Finnegans W/Fake is a sound journey through the history of Poland. Katarzyna Kalwat and Wojtek Blecharz extract a language from the famous James Joyce novel that, stripped of emotional literalness, creates theatrical music. Once again, the actors who use their bodies as instruments play a significant role in the director's artistic explorations.

The strings of meaning touched by the authors go far back to tribal times – the sources of our current social order. The words create surprising meanings and the dialogues sound like echoes of overheard conversations, philosophical disputes, biblical verses, intimate gossip and love confessions. Many surprising contents listened to between breaths remain in memory, some surprise with aggressive overtones, others, put together in an original way by the playwright Benjamin Bukowski, entertain with contemporary references.

We invite you to an unusual theatre experience combining virtuoso music by a world-renowned composer and literature that invariably fascinates the enthusiasts of Joyce’s work. The show is especially relevant today when communication and language do not have to be synonymous. Everything is happening live in front of us. Musicians and actors together make a theatrical attempt to realise the vision of a multilingual universe dreamed by James Joyce in the summer of 1939.

Joyce claimed that a proper understanding of his work – due to its rebellious nature – could not take place not until hundred years afterwards. With our project: first a performance, then a full-scale spectacle, we respond to the writer’s challenge in accordance with the contemporary aesthetics of a work of art.

This programme note comes from the website of the Polish Theatre in the Underground

Tickets: Polish Theatre in the Underground