A Woman Alone review – a stylised portrait of contemporary financial precarity

The Guardian

29-06-2025

Agnieszka Holland's 1981 film A Woman Alone may be viewed as an indictment of communist Poland for its story of an impoverished single mother who is comprehensively failed by the state – and was banned in the country for many years as a result. The Polish-born film-maker, though, has maintained that it was not just a political critique but a universal portrait of lone, dispossessed motherhood.
This stage adaptation, written by Natalia Fiedorczuk and directed by Anna Smolar, tests that thesis – and in some was proves it – by lifting the story out of its original sociopolitical context and transposing it to a modern-day Poland of online abuses, zero hours contracts and today's lone parenting culture.
Irena (Anna Ilczuk) is failed by all around her, even those presuming to be on her side. She is desperately poor, and has to care for her nine-year-old son Boguś (Ryfa Ri) while they face eviction. Her world is filled with well-to-do parents who judge her at the school gates – one of whom is also her bullying landlady – and liberal leftie teachers who perform acts of charitable solidarity but condemn Irena's parenting style and problematise her son's behaviour. Boguś's estranged father is part of the story for his refusal to pay child support, as is Irena's abrasive mother, who grudgingly puts Irena up after she is evicted.
Despite the potent subject matter, it all seems skimmed across, with a plethora of plotlines and an examination of motherhood that does not penetrate beyond familiar ideas of responsibility overload and the desire for escape. The expressive elements of the production create a languorousness at their best, but the tone flattens as it goes on, and emotion is subsumed by meta-theatrical tics that are better in idea than effect (such as one elaborate scene in which two mothers put on VR headsets to access an alternate reality that offers escape from the tyranny of parenting).
Where Holland's film is arresting in its matter-of-fact horrors, the hardships here are spoken of, or rapped into mics, in laboured lyricism. Or perhaps something is lost in translation with the Polish-to-English surtitles?
Originally staged at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, and co-produced by the Malta festival in Poznań, it is an example of post-dramatic theatre, which is intent on deconstructing theatrical convention. What seems refreshing at first spirals into artifice. An ensemble of actors initially gather in a semi-circle before emphatically constructing scenes. Irena narrates an endless shopping list of tasks, which is striking at first but begins to sound like a stylistic flourish. Irena's disabled lover Jacek (Oskar Stoczyński), who sits at the heart of the film, is tangential here, both in action and emotion. Perhaps this is to give Irena an even greater sense of aloneness, but it means the story is filled with incident yet devoid of an emotional core.
Some scenes jar, such as the one involving a series of phone calls between Irena and an actor who changes roles numerous times while they sit next to each other on a sofa. It seems little more than a game for the actors, and leaves you confused as to who is whom.
It all becomes confounding as the narrative travels between Boguś's absent father, figures from his school, and the rather purposeless presence of Jacek. All the while, Boguś expresses himself in a repetitive and mannered dance, occasionally rapping, although his interiority remains largely unknown.
The drama seriously falters when Irena stages a Pulp Fiction-style hold-up, exploding into anger at figures from her son's school. What follows does not re-enact the shock of the film's ending but gives us a paler alternative.
A stone boulder hangs over a corner of Anna Met's set design – to represent the Damoclean weight dangling above Irena, perhaps? Again, this feels like laboured symbolism. It is a shame because the production begins with such freshness. Jan Duszyński's sound design is exciting and there is power to the earlier scenes. But it spins in too many directions, ponderous and unwieldy in its portrait of a lone woman trapped in capitalist consumerism, which is no less blind to her suffering than Holland's original communist state.