In a Small Manor

In a Small Manor
Mystery / comedy / drama

Director: Ingomar Vihmar
Author: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Set designer: Illimar Vihmar
Translator: Hendrik Lindepuu
Music: Ingomar Vihmar
Lighting designer: Ivar Piterskihh

Cast: 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), Jan Eik Saard (guest)

The Nibek family lives and goes about its business in a small Polish country manor: a father, two early-teen daughters, a number of relatives and servants. Then the departed mother of the family returns, and everyday life becomes intertwined 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 lightness with which people try to explain the inexplicable. Or themselves.

The play’s author is Polish writer, philosopher, artist and art theorist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), one of the most extraordinary and versatile creative figures in Poland in the first half of the 20th century. During his lifetime, he was regarded more as an eccentric than as a particularly serious writer. It was not until 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 1970s, his ironic, grotesque works, poised between the comic and the frightening, also became known in Europe and North America. Today, Witkiewicz is a classic of Polish drama, whose works have been translated into dozens of languages and staged around the world.

As the play’s translator, Hendrik Lindepuu, says: “Witkiewicz’s plays combine an awareness of life’s mystery, social and political vision, and, ultimately, irreverent gallows humour. The structure of the plays leads the reader astray. Their characters—including wholly fantastical ones—act with equal cruelty and unpredictability, engage in unusual love intrigues and conduct cognitive-erotic experiments. The abundance of events, sudden plot twists and unpredictable changes in the storyline all resemble a hallucination or a dream, but also a well-functioning mechanism—Witkiewicz had a perfect command of the art of playwriting.”

In a Small Manor was written in 1921 and is being staged in Estonia for the second time. In 1990, Mati Unt directed it at the then Youth Theatre. Now, at Endla Teater, director Ingomar Vihmar offers his interpretation of this mysterious, romantic story full of unexpected turns.