Väikeses häärberis

In a Small Manor Mystery / comedy / drama   Director: Ingomar Vihmar Author: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Set designer: Illimar Vihmar Translator: Hendrik Lindepuu Sound designer: Ingomar Vihmar Lighting designer: Ivar Piterskihh   On stage: Meelis Rämmeld, Carita Vaikjärv, Saara Nüganen, Priit Loog, Fatme Helge Leevald, Astra Irene Susi, Karl-Andreas Kalmet, Nils Mattias Steinberg, Kati Ong, Adrian Rozbaum (guest performer), Jan Eik Saard (guest performer)   In a small Polish country manor lives and works the Nibek family—father, two early-teen daughters, a host of relatives and household staff. Then the departed matriarch returns, and everyday life becomes entwined with memories, secrets and lies, until the boundaries of reality begin to crumble, love triangles become quadrangles, and the door between life and death is no longer invisible. “In a Small Manor” is an enchanting ghost comedy about love, fear and loss, and the absurd ease with which people try to explain the inexplicable. Or themselves.   The play’s author is the Polish writer, philosopher, artist and art theorist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), one of the most extraordinary and versatile creative figures of the first half of 20th-century Poland, who in his lifetime was regarded more as an eccentric and not a particularly serious scribbler. It was only in the second half of the 1950s, as cultural life in Poland became more liberal, that people began to grasp the scale of Witkiewicz’s genius. In the 1960s and 70s, his ironic and grotesque works, balanced on the boundary between the funny and the horrific, also became known in Europe and North America. Witkiewicz has since become a classic of Polish drama, whose works have been translated into dozens of languages and staged around the world. For, as the play’s translator Hendrik Lindepuu says: “Witkiewicz’s dramas combine a perception of life’s mystery, social and political vision, and, finally, irreverent gallows humour. The structure of the plays throws the reader off the trail; Witkiewicz’s characters, among whom are entirely fantastic figures, act as cruelly as they do unexpectedly, take part in unusual love intrigues and carry out cognitive-erotic experiments. The wealth of events, sudden plot twists, unpredictable changes in the story—all this is reminiscent of hallucinations or a dream, but also of a well-functioning mechanism—Witkiewicz perfectly mastered the art of playwriting.” “In a Small Manor” was written in 1921 and is being staged in Estonia for the second time—Mati Unt directed it at the then Youth Theatre in 1990. Now director Ingomar Vihmar gives his interpretation of this mysterious-romantic story full of unexpected turns at Endla.