Lazzi’s treatment of Witkacy  

Rather than perform one of Witkacy’s own plays, Lazzi are interested in creating a collage of the man and his work, an autobiographical sketching in the stylistic spirit of Witkacy himself. The life and work of Witkacy are portrayed not in a linear or realistic way, but in the ‘absurd’ manner of an abstract painting. The piece explores, and attempts to play ‘pure form’. The form of the piece offers images through which an understanding of the man can be derived. Discontinuities, parody, silliness, intensity. The unknown is full of surprises.

Cast of Characters

Witkacy : Sandy Grierson
Direktor/Psychiatrist/Witkacy : David WW Johnstone

Witkacy Idiota: an outline

Witkacy Idiota is a performance piece in three sections, each played in a different ‘form’.  

Act One, 'Surreal Therapy', directly influenced by Witkacy’s play The Madman and the Nun, appears to offer the audience a scene of the young Witkacy and his psychiatrist in a mental asylum: the sarcastic psychiatrist ‘treats’ the young Witkacy, penetrating his memory and dissecting his legacy in a series of visually charged images incorporating surreal physicality and absurd vocals. The young Witkacy responds to psychoanalysis with 'patches and scraps': his behaviour is fragmented, frenzied, foolish, broken, jerky, crazy. He is an embodiment of the experimentation process, of the constant search for a Pure Form. He is a crazy locomotive running off the rails. The Direktor of this experiment (or the psychiatrist) might personify a sly Witkacy now returning to us from the dead, moving with a sense of retrospective wisdom and simplicity, a Witkacy perhaps laughing at his earlier incarnation. 

In Act Two (intermezzo), 'Tropical Fantasy', we move from the asylum to the Tropics: we witness the nonsensical delirium of the senses and the ecstatic happiness of drug addiction and experimentation, revelled in before the reality of the First World War.