Randia’s Quiet Theatre : Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder

Throughout Poland, tens of thousands of elderly people live with disabilities in four-storey walk-up apartment buildings.In many cases their children have emigrated; they live with loneliness, a lack of basic amenities, silence, and the absence of care.They are known as “prisoners of the fourth floor.”In Randia’s Quiet Theatre Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston mixes autofiction, ethnography, and theatrical improvisation to unravel the politics of aging in Poland.At the centre of the book is Randia, a Romani fortune teller, storyteller, and performer confined to her fourth-floor apartment in old age.In interviews, Randia’s identity is fixed: she tells of the hardships she faced as a Romani girl and as a wife, mother, and grandmother whose relationship with her family was shaped by separation, sickness, and death.But in storytelling sessions staged in her home, Randia steps into characters and is freed: her tales move between the past, the present, and the future, across life and death; her c