
Cezary Goes to War
direction Cezary Tomaszewski
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Cezary Goes to War 10.11.2025, 19:00
- Buy ticket
Cezary Goes to War 11.11.2025, 19:00
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Cezary Goes to War 12.11.2025, 19:00
The play deconstructs military ethos and pride to make the audience aware of their toxic dimensions and oppressiveness. The play draws on the author’s personal experience of having to appear before an army conscription committee. This memory serves as the vehicle for a funny, witty, and spot-on critique of nationalistic war discourses, which resonates with particular force in modern-day Poland. Using elements of Moniuszko’s and Szostakiewicz’s musical compositions and Nijinsky’s ballet Afternoon of a Faun, the director engages the audience in a series of subversive identity games that not only undermine gender norms but also turn the military ethos on its head.
The director’s biography, written for four actors and a pianist, becomes a pretext to redefine the existing concepts and create their own queer fantasy system. The performance, in which Nijinsky’s Afternoon of the Faun comes to life in the men’s dressing room with one of Moniuszko’s songs, aerobic exercises with Shostakovich’s battle symphony and the memory of recruitment commision’s decision from years ago becomes an impulse for launching performative, camp variety. The performance counts among the most important theatre events of 2017. Awarded for the best artistic team at 10th ITF Divine Comedy in 2017.
Team
cast: Michał Dembiński/Mateusz Wróblewicz, Weronika Krówka, Oskar Malinowski, BAXI Ostrowski/Szymon Dobosik, Łukasz Stawarczyk/Szymon Dobosik
costumes: Bracia (Agnieszka Klepacka, Maciej Chorąży)
light: Antoni Grałek
dramaturgy: Justyna Wąsik, Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak
photography: Pat Mic
Media
“Tomaszewski highlights the power of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity to control, define, and object to behavior–drawing poisonously sharp lines between the “acceptable” and the not. Crushing individualism may be the military’s job but looking at this with a larger lens, the community’s ability to police difference is also at play, making for the show’s most affecting moments. Institutional and societal indoctrination bleeds into personal behavior. Do we choose to perpetuate that or do we resist?”
Nicole Serratore, “Exeunt NYC”
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“Cezary Goes to War is an idiosyncratic piece bursting with originality and verve. It turns upside down the expectations of how people in the military might traditionally perform and is as far removed from a tattoo as could be imagined.”
Richard Beck, broadwaybaby.com
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“Tomaszewski combines archaic forms with avant-garde courage, contemporary choreography with a dusted farce, Moniuszko with an absurd sense of humor. He’s making theatre which is approachable for everyone, though based on forms perceived as sophisticated; a theater either ironic or affectionate.”
Witold Mrozek, “Gazeta Wyborcza” online
About
Cezary Tomaszewski, born in Warsaw in 1976, choreographer, director, and performer , studied theater at the Theatre Academy in Warsaw and choreography at Bruckner ConservatoryLinz in Austria. He directed Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow in 2009 in Vienna, which earned critics’ picks in the magazines „Theater Heute” and „Falter” for Best Young Director and the Best Off Production in 2009 in Vienna. Two of his early projects, The Last Temptation of Saint Bernardette and Dance Tetralogy, were presented at theatres in Austria and Switzerland.
He directed musical productions by Capella Cracoviensis: the stage production of Monteverdi’s madrigals Baroque feast in a milk bar in Kraków, and operas, including Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula and Moniuszko’s Halka. In Polish dramatical theatres he directed Wedding Based on a Wedding, after Stanislaw Wyspianski. In 2017 Tomaszewski directed It Pina Hadn’t Smoked She’d Be Alive at the Jerzy Szaniawski Drama Theatre in Walbrzych and Cezary Goes to War at Komuna Warszawa.
Partners
The event is co-financed by the Warsaw City Hall.
