Łukasz Twarkowski shows why he is one of the most exciting new directors around with sci-fi epic The Employees at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
“I miss the smell of gravity”
It’s more than 15 years since Ivo van Hove blew my tiny mind about the idea of an audience not being static in watching a production, the option to move around and watch Roman Tragedies from different positions on and off stage feeling so novel. It isn’t a device that has taken off that much in UK theatres (perhaps because they are less flexible spaces…) but it is interesting that it has taken the arrival of another European director to get me moving onstage at the interval (well, it’s a pause…).
Łukasz Twarkowski has been steadily building a reputation on the continent as a director to watch and with The Employees, a STUDIO theatrgaleria production from Warsaw, it is easy to see why. An adaptation of Olga Ravn’s 2021 International Booker Prize-nominated novel performed in Polish with English surtitles, it’s an exhilarating, genre-defying, often astonishing piece of work that is as much art installation as pure theatre. You may well be dissatisfied if you’re looking for a straight take on the story, what is on offer is more sensation.

At some point in the near future, a group of humans and humanoid robots occupy a spaceship. Earth has been destroyed, an entity called The Organisation is giving them orders and perhaps naturally, existential crises are popping up everywhere. Fragmented scraps of reports offer us small insights into what life has become as the lines become increasingly blurred between human and android – relationships blossom, the act of memory probed, the question of can humanity be learned ever more pressing as behaviours start to shift.
The company of Robert Wasiewicz, Dominika Biernat, Daniel Dobosz, Maja Pankiewicz, Sonia Roszczuk and Paweł Smagała all play a human and a humanoid to thrilling effect and increasingly ferocious intensity. Live cameras follow them around the cube of Fabien Lédé’s design but there’s something unique about the depth of their camera acting, hi-res close-ups pushing right in and revitalising a concept that arguably has felt a little tired on London stages of late. Roszczuk and Biernat in particular smash through the fourth wall to look into our very souls.

Creatively though is where Twarkowski makes an astounding mark. Live video gets mixed with striking pre-recorded material (Jakub Lech), Lubomir Grzelak’s throbbing music pulses throughout and Svenja Gassen and Bartosz Nalazek’s lighting plays with both colour and shadow as we discover sex, secrets and bland food. The extended wordless sequences of intercut video and imagery are simply astonishing, hypnotically powerful in their pounding relentlessness, a truly unique experience.