“Country House”

The stage design for the Krakow performance had three main features: a wardrobe, a rubbish cart and a ‘funeral machine’. There were four persons in the wardrobe: Dyapanazy Nibek, cheated on by his wife Anastazja, and his two rivals – the steward Ignacy Kozdroń, Anastazja’s actual lover, and Jęzor Pasiukowski, a poet dreaming of erotic conquests – as well as Aneta, a governess who was to take care of Anastazja and Dyapanazy’s daughters after the death of their mother. In the rubbish cart, loaned from the Municipal Waste Collection Company, there were the Orphans – Zosia and Amelka, summoning the spirit of their Mother and making derogatory comments on what was happening on stage. The ‘funeral machine’, or an old chest on a platform (bringing a catafalque to mind), was closely related to the figure of Mother. A character that connected these three, largely disconnected, areas of action was Maszejko, a footman and a gravedigger who also carried “many other functions” and never parted with his top hat and a black umbrella with holes in it, in the Art Informel style.