Writer: Kata Wéber
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Pieces of a Woman is described on Dublin Theatre Festival’s website as a “cinematic stage play”, and it was more than slightly enigmatic as to what this specifically referred to. Perhaps used as a means to entice people who saw the 2020 English-language film based on the play, we soon see what it is – the first act is filmed almost entirely behind the façade of an apartment in modern-day Warsaw, in one continuous shot, and projected onto the front of the building. Our characters speak entirely in Polish, with surtitles on a screen above the stage. The scene is that of Maya having a homebirth with her boyfriend, Lars, and a midwife she has just met, Ewa. Having seen neither the film nor someone giving birth, I am in no position to comment on the veracity of this scene, but it was undeniably powerful, brutal, delicately done, and stylistically innovative.
After this harrowing and beguiling opening, it was natural to expect a great deal from the rest of the story – where would it pick up, how would it look and feel, what would be the state of Maya and Lars’ relationship? Unfortunately, it doesn’t follow through, and we slip into overly familiar family play territory. The outer and inner walls are dismounted, and the apartment space we only knew in shaky hand-held camera images is revealed to us in its entirety. This was Maya’s mother’s apartment, and she is hosting her daughters, their partners, and her niece for dinner, to view her new décor – “home staging”, as she repeatedly calls it. Tensions and traumas, both childhood and contemporary, are revealed throughout, along with the daughters’ disastrous taste in men, and while much of this is good, it is frustrating to have such a traditional scene after as radical an introduction as this.
The surtitles aren’t a problem, typically, until they are – though the actors all do a very fine job in communicating beyond the relatively limited translations we see, they sometimes lag, or can make it confusing to understand who says what. Music is used to heighten emotion and tension at various stages, but what would do so more effectively would the narrowing of the script – none of it is bad, but the effectiveness and relevance of some of it is lost in translation from Poland to Ireland, and trimming it would keep the emotional core of the play more in view.
The ambition of this project is to be commended all round; not only for bringing foreign-language theatre to Dublin and being innovative with its staging, but also for putting such brutal and rarely discussed topics on the stage. Dublin would be very well served by much more of this kind of thinking, but a more judicious approach to script editing would have rendered this an unforgettable night.
Runs Until 11th Oct 2025.
