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National preferences, complexes and prejudices: set at the former Polish-Slovakian border crossing, the play Waiting for the Turk by Andrzej Stasiuk adopts the perspective of former border guards and cross-border commuters who, in the no man's land between here and over there, yesterday and today, look towards an uncertain future. taz writer Katrin Bettina Müller was in Krakow for the premiere.

"Usually, after all these readings, the organizers invite you to an Italian restaurant," writes Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk in Dojczland, his book published in 2008 about his reading journeys in Germany. "There's no question about it, the Germans have a complex. The good life is in sunny Italy."

Funnily, on the city map of Krakow that the Goethe-Institut hands out to visitors who come to a Stasiuk premiere from Germany, five Italian restaurants are marked as recommended. Andrzej Stasiuk knows what he is talking about when he tells of national preferences, complexes and prejudices. This is also a theme of his play Waiting for the Turk, which had its premiere on 19 June at the Stary Teatr Krakow.

The drama was written for the series After the Fall. For this project 17 writers from 15 European countries wrote plays at the request of the Goethe-Institut about social and political change in their homelands since the fall of the wall. The authors include highly praised newcomers such as the Moldovan playwright Nicoleta Esinencu, Dirk Laucke from Germany, but also well-known names such as Stasiuk.

Out-of-work smugglers

What would the language be worth without the prejudices, the thinking without complexes? "And we don't know, companions, which is more terrifying: the Albion or the merciless Mussulman," Stasiuk's "choir of smugglers" states in Waiting for the Turk, "limitless freedom or the Mohammedan yoke, Europe or Asia, companions, it worries me to death for the decision asks too much of me."

The choir of three opens the production by Mikolaj Grabowski, the artistic director of the Stary Teatr, with a little ballet and with whispers, as if still travelling on secret pathways. Out of work, the smugglers now hang about, as does the old retired border guard Edek, at an abandoned frontier post between Poland and Slovakia in the Beskids. They miss the old order of border as does Edek, their erstwhile foe. They are roused from their comfortable laments by Patryk, a young security guard who has been hired to now watch the "grounds" by a Turkish investor.

Slideshow: "Waiting for the Turk" - The Rehearsal

Their cross talk is witty and sharp, permeated by male vanities, swank and pride. Stasiuk packages their ideological conflict in ribald language; negotiating the rootedness in old hierarchies and the hope for change. Mikolaj Grabowski's production makes it clear that Edek's yearning for the old order is based on his own self-deception and repression, just as Patryk's gushing about a life in London does not tolerate any prying questions about how well he would thrive there.

Someone who stirs up the anthill

"Andrzej Stasiuk has always examined the change in the political system," says Grabowski, who also produced his first play, The Night, four years ago. He considers Poland's dealings with the past burdened by many taboos and therefore considers Stasiuk important as someone "who stirs up this anthill." Jan Peszek, who plays the role of Edek, finds that the play expresses "the trepidation we all feel. Do we know where this Europe will lead us?"

"How do you tell about the present, the many developments in Europe, the various democratic movements, the shift of the borders to the outside?" asks Martin Berg, head of the division of Theatre and Dance at the Goethe-Institut and one of the series initiators. This is the question the playwrights had to ask themselves. The aim of After the Fall was to capture the European dimension of history twenty years after the fall of the wall with a multiplicity of voices. Stasiuk answers these questions using a political grotesque that saves its strongest effect for the end.

For in the end, the Turk the play is named for turns out to be a woman offering smugglers and borders guards the continuation of their old roles in a theme park called "Life on the Border." There they could sell their past reality as a folklore copy.

The play also has its weaknesses. It is a somewhat too predictable droll story and when you afterwards leave the Stary Teatr and return to the streets of Krakow, which are practically flooded in the evening by hard drinking bands of tourists, it also inheres something of a retreat to a place that is yet to be, but that the city of Krakow has already long experienced. Yet perhaps we need the constraint to make what has already become routine visible again.