Cherry Blossom

Catherine Grosvenor's second full-length play comes three years after her first, One Day All This Will Come to Nothing.

The is a compelling multi-media, bilingual performance, delivered by four actors on the thrust stage, which kept the eyes of the audience for ninety minutes.

The state-of-the art production is the fruit of an international collaboration between the playwright, the Traverse, film and media company Fifty Nine Productions Ltd, and Teatr Polski, a distinguished Polish political theatre.

Set between Poland and Scotland, it follows the story of a middle-aged woman, Grazyna (initially Malgorzata Trofimiuk), forced to leave behind her husband and two children and enter Scotland with very poor knowledge of the language and the culture.

Her life constantly fluctuates between home and her new environment. All her cravings for a family reunion are shattered after a visit, eleven months later, when she finds out she has turned into the family 'money donator'. She returns to Scotland and develops a new relationship with a Scottish man, John, which helps her master English better and stand up for her rights, fragmentally presented in a scene of dispute with her landlord where she insists 'the carpet with the mushrooms to be replaced'.

The performance has a cyclical character, transparent in the playwright's dramatic text and sparklingly presented by the actors' rotation in and out of roles. The acting, combined with simplistic props, screened decorations and unmarked clothing facilitates the director's idea of introducing Brechtian elements. The fourth wall is further broken by the introduction of narration (somewhat distracting, and unnecessarily long at times).

The use of two languages, with Polish dominating over English, makes the play hard to follow at times, because interpretation (as opposed to a translation) is projected on the stage platforms at uneven intervals, bringing awkward pauses and interruptions.

The play targets the contemporary situation of the Polish emigrants in Scotland and all problems arising with it. 'Theatre must face challenges of time,' claims Pawel Lysak, the art director of Teatr Polski, and that is exactly what Cherry Blossom does with its appearance on the Scottish stage.