About performance

Creators

• In this performance, we are given all the information directly. There is no traditional exposure. The family does not explain what everyone already knows. You can read some things from allusions, gestures, glances and abruptly stopped utterances. Thus, the play’s strongest points are the dialogues, which are very natural, attentive, and insightful, highlighted by the excellent acting developed over the years in one of the best theatre companies in Poland.

  Katarzyna Niedurny, Dwutygodnik

• In “When the Snow Melts”, we also flow behind trivial and everyday events, picking up emotions that emerge from irrelevant chitchat or embarrassing (and all the more painful) arguments. With its emotional intensity, the heartrending finale is a bit like theatre. Except the stakes for Minkowska’s and Walesiak’s characters are closer to life, though this doesn’t mean that they are less dramatic. They are definitely worth our time.

  Witold Mrozek, Gazeta Wyborcza

• Katarzyna Minkowska’s play hints at some clues, but certain questions remain open. For example: Do conventional family models still work? Do we perhaps need a revision of the basic social unit and new answers? Is the modern family different from that of ten, twenty or thirty years ago, though we try hard to pretend it’s not? Is it an obligation to maintain relationships with people who don’t give us a sense of safety and understanding?

  Alicja Cembrowska, Teatr dla wszystkich

• When the Snow Melts is one of those (few) plays that stays in your head long after you leave the theatre. It won’t let you sleep as it confronts you with various situations in your own family and among your loved ones. Though, probably, the circumstances are not so dire.

  Wanda Świątkowska

• Minkowska and Walesiak portray a typical family on the border between realism and stereotype. The older generation, which has not been thought to talk about problems and emotions, is convinced that they have given all they could to their children, who not only don’t respond with gratitude, but are always dissatisfied. The younger have their own strategies for survival and self-protection: running away, avoiding confrontation, or being a support or disgrace to the family.

  Aneta Kyzioł, Polityka

• A poignant study of a family trauma. A family tragedy uncovers deeply hidden problems, resentments, and disputes. Taken straight from life, the text combined with extremely suggestive, natural acting, as well as strongly emotional and realistic films from family archives projected on several screens, creates a mood of unusual and moving authenticity. Watching the performance, you may have the impression of arriving at your own family gathering, where the participants drag up serious problems and go on about them forever.

  Przemysław Gulda, guldapoleca

• Another successful play by Katarzyna Minkowska created in tandem with Tomasz Walesiak. […] The convention invented for this show allows you to penetrate, without prejudice or preconceptions, the inside of a family in crisis, seeking an answer to the question of how to carry on. The result is an ensemble performance: a thought-provoking tale about who we are to ourselves and our loved ones, who in fact are often unfamiliar.

  Tomasz Miłkowski, aict.art.pl

• When the Snow Melts is a dense, unpleasantly touching and subcutaneously irritating performance because it shows how we can sweep many uncomfortable things under the carpet, hide them for years, and how we are unable to talk to our loved ones.

  Marek Zajdler, Nasz teatr

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