The new work by one of the most striking Swedish artists working where the stage meets the visual arts, being the third one produced at Warsaw’s Nowy Theatre, brings to life Fag Fighters: a gay hit squad, known from the works of Karol Radziszewski. His hallmark is pink balaclavas, with the first his grandmother sewed. Yet the actors’ hands wield baseball bats and carry a toolbox filled with instruments designed for the most elaborate tortures. In three morbidly funny episodes that nonetheless have blood gushing by the hectolitre, Fag Fighters teach a bitter lesson to self-satisfied corporate rats, philistines, and artists (a tongue-in-cheek cruel self-portrait of Öhrn himself), presenting their own homosexual vision of our society. What we receive in result includes a cruel quiz on Poland’s gay/queer history inflicted upon a self-satisfied and to all appearances gay-friendly family, a reckoning with a self-important corporate boss who starts from spluttering with platitudes, but then proceeds to spluttering blood and his own teeth. In the third picture, the Swedish dramatist puts himself at the gunpoint of criticism. Quartered and laid out on a sacrificial table from a renowned manufacturer, his compatriot, he bids Poland and life farewell forever. 

Sparing no one, the production carps at the conservative backwater. Though filled with cruelty that at first seems unacceptable, you watch Phobia with a perversely guilty pleasure. They say that the Swede’s style is cartoon-like, and Phobia gives you a representative sample of that. Hidden under monstrous masks, the artists with their distorted voices must resort to an entirely different acting, and they are wonderful. You are not going to recognise Magdalena Popławska, Ewelina Pankowska, Piotr Polak, Wojciech Kalarus, and Jan Sobolewski. So what? Or perhaps you will actually realise who is who. Whichever is true for you, it’s going to be superb fun. And horror.

---

Photos by Maurycy Stankiewicz