Princess Ivona

Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 play Princess Ivona tells an intricate but sharp story about the intrinsic mechanism of the socio-political game for power and status. When Prince Phillip decides to marry a girl because of his “repulsion” for her, the unattractive and ordinary Ivona enters the royal family and becomes a variable that disrupts the established order. According to Gombrowicz, Ivona becomes a “decomposing agent” who exposes the hypocrisy and complicity thinly veiled by the glamor of the elite class.

With a brilliant cast (who are naturally funny) and wonderfully colorful stage designs, Jenny Beacraft’s Princess Ivona offers an unexpectedly tender—thus almost redemptive—rendition that both invites meditation upon and serves to counteract the brutality and darkness intrinsic to the original script. Making the royal family members farcical, ridiculous—almost goofy—characters exposes the irrationality–rather than the simple cruelty–of power.

This hopeful mood and aesthetic facade, rather than diluting the gravity of the issues at hand, instead surprisingly lend power and layers to Ivona’s character and, in turn, to the piercing yet simultaneously healing effect of the play’s social critique.