Barbican Centre, Pit Theatre

Booking is essential. Please phone the Barbican Box Office on 0844 243 0753 Paul Allain discusses radical reinterpretations of classic drama, opera, novels, and contemporary plays by the Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna. Jarzyna is General and Artistic Director of TR Warszawa and is known for his stage adaptations which cut across various genres and media. He has directed productions based on a wide range of sources, from the plays of Shakespeare, to the novels of Mann and Dostoyevsky and the films of Pasolini. His adaptation of Nosferatu will be at the Barbican from 31 October to 3 November.

Grzegorz Jarzyna is General and Artistic Director of TR Warszawa, Warsaw’s most prestigious theatre. He has directed over twenty theatre and opera productions, which have been staged, among others, at the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam and the Barbican in London. Jarzyna has staged and radically reinterpreted classic drama (Tropical Craze according to Witkiewicz, and Magnetism of the Heart based on Aleksander Fredro's Maiden Vows), he has adapted novels (Mann's Doctor Faustus, and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot), directed contemporary plays (Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains, Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, and Dorota Masłowska’s No Matter How Hard We Tried) and operas (Mozart's Così fan tutte, and Prokofiev’s Gambler after the novel by Dostoyevsky). His recent adaptations include 2007: Macbeth after Shakespeare; T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T, based on the film Theorem by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Giovanni based on Mozart's Don Giovanni and Moliere's Don Juan, a production melding dramatic theatre and opera. 

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and specialises in performance theory, Eastern theatre forms, and Eastern European theatre. In collaboration with the Gardzienice Theatre Association he published Gardzienice: Polish Theatre in Transition (1997). He is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (2000), author of The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki (2000), and co-writer, with Jen Harvie, of the Companion to Theatre and Performance (2006). He has since published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project. Most recently he has hosted Professor Richard Schechner at Kent for a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, and has just published the DVD/booklet Andrei Droznin's Physical Actor Training (2011).

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