The Polish Theater in Poznań presents a Shakespeare sonnet in a surprising, choral version directed by Mira Mańka who announces: “Lover’s complaint” is a story by a choir of deaf and hearing people. A choir that looks at strategies for talking about love failure in a multitude of languages and expressions. A choir that, by expanding the field of representation, expands the field of understanding.

The basis of the performance is the poem “A Lover’s Complaint” by William Shakespeare – both the original text, as well as fragments translated by Maciej Słomczyński and paraphrases by Mira Mańka were used.

“Lover’s complaint” is a manifesto of people who fell in love and in their love were cheated, rejected and abandoned.

“Lover’s complaint” is a story about a girl seduced by words. About a girl who trusted someone who could talk beautifully. About a girl who believed that words describe reality and are not just poetry, fun, or a means of seduction. About a girl who, despite having experienced deception and abandonment, knows that she would once again fall under the spell of her lover’s words. “Lover’s complaint” is a story about experiencing love deception. This is a story that begins with the realization of the end of a relationship. When you are left with a few objects – witnesses of love, with which, when love passes, you don’t know what to do.

“Lover’s complaint” is a lament for oneself, and in a broader sense, for all those who have experienced or are experiencing a love failure. It is a song of purification, a public mourning of a lost part of oneself, it is both an end and a beginning, a moment of rebirth. It is a pain that, when named and expressed in front of witnesses, brings relief.

“Lover’s complaint” is a community listening and/or expressing, dancing, singing, shouting out the complaints that we make ourselves and which are often made about us. It is an attempt to take the words of the heroine of Shakespeare’s poem as one’s own, an attempt to pass them through individual sensitivities while maintaining the collective character. It is a communal coming to terms with what is most human – with a failed love relationship, with a broken heart, with being abandoned and abandoning someone else.