The play’s point of departure is simple, and at the same time absurd. Two young people - a he and a she - are trying to get to Warsaw. They’ve lost their way because they’re coming down hard after an intensely druggy party. The party’s slogan had been “poverty, rats and disease,” meaning that members of the upper crust dressed up like poor people and picked up cheap babes on the street. He belongs to the upper crust (an actor), she to the cheap babes (an unmarried mother who works in a chip shop). On the morning after the party they’re still playing bums, but now they’re doing it in front of strangers: they pretend to be “a couple of poor Romanians” begging for a ride to the capital. We hear the story of this journey as it progresses, observing their successive meetings with others, as well as through voiceover, from which we learn the testimony of the compatriots they happen across. With each passing hour, he becomes more frantic, while she isn’t much bothered. In the morning he’s supposed to show up on the set of some soap opera, in which he plays a priest; she realizes that she’s forgotten to pick up her child from preschool and that she’s blown her month’s alimony during the party. The more conscious they become, the more they are seized with dread: increasingly, he pulls back from playing the poor Romanian, and she becomes increasingly aware that she’s returning to a life in which she is a ‘Romanian’. During the party they were on the same side, the side of the drugs. But after the party it turns out that there are more sides: male and female, rich and poor, native and foreign. And since he is in a panic over the prospect of falling from his world of privilege, he treats his travelling companion to a heavy dose of humiliation, which might help him establish his own identity. The more he feels threatened with being cast out, the more dirt he throws at her. Thus there is only one Romanian left in the end - female, and dead. Masłowska’s play is a comedy with a tragic ending, a pyrotechnic display of stylistic ideas, a series of horrifying portraits. This cross-country trip shows that no language is capable of introducing change - in one’s consciousness, between people, in ethics. What remains is a helpless account expressed in a style that can no longer cross the boundaries of this reality.
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