The 2020 Netflix film based on this Polish hit by Kata Wéber and directed – like the play – by her husband, Kornél Mundruczó, shockingly opened with a 23-minute single shot sequence of a home birth that goes disastrously wrong. It won an Oscar nomination for Vanessa Kirby as the traumatised mother.
Here the sequence is projected on to a screen behind which three actors and a camera operator enact it live. Justyna Wasilewska’s Maja labours away, screaming in and out of focus like the victim in an amateur horror flick, while her clownishly incompetent husband (Dobromir Dymecki) pops out front every now and then for a stressy cigarette break or a frantic attempt to get a phone signal to call an ambulance.
The dialogue, and even the apartment setting, are so far pretty much identical in both play and film, but this feels so much more nightmarish. Audience members have fainted. The smell of coffee brewing, as Lars ignores Maja’s protests that it makes her sick, provoked a wave of nausea in me. Then suddenly, everything changes. The screen is whisked away, and we’re transported forward six months to one of those grim family reunions that have been a staple of western theatre since Ibsen and Chekhov.
For the next two hours, we’re in the apartment of Maja’s dementing mother (a deceptively dotty Magdalena Kuta), where a duck roasts in the oven, and shame, trauma and family rivalries run riot among a jumble of stuffed birds and animals that have defied a valiant attempt to modernise and declutter. In the tradition of the best reunion dramas, this is about so much more than a single family, while remaining utterly specific and focused, in the hands of a world-class ensemble from Poland’s TR Warszawa.
What starts as tragedy morphs into the blackest of black comedies via a smoky surrealism, as Maja strips off her clothes and acts out her carefully concealed trauma in the bath with a glove sponge from her childhood, her oblivious family roistering outside. The changes of tempo and mood are nimble and surprising, sweeping towards a deeply moving resolution in the stubborn power of love between mothers and daughters. When the magnificent Wasilewska bursts into song at the end, with her mother’s gnarled hands pounding away at an old piano, everything for just a moment seems survivable.
Pieces of a Woman is at Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 23 May
