated it from Polish into German. Anyone who knows the American translation published by Rowohlt will not notice any differences. The first performance took place in 1985 in the Molfsee Open Air Museum near Kiel.

Since then Galia has played Gimpel so often that he stopped counting after 1,500 performances. He plays it at guest appearances in other privately-run theatres all over Germany, at events, in barns, schools, retirement and nursing homes and even in front of mentally handicapped people, and the subsequent discussions with the audience show that this also works excellently with the latter. Nevertheless, the play has not become routine. In a personal conversation before the performance at the Polish Theatre in Kiel, Galia admitted that he was still terribly nervous before every performance, and he wondered every time whether he would succeed yet again in bringing Gimpel back to life. Each time, the emotions and images arise anew, the way the story is told and the mood it creates are slightly different. At the second to last of the seven shows at 8 pm on Fridays and Saturdays, only twenty of the forty-five seats are occupied. However, it is pleasing to note that the audience is mixed and includes school pupils and students.