Piercingly beautiful but elusive melancholy love story, with gorgeous music from Elvis Costello
A tormented love affair that mirrors the post-war tensions between East and West is the ravaged heart of this story, based on Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film, loosely inspired by his own parents. Aside from the obsessive passion of its two central characters – intense musician Wiktor and charismatic singer Zula, whose journey takes them from Communist-ruled Poland to Berlin, Paris and back again – the movie’s compulsion lies in its stunning black-and-white imagery: blazing eyes, the glow of stage lights on skin, rippling fields of wheat, snow-crusted streets, all lensed with a silvery shimmer.
Conor McPherson’s stage version, directed by Rupert Goold, has a very different flavour. It is broader, more bleakly humorous, with a more expansive sense of the characters who surround the lovers. And while, like its cinematic counterpart, it draws on traditional Polish folk music, it also features songs by Elvis Costello, some of them familiar – including the sublimely wounded, vitriolic I Want You from 1986.
It is a languorous and episodic watch, as Luke Thallon’s Wiktor and Zula, played by The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra, are caught up in a push-pull dance in which, from the start, they are fated to be perpetually out of step. Goold’s staging creates a penetrating mood of melancholy and yearning. Often piercingly beautiful, it is also elusive, and sometimes frustrating, its meditative tone lacking impetus, and the interplay of the political and personal so subtle that it never gains much traction.
Our pair meets when Wiktor, pragmatic manager Kaczmarek (a tough, saltily funny Elliot Levey) and choreographer Irena (Alex Young) are touring rural Poland collecting folk songs with the aim of forming a touring troupe to perform them in the authentic “peasant style”. Chalotra’s spikily assertive Zula, concealing an urban upbringing and a prison stint for stabbing her abusive father, auditions; Wiktor, despite being romantically involved with Irena, is instantly smitten.
Continues...
Other lovers, marriages, booze and record deals are among the detritus of a wild connection that culminates in desolation and despair. McPherson gives both Wiktor and Kaczmarek some dark additional wartime backstory that adds historical texture. Meanwhile, the music and Ellen Kane’s choreography, set against Jon Bausor’s design of crumbling stone, peeling paintwork and a dilapidated piano, transport us through the years and locations. Lilting, ululating mountain songs give way to state-ordained anthems to Stalin, exuberant, skirt-swishing, acrobatic dances becoming more regimented; later, there is smoky jazz, rock’n’roll jive and 1960s girl-group harmonising.
Chalotra’s Zula almost vibrates with dangerous volatility, and both she and Thallon’s quietly agonised Wiktor sing gorgeously, as they reckon with their mutual need and misery, and their émigré feelings of loss and displacement. The plangent music insinuates itself into the imagination rather more persuasively than much of what surrounds it. The overall effect is slow and cumulative, and for all its moments of stark loveliness, dramatically the play doesn’t satisfy. But it’s like an emotional bruise, tenderly and insistently inflicted.
More Reviews
More Reviews
Recommended for you
Most Read
Across The Stage this weekYour subscription helps ensure our journalism can continue
Invest in The Stage today with a subscription starting at just £7.99
© Copyright The Stage Media Company Limited 2025
