Битеф

sul from Under the Volcano lives in a neglected, weed-grown garden; it is no accident that while in a delirious trance, he sees the words, real or unreal: Le gusta este jardin? Que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destuyan! Love, the only thing that could save him, is the Consul's paradise lost. And yet, engaged in his struggle, sinking- in the inferno of mescal, he strives to fight the inevitable, the necessary, fate. A human beetle, he stirs his legs on the ideally smooth, slippery walls of the glass cover in which he has been imprisoned. Only his longing and his acute pain evoke the Arcadian scenery in which the Consul would like to live with Yvonne. Grzegorzewski's Garden is a cemetery of dying European culture, a beautiful city which has been deserted and turned wilderness, a suspect labyrinth of penny gaffs, cafés chantants, low class cabarets - a night city. It is the garden of obscure earthly delights where beauty and love appear in the brilliance of their negation, contorted in a caricatural way, fixed in a ghastly grimace. In the dusky background of the stage, we see tall, opalescent façades of narrow buildings (Amsterdam?), reminiscent of exotic trees or of the slim fifes of strange instruments emanating magically musical silence. Near the left wing, there is a light door, half-Indian, half in the style of mountaineers' cottages. To the right, deeper into the stage, there is a rotating door leading from the wing. It is a converted case of a grand piano, the gist of Grzegorzewski's magic gift for converting objects. When converted, an object, placed within new references and relations, emanates a new meaning. Between the left wing and the centre of the stage, we see a black arm the huge blade of a saw. When the show begins, there is also a gymnastic or dancing apparatus, a strange Procrustean bed from a pantograph on the left. Part I, called Movable Background, is a peculiar overture of visual symbols. Grzegorzewski re-interprets Lowry’s vision and permeates the Consul's vision with his own. The scenery is reminiscent of the night city from Bloomusalem, Grzegorzewski's production based on Joyce's Ulysses, and the Consul (Marek Walczewski), all dressed in black, and with dark glasses on, who sneaks across the stage, catches on the arm of the black saw, and runs on the spot, is like Bloom and Joseph К from Kafka's