The Play "Rodzeństwo" at Teatr Jaracza

Thomas Bernhard's Rodzeństwo is a work about love. An extraordinarily difficult love that traps its characters in a painful grip of resentment, a sense of injury, and at times even anger and hatred. Despite the suffering this causes them, Bernhard's protagonists cling to each other, wanting to stay together and form a family. It is easy to get the impression that they derive a kind of perverse pleasure from tormenting each other out of selfish motives, forcing sacrifices, deliberately wounding. There is certainly a considerable dose of masochistic delight when they view each other as victims of other relatives. Yet it is better to think of this difficult relationship between three people differently. To see it as an act of extraordinary sacrifice, a desperate desire to sustain a bond that, while destructive, is also...