Excerpts from German reviews of ARETEIA

Christine Dössel, Süddeutsche Zeitung

„Areteia”, the frantic prelude to the festival in Essen, directed by Jarzyna, and “Odysseus, Verbrecher” from Theater Dortmund were the best events of the German theatrical marathon. Both playwrights use the theme of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca in order to talk about the wounds of a fatherless society, about the sins of their parents and about the severe post-war trauma. In both cases, Ulysses is a broken man, a stranger in his community, who forces his son to become a murderer, just like himself. Jarzyna’s production resembles a David Lynch movie – it’s scaringly defamiliarized and incredibly gripping. The director creates electric atmosphere that echoes with ancient myths.

Gudrun Norbisrath, WAZ

Grzegorz Jarzyna stages his play gently as if it was a dreamlike choreography. Andreas Grothgar plays a desperately lonely Ulysses. Krunoslav Sebrekal, as his son, is outstandingly provocative. It’s a mysterious play about death and love: “we age quicker than the stones”, says Ulysses and kills his adversaries. It’s dreading but in a peaceful kind of way.
Almost every participant of the project “Odyssey Europe” was born after 1945. Those artist didn’t experience the war and for that reason they treat it as something mythical, something that’s past them. In that case, Jarzyna’s sensual theatre is even more fascinating with the lights and the sounds that seem to be falling from great heights.

Bernd Auchlich, Neue Westfälische

The festival in Schauspiel Essen has begun just formidably. “Areteia”, written and directed by a Polish artist - Grzegorz Jarzyna, came into being during several improvised rehearsals with his renowned troupe TR Warszawa and German actors. By means of magical theatre of visibly Eastern provenance, the director mixed the past, the present and the future, as well as individual traumas and social extremes. Ulysses, strongly manifesting his appearance on stage, kills all the suitors that kept harassing Penelope (played by the beautiful, charming Polish actress Katarzyna Herman), murders his father Laertes with cold fury and ends up slaughtered by his own son Telemachus.

Berliner Zeitung

“Odyssey Europe” - that’s the name of the theatrical event which takes place in Essen, the European Capital of Culture and the cultural heart of the Ruhr, the industrial giant. When Ulysses returns to Ithaca, Penelope’s suitors are acting very decently, Penelope, dressed in a black gown, is trying to preserve her bella figura and her son Telemachus is practicing his tennis serve. In the background, the sounds of a gloomy guitar, blending with the clangs of champagne glasses, accompany the party guests. The homeland to which the supposed master of artifice comes back is indeed sinister.
It’s no longer the Ithaca. It’s a place of fear, a place that goes beyond the boundaries of the original, ancient text. Gods appear there, but they look more like the Japanese with their black hair. Their voices sound as if they were the Vulcans from the starship USS Entreprise. They speak Polish backwards. They are played by Jarzyna’s countrymen whom he asked to come to Germany for that particular production about Ulysses under the title “Arteia”.
Ulysses is played by Andreas Grothgar: a big, strong, possibly violent and cold warrior, experienced in travels and hardened to pain. He has to watch his son Telemachus enter the killing business exactly where he left it. Jarzyna shuts this nightmare within the boundaries of a prolonged and pompous Eastern performance and Grothgar embodies perfectly the type of a cursed warrior.

Stuttgarter Zeitung

The most memorable element of this production is Ulysses – a rootless warrior coming back home – who, along with the Polish writer and director Grzegorz Jarzyna, takes us on a theatrical journey at the festival in Essen. Jarzyna proves that a man who’s too good at killing people isn’t able to retrieve his place in the world that he once left. He ends up killing the first person who recognizes him tries to hug him. Andreas Grothgar impressively impersonates the intense, internal conflict between contradictory emotions of a man who’s a soldier, a husband and a father longing for love and familylife, but unable to come out of his shell.