A box office hit, which many critics hail this season’s most important production, and a must-have of Poland’s prime festivals. Several years after The Secret Life of the Friedmans, at Kraków’s Ludowy Theatre, Marcin Wierzchowski presents a fact-based tale of a destructive home and a destructive though potent love. The script penned down by Justyna Bilik and Wierzchowski transports us to the Dłubnia village near Kraków in the 1920s. The eponymous heroine eagerly visits the city to pose for Young Poland painters. She is, however expected to give up the practice upon marrying Maciej Paluch, local shoemaker. Initial love dies under the weight of dramatic events and daily drab drudgery. Paluch turns into a monster. Battered, his wife – defying the customs of the time – decides to fight for herself. Yet, six days before the divorce case opens, she is murdered. The local river washes ashore fragments of her dismembered body.

A rare guest at the Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy Festival, the Gdańsk-based Wybrzeże Theatre has recently grown to one of Poland’s foremost stages, and Zośka the Beautiful stands as a pinnacle of its achievements. A chamber piece, yet potent through its intensity and impact. The emotional density of the narrative makes Wierzchowski’s production compared to the finest films of Wojciech Smarzowski. Lingering long after the curtain falls, it won’t let you disengage the heroine’s story from the (literally) painfully contemporary reality. 

It is so as Zośka the Beautiful conjures images of women’s hell: of the victims of daily violence perpetrated behind closed doors, hidden from any but the closest eyes. Which is why the artistic team dedicate their work to these women, the nameless victims.

Consummately performed by Wybrzeże actors (keep an eye on the phenomenal roles of Karolina Kowalska and Piotr Biedroń), it is a treatise about guilt and punishment, bathed in mud and sweat. Extraordinary.

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Photos by Natalia Kabanow