Reviews

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Cinders

NEW YORK PUBLIC THEATRE: 1984

 
“Extremely clever and provocative writing… Set in a girls’ reform school near Warsaw, Cinders is about what happens when a documentary director arrives to film the inmates as they perform a dramatization of the fairy tale. Mr. Glowacki has a keen ability to mine the dark absurdist humor in the language of terror and to make elegant Kafkaesque comedy out of his nation’s ongoing nightmare of repression.”

-Frank Rich, N.Y Times

 
“A very powerful play.”

-William A. Raidy, Newhouse Newspapers

 
“Glowacki is a provocative writer. Cinders is a cat and mouse game as comic as it is scary. John Madden has directed magisterially.”

-John Simon, New York Magazine

 
“Another major production thanks to Joe Papp. Thoroughly engrossing and important theatre.”

-Leida Snow, WINS Radio

 
“Good performances by Christopher Walken, George Guidall and Robin Gammell. Lucinda Jenney, the Cinderella of ‘Cinders’ is a touching and lonely figure of resistance in a world where such bravery is the only hope.”

-Frank Rich, WQXR

ROYAL COURT THEATRE, LONDON 1981

 
“ ‘Cinders’ must be one of the finest pieces of ensemble playing in London this year.”

-Paul Schweitzer, The London Times, Jan. 1, 1982

 
“Allegory for survival under an intolerant authority.”

-David Roper, The Guardian, London, Dec. 24, 1981

WEST COAST PREMIERE:

 
“Fairy tales always were dark. This production reminds you how dark.”

-Ray Loyud, Los Angeles Times

 
“Glowacki’s use of a fairytale as the metaphor for his lacerating work is ingenious and well contrived. The tone of the play is as grim as the Grimm brothers’ fantastically bloody tales. However Glowacki also employs much humor to express his pointed social criticism. His is not purely a horror story; it is a bitterly funny satire as well.”

-Kathleen Foley, Drama Logue

NATIONAL THEATRE IN TAPEI, TAIWAN:

 
“ This Kafkaesque play is deeply human and therefore universal. Which is why it is understood equally as well in Moscow and London as in New York, Buenos Ayres and Taipei.”

- China Times

 
“The situations that Glowacki describes are not that foreign to the Chinese audience. Good fairies set traps for Cinderella not only in Warsaw.”

-China Post