The Mother in Discussion at King's

In our final few months as a resident company at King’s College London, we’re delighted to be returning to this year’s King’s Arts & Humanities Festival. 

Inspired by this year’s theme ‘play’, we’ll be presenting an event called, The Mother – playing with a play. Featuring discussion and performance, we’ll explore the process of turning Polish avant-garde writer Witkacy’s seminal play, The Mother (Matka) into an opera, or ‘playing with a play’. 

Joining us will be The Mother’s composer Laurence Osborn, Paul Allain – Professor of Theatre & Performance at the University of Kent, King’s College London’s Kelina Gotman and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Bramley who will be perform excerpts from the opera. 

The Mother – playing with a play takes place at King’s College London (Strand Campus) on Tuesday 18 October, 6.30pm. Free tickets for this event can now be booked via the King’s College London website. 

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, playwright, poet, painter, photographer, philosopher and art theoretician. He was a visionary ahead of his times, a prankster, whose cutting-edge judgement and catastrophic prophesies continue to resonate with younger generations. Often dismissed by his contemporaries, he developed his own theories on theatre and performance, writing:

“On leaving the theatre, one should feel that he has woken up from some strange dream in which even the commonest of things possessed some strange unfathomed charm characteristic of dreams and incomparable to anything else.”

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