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Stefan Golaszewski and Richard Jordan Productions Ltd in association with

The Bush Theatre and United Agents present

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays

Photo by Pete Le May

Written and performed by Stefan Golaszewski

Directed and designed by Phillip Breen

Bush Theatre

2 December 2009 – 9 January 2010

ary Couzens

A review by Chad Armitstead for EXTRA! EXTRA!

Oh, so that’s what a solo show should be like.

Other shows are playing their hearts out, but Stefan Golaszewski is bound to be the alpha on the playground of solo shows for a while.

His plots are defiantly simple.  In fact what appear to be long titles are just extremely short synopses:  Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower.  No more explanation is needed.  But of course there will be some anyway. 

The first play is a comic, wrenching look at Stefan ending up with the most beautiful girl in the pub, with whom he has what turns out to be an ill-fated adventure. 

The second play is a more melancholy look at a ‘clingy’ Stefan in 2056, after his wife has died.  He mines the time differential for humour, speaking of his audience’s future and present as passé historical footnotes. 

Far from the too-often self-indulgent fare of writer/actor solo shows, I didn’t begrudge a single moment spent with the first play.  And if there was a moment during the more sentimental second that one might have been tempted to begrudge, it was forgiven for its sincerity and the brilliance of the first piece.

Golaszewski fills the Bush to bursting with friends you know and love to mock.  He gives you the kind of belly laugh you get while lying in bed with your partner after an evening out, deconstructing your foible-riddled menagerie of mates.

Committed and intense, Golaszewski looks his audience right in the eyes and delivers insights so searing you have to laugh to extricate yourself from his thrall.  His characters are sometimes uncomfortably vivid, forcing you to silently concede you know exactly the kind of person he’s talking about, or worse, to admit you are that person. 
As a writer, Golaszewski gets the dramaexactly right.  He shuns complex plots.  He endears us to characters with quirks we laugh at, hoping no one notices some of their quirks are also our own.  He gives his seemingly autobiographical characters simple, powerful goals.  In the case of both of these plays, that goal is to be loved by the one person you’ve already made the mistake of falling in love with.

Having created his world, the performer takes over and Golaszewski holds his audience in the clutches of a muscular comic verve.  He then is free to coerce laughs and wring hearts like wet washcloths.

For all their rough humour and graphic moments, these plays can’t help but be incredibly sweet.  Whatever Golaszewski’s intention, he has steeped his idea of love in a Labrador-like eagerness, loyalty and simplicity.  So much so that the heartbreak he achieves seems almost perverse.

Director and designer Phillip Breen has allowed show’s simplicity to speak for itself.  From the mad, unexpected comic props of Girl He Once Loved to the white, sterile heaven-meets-padded-cell design of the second piece, Breen embraces what theatre is.  He achieves more with less and leaves room on the canvas for imagination.

If you’ve been subjected to the rambling solo vehicles of lesser aspiring comics or dramatists, Golaszewski reminds you why the one-person show exists: for those rare artists who can write as well as perform and who can do each one better than the other.

The Bush ends its year on a decidedly high note with The Stefan Golaszewski Plays.  You’ll likely leave feeling glad you’re not the characters you’ve seen, but secretly wondering if you might be.  But I’ll wager this will be the best piece of new comic theatre you’ll see until 2056.  Alright, maybe just this year, then.

£15/£13 concession

Box office:  020 8743 5050

www.bushtheatre.co.uk

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