Pieces of a Woman
O’Reilly Theatre
★★★★☆
“Just promise you won’t give birth without me,” says Lars, a soon-to-be father stepping outside his Warsaw apartment for a cigarette. It’s a confounding decision moments from the delivery of a daughter that dominates the opening scene of Kata Wéber’s play for Poland’s TR Warszawa company: are we watching the harmless day-to-day rhythms of a couple’s life or a man who walks out on his wife a little too easily?
The audience see the smokers’ porch for themselves. They see inside the apartment via director Kornél Mundruczó’s live video projection. It is a meticulously choreographed dance that depicts Lars and his pregnant wife, Maja, in close-up as she goes from bath to bed during an uncomfortable labour.
Theirs is an enjoyable contrast: Justyna Wasilewska’s Maja, who tries to rehang a shower curtain while she’s in labour, is a stressed, impatient perfectionist; Dobromir Dymecki’s Lars is disorganised, an emotional goof who has missed all his antenatal classes.
Anyone who has seen Mundruczó’s gruelling film version of Pieces of a Woman will already know this is home birth presented as horror. A midwife (Monika Frajczyk) is soon picking up warning signs, but her client refuses hospital, Asher Goldschmidt’s music surging with each contraction.
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In the sad tragedy that follows, the removal of the exteriors of Monika Pormale’s apartment set seems an apt metaphor: Maja and Lars’s walls are literally tumbling down. But there is a double meaning in the scene change, as Wéber’s play moves into the complicated world of Maja’s family, especially her status-conscious mother (Magdalena Kuta), whose preoccupation with surfaces and perceptions has found an outlet in home stagings. Anything that looks out of place can be rearranged.
Here in her home, months after the delivery of Maja’s baby went terribly wrong, a family delicately tries to discuss how to grieve (some more obviously than others: “I lost a dog once,” says Maja’s bumptious brother-in-law, played by an excellent Sebastian Pawlak).
Maja’s mother has her own suggestion for coping, one she thinks will shut the door on this part of their lives, as she encourages Maja to spend the family’s savings on a lawsuit against her midwife.
Mundruczó’s staging may impress with the dazzle of contemporary theatre, but Wéber’s play is actually old-school, its concealed letters, up-for-grabs family finances and high-tech spectacle really the stuff of 19th-century melodrama.
What anchor it are its knockout performances; while Maja’s family reminisce and disagree, Lars is unravelling, jittery with drug relapse, and mourning in his own way. Less clear is Maja, written as initially reluctant to deal with her grief but later seen as the most insightful about its unebbing presence.
Nonetheless, a magnificent cast marshals the play towards a conclusion that confirms Wéber’s story as being about mothers and daughters, some of their pieces reassembled.
Pieces of a Woman was at the O’Reilly Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
