In Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema, a bourgeois family is visited then discarded by a divine force. Now, Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna stages the tale, in a series of stark, immaculate scenes. One by one, the household of venerable plutocrat Paolo is seduced by this guest, who then abandons them to an awakened sense of their own emptiness. Jarzyna strains to elevate proceedings to an existential plane, with a script increasingly burdened by pronouncements on God and the sacred. It's always ravishing and strange – but the connection between TEOREMAT's domestic events and its portentous philosophy is asserted, not felt.
With delicious contrariness, the production starts with a Q&A. Paolo (Jan Englert) is taking questions from the floor. "Do you believe in God?", he is asked. "I don't understand the question," he replies. We then rewind to sequences of his family living their pristine lives: perfectly dressed, perfectly undisturbed, perfectly hollow. A guest announces his arrival, to destabilise this petrified status quo. He squirrels into son Pietro's bed to the jaunty sound of Henry Mancini's Baby Elephant Walk. He drinks wine glasses of cigarette smoke with Paolo's sexually frustrated wife Lucia. Like two little boys, he and Paolo play football.
Individually, these scenes – often wordless, bathed in bright light and long shadows – make for seductive theatre. But they don't ring true. Sebastian Pawlak's guest isn't divine, he's just a very naughty boy. So the play's would-be epic second half ("How terrible the agony," Lucia raves, "when the soul starts to feel its body, and the body its bonds") is unearned. One admires the production for asking the big questions, while wishing it had gained a better position from which to answer them.
