British director Dan Jemmett returns to the Polish Theatre

The British filmmaker is well known to Polish audiences. We remember his innovative stagings of William Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’ and ‘An Evening of Three Kings’ and John Ford's ‘A Pity She's a Harlot’. This time on the 112th anniversary of the opening of the Polish Theatre in Warsaw: ‘Maiden Vows’ by Aleksander Fredro.

British theatre director, specialises in Elizabethan theatre. He comes from an artistic family, his parents were actors. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College, which is part of the University of London. Early in his theatre career he was a puppeteer at Norwich Puppet Theatre. In 1993 he founded the experimental theatre company Primitive Science with Mark von Henning. The organisation presented productions of plays in London, viz: Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial (Soho Poly Theatre), Bertolt Brecht's Antigone (Battersea Arts Centre), Heiner Müller's Quartet (Lilian Baylis Theatre), Fatzer, excerpts from Bertolt Brecht, a montage of texts by Heiner Müller (Gate Theatre), Hunger from texts by Franz Kafka (Purcell Room), Imperfect Librarian based on novellas by Jorge Luis Borges (Young Vic Theatre). Dan Jemmett's first production was Alfred Jarry's King Ubu, presented at the Young Vic Theatre in 1998. The production was repeated at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale in Paris.

Jemmett moved to France in 1999. He has performed Shakespeare, Molière or Jarry on major European stages, including Almost Hamlet starring Gilles Privat at the Théâtre National du Chaillot. In 2002, his production of Shake, based on William Shakespeare's An Evening of Three Kings at the Théâtre de la Ville, brought him the prize of the year awarded by the French critics' association Révélation Théâtral . After receiving this accolade, he became the first Briton to be invited to direct a production at the Comédie-Française, with which he works on a permanent basis. His other acclaimed productions are: Molière's The Convenient Exquisites (Les précieuses ridicules, Comédie-Française, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 2009), Eduardo de Filippo's The Great Magic (Comédie-Française, 2010), and The Tragedy of Hamlet, based on William Shakespeare's masterpiece (Comédie-Française, 2013). Jemmett has also staged operatic works such as Gioacchino Rossini's L'occasione fa il ladro at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (2004) or Hector Berlioz's Béatrice and Bénédict at the Opéra-Comique (2010). His film Curtains (2009) was presented at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The staging of Maidens' Vows will take us back to the past, but not as far back as we might think... The story of emancipation shows that the dilemmas of the maidens of the Polish court were still shared by women, not only in Poland, for many decades to come.Klara and Aniela, who are the subject of Dan Jemmett's production, live in a house in the English suburbs. Like many women in the colourful and turbulent 1970s, they rebel against the rules created by their parents' generation. Taking ‘maiden vows’, they attempt to redefine their social roles. Fredro's heroines have lost their battle for independence, and what will it be like now?