The decision to build the performance around the life of composer Norbert von Hannenheim reflects the director’s long-standing fascination with creating theatrical essays about the search for identity and the tensions between biography and artistic creation.

Novel synopsis:

Patryk Werhunt, the novel’s teenage protagonist, grows up in Międzyrzecz (Meseritz), one of Poland’s oldest towns – occupied by Germany and liberated in 1945. One day he discovers the body of a neighbour floating in the Obra River. The circumstances of the death remain unclear, and suspicion begins to fall on the young man as he stands on the threshold of adulthood. This traumatic event becomes the starting point for an expansive narrative, composed with the precision of a fugue, tracing intertwined histories of Poles, Jews, Germans, Soviets and their descendants. Running through it all is an obsessive search for the truth surrounding the fate of the German composer Norbert von Hannenheim.

Meticulously constructed, immersive, multilayered and deeply intertextual – it can simply be said: Pulverkopf by Pasewicz is an outstanding novel, perhaps one of the finest works of Polish literature in recent years.

“If you have been waiting for ‘the great Polish novel’ – one capable of speaking about our Polish struggles with history and identity, with male and female characters written so vividly that they remain with you long afterwards – here it is,” wrote Wojciech Szot.