A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians

Synopsis

‘So there was this party, that’s a fact. We got a little f**ked up. I understand that that’s when I met you. But something was off with those drugs.’ Dzina and Parcha are on a trip and they’re coming down fast. They don’t know how they met, or where they’re going. All they know is that they’ve got to find their way back. Exploding with warped humour and twisted storytelling, this is an astonishing new play from Poland’s most original new voice.

Our Review:

10 March 2008

There is something genuinely weird about this play, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, by 24-year-old Dorota Maslowska, in which two whacked-out hoodlums make a havoc-strewn progress across Poland and jump aboard a coal barge bound for Romania. She, Dzina, is a glue-sniffing pregnant prostitute; he, Parcha, is a violently psychotic actor famous for playing a priest in a television soap series.

Maslowska’s text has been translated by director Lisa Goldman and writer Paul Sirett, but retains a grim post-Communist European grittiness about it that makes this curious and dreamlike travelogue hit you like a teenage version of Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers (itself a source for Ben Elton’s satirical novel and play, Popcorn).

Every time you think, during the play’s noisy, brutal 90 minutes, that this is too much, or indeed too little, some striking detail of aspiration or cultural reference will pull you up short and...

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