Polish Theatre Kiel

Staging two to three performances a year also means constantly searching for new plays and texts that can be produced with as little human and financial resources as possible. From the very beginning, the theatre has made it its mission to introduce plays by Polish and other Eastern European authors. But the repertoire also includes less familiar or newly found Western literature. The team is not interested in light entertainment, but in dealing with questions of human existence in a realistic manner. Now it is becoming more and more difficult to find new plays by young authors, complains Galia, because not only the quality must be right, but also the author royalties and the agency fees must be affordable. The original support association Initiative Polnisches Theater Kiel e.V., which sponsors the theatre, is still working today to win a regular and committed audience that gets free admission to previews for an inexpensive annual subscription. 

If you take a look at the programme over the past six years, you will find an exciting mixture of authors and world premieres alongside classics, unknown works and plays from Poland.[5] The Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans (*1965) was featured with her relationship drama "Gift" in 2012, and once again in 2015 with a story of the biblical Judas, played by Galia. In December 2012, a comedy about the famous lying Baron von Münchhausen, "The Flight of the Roasted Duck" by the Georgian author Grigori Gorin (1940-2000), was staged with twelve characters. In 2013 two classics were presented: "The Maids" by the French playwright and novelist Jean Genet (1910-1986) and the 1983 comedy "Halpern and Johnson" by the London playwright Lionel Goldstein (*1935). In 2014 Jutta Ziemke, Tadeusz Galia, Gina Tantow, Kristina Greif and Natalie Baron appeared in the play "Kammerjagd" by the actor and director Andreas Hüttner (*1969) from Wittenberg. Hüttner lives in Kiel and had written the play for the actors in a collaboration lasting months. At the centre of the drama is a retired teacher named Gertraude and her Polish neighbour. Gertraude sees in her acquaintance nothing more than a handyman from the East who is only good enough to do the dirty work. Everything culminates in a scandal at a birthday party with friends. 

In April 2015 and 2016 respectively, the programme included two-person plays. In the contemporary drama "Enigma" by the French-Belgian novelist, playwright and film director Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (*1960), Galia and Friederichs played out an interview between a provincial journalist and an eccentric literary prizewinner, which turned into a duel of words about life and death. By contrast, "Boston" by the Danish author Kaj Nissen (*1941), was a desperate dialogue between an aging married couple, played by Ziemke and Galia, about a love grown cold and its revival. In August 2015 Galia appeared in the play "Königlicher Totengräber" ("The Royal Gravedigger") by Jerzy Łukosz, a playwright, essayist, literary critic and translator born in 1958 in Wroclaw: here he played a Polish emigrant who is forced to struggle to scrape a living in Germany as a cremator. The guest worker ad the intellectual played by Galia and Astrit Geci, are also "emigrants" in the eponymous play by Sławomir Mrożek. Mrożek, a representative of the Absurd Theatre, himself went into political exile to France in 1968 and then lived in Mexico for six years before returning to Poland in 1996. In September 2017, this production was followed by Václav Havel's (1936-2011) one-act play "Protest", depicting his experiences as a politically persecuted writer. In January 2018, the play "Bombshells" by the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith (*1962) - it depicts six portraits of women between the ages of 15 and 57 -  was performed with great success by the acting student Oleksandra Zapolska, followed by Antje Schlaich, who returned to the Polish Theatre Kiel after five years.