When 10-year-old Patichek isn’t driving around with his handyman father in their ‘Poland van’, he’s at home playing games with his sister. Their mother is ‘a breath of fresh air’, but never seems to come home. Their father sleeps in a life-size vodka bottle. the stick man is a modest, but original youth performance about a dysfunctional family, which is having a hard time with all kinds of cultural differences.
Actor and writer Tomer Pawlicki makes a fine debut as a youth theater writer. The performance is a co-production of Dood Paard, De Toneelmakerij and Theater De Krakeling and is performed by Pawlicki himself and Paul Knieriem and Manja Topper. The acting style is slightly grotesque, with Knee Strap in the role of the sister, a moody teenager, and Topper in the role of son Patichek. Pawlicki plays the alcoholic father with a thick Polish accent. There is a lot of humor in all the exaggerations, which makes the essentially sad story rather tragicomic.
Pawlicki wrote a partly autobiographical text about a Polish-Israeli family that came to the Netherlands, after which the parents find it difficult to adjust. The mother leaves again and the father loses himself in the drink. The kids have to figure it out for themselves. This neglect is not shown laconically, but laconically. The father calls his slender, clever son a “stick man” and has to watch with sorrow how any kind of machismo is alien to this young man. In this new country and in this new world the rules change in front of you.
The beautiful lesson of this youth performance: the children will be fine. It is the parents who could use some help.
The stick man (10+)
Theater
★★★★ ren
By Tomer Pawlicki, by Dood Paard, De Toneelmakerij and Theater De Krakeling. With Tomer Pawlicki, Paul Knieriem and Manja Topper
8/9, Theater Frascati, Amsterdam. Still on display until 12/2.