Lights over Warsaw
A constellation of crackshot directors is reanimating Polish theatre—and Grzegorz Jarzyna is their leading luminary
By Jim O'Quinn
WARSAW: It’s hard to argue with success. Grzegorz Jarzyna’s career as a stage director has been brief, brilliant, inconsistent, controversial—and, here in this bustling East European theatre capital, meteorically successful. He’s the Polish equivalent of a pop star, idolized by adoring fans, stalked by gossip columnists, exclaimed over in glossy magazines. (To suggest that there’s no American equivalent is an understatement. When’s the last time you spotted your favorite theatre director on Entertainment Tonight?)
Why the fuss about Jarzyna (yar-ZHEE-na)? It may have less to do with the lanky, dark-eyed, soulfully serious 33-year-old wunderkind’s charisma—which is considerable—than it does with the conspicuousness of the theatre in Poland’s cultural landscape. Some twists of recent history set the stage for Jarzyna’s rise, and with him a bright new wave of Polish theatre directors who have the potential to influence theatrical forms and styles on an international scale.
I met and talked with several of them [see sidebars] early this year on their home turf, and sidled in alongside Warsaw theatregoers to watch their productions—among them an uproariously upended classic, an austere Shakespeare and a company-created comedy with a cast of 27. Without exception, the productions crackled with such wit and exuberance that they seemed to be nudging the barriers of language and geography to connect with a larger world. That connection is already being made on the European festival circuit, where Jarzyna and his colleague Krzysztof Warlikowski (who frequently directs at the high-profile Rozmaitosci Theatre, where Jarzyna took over as artistic director in 1998) are particularly sought after. But these new faces in Warsaw are still strangers to the U.S.
Some are even strangers to each other—it’s the media that’s linked them into a movement, they will tell you. Indeed, these men and women in their thirties and forties are bracingly dissimilar in their ambitions and aesthetic approaches—but all of them, a visitor can’t help noticing right away, are deeply interested in their national literary and theatrical antecedents. They have had to pick up the pieces of an interrupted tradition and reassemble them in a time of frenzied economic and social change. And they’ve had to contend with roller-coaster swings of public opinion about theatre’s role as a mirror of Polish life.
Jarzyna, the youngest of the lot, was barely out of his teens when democracy arrived in Poland in 1989, but like everyone else he was aware of the heroic role theatre people played in the Solidarity movement that broke the back of Soviet repression. During the grim decade of martial law in the ’80s, theatre activists won visibility and prestige as they galvanized demonstrations with their performances and staged a yearlong strike, refusing to work in the propagandistic mass media. In Poland, theatre spoke truth to power.
It was, not coincidentally, superbly equipped to do so. Because Polish theatre (which originated in the Romantic literary tradition, with dramas that were mainly to be read but not staged) took shape during a long and unhappy history of foreign occupation, it nurtured a strain of hard-nosed, sometimes adolescent resistance (perhaps quintessentially captured in Witold Gombrowicz’s rude 1937 satire Ferdydurke). This theatre of thumbed noses, nasty gestures and social alienation was a tradition that could have been hand-tailored for the anti-Communist uprisings of the ’80s.
But when Soviet power collapsed, the high-flown prestige of theatre collapsed, too. As Poland struggled toward capitalism in the ’90s, its theatre, increasingly bereft of state funding, went commercial: Warsaw witnessed its first British sex farces and mega-musicals; plays anchored themselves to TV sitcom stars. Actors, once on a pedestal, were selling themselves cheaply, and the intelligentsia—that historically influential class of opinion-shapers that was largely disenfranchised by the political upheaval—had no reason (and far less money) to go to the theatre.
What was to be done? Jarzyna and his generation were ready to step into the void with a simple but stunningly effective stratagem: When society changes, theatre changes. Politics was over; the personal was what mattered. If young Poles were obsessed with movies, television, video and pop music, the throb of mass culture could be felt on the stage as well. If this society hurtling toward the West was riddled with problems of identity, sexuality, the devaluation of language, juvenile crime and existential angst, these up-to-the-minute predicaments could be anatomized in drama—and (surprise!) the tools for doing so were close at hand, in that very canon of literary and theatrical works that had so adroitly sustained Poles through other troubled times: Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Rózewicz, Kafka, Shakespeare.
Not to mention Aleksander Fredro, the Polish Molière. As any Pole who’s had a brush with formal education can tell you, the apex of Polish humor—its purest incarnation—was achieved a century-and-a-half ago in the genial, upper-class verse comedies of Fredro, a writer who died in 1876 but lives eternally on in the nation’s mandatory high school reading lists. It was tedious old Fredro, bane of the 14-year-old intellectual, who gave Jarzyna his most inspired idea.
Already Jarzyna had tackled two Polish literary giants. Fresh out of the State Theatre School in Crakow, he had made his sensational 1997 professional debut with Tropical Madness, a sexy, cinematic adaptation of two rarely performed works by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (stumbling over themselves for superlatives, the critics compared the production to David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino movies and handed him all the season’s most important theatre awards); his follow-up was an only slightly less outrageous treatment of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. By the time Jarzyna moved on to Canadian Brad Fraser’s sex-and-serial-killer epic Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, the powers that be, undeterred by cries of “scandal” and “raunch,” had handed him the reins of the Rozmaitosci. Polish theatre’s youngest artistic director was already an arts-world superstar, but his next project, the one I saw in Warsaw—a deconstructionist assault on one of the holiest of sacraments of the Polish stage, a Fredro masterwork—would make him a teen idol as well.
The play was Maiden’s Vows, or The Magnetism of the Heart (1833), a museum-piece comedy of manners about the fate of two sisters in a country manor whose covenant never to marry goes comically awry. Jarzyna’s inspired concept is to begin the play straight, in Fredro’s typical buttoned-up style; only gradually do mocking cracks begin to ripple through the play’s circumspect façade. Before long his seven-member cast is punctuating emotional moments with impulsive flights of dance—flouncing tangos or wall-slamming dashes à la Pina Bausch. The sister Klara—played by Jarzyna’s favorite leading lady and real-life companion Magdalena Cielecka, a stunning blonde with Carole Lombard timing—appears incongruously in a deep-cut gown with cigarette holder, behaving like Hedda Gabler on a bender. Her once-timid suitor Albin showers naked in a cubicle of frosted glass. Time clicks on fast-forward. The actors careen, hilariously, from style to style as Fredro’s well-mannered speeches are run through the wringer of symbolism, naturalism, expressionism. A blue planet and galactic nebulae swirl portentiously outside the manor windows. In a frenzied finale, Klara and Albin copulate under a blanket in the stark glare of white neon as the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” pounds out at top volume.
The night I saw Magnetism of the Heart at the Rozmaitosci, a well-appointed 250-seat house in a lively central Warsaw neighborhood, I was (with the possible exception of my American companions) the oldest person in the auditorium—by a couple of decades. The mostly student crowd was captivated, and as the play broke open they roared their approval as spontaneously as if they’d been at a rock concert. Clearly they were delighted to witness old Fredro’s public dissing—but they left with a bonus. For all his production’s irreverence, provocation and surface flash, Jarzyna had retained what was most important in Fredro’s comedy: the irrefutable power of attractions of the heart, despite barriers of family, propriety or even (in this unsettling day and age) cosmic interventions. Jarzyna had reinvented a cultural monument that these young Poles had left behind and made it theirs again.
In Polish, Jarzyna means vegetable. Perhaps that prosaic point is not the reason that Jarzyna signs each of his productions with a new pseudonym, but he does so, and that quirk has contributed to his mystique. Some of the aliases are derived from his father’s name, Horst—reviewers not in on the joke were attributing the delights of Tropical Madness to an enfant terrible called Grzegorz Horst d’Albertis. By the time of Unidentified Human Remains, everybody knew who Brokenhorst was. If you believed the poster, Magnetism of the Heart was directed by Sylwia Torsch, and the 1999 Doctor Faustus, the first of Jarzyna’s productions to falter with the critics, was supervised by Das Gemüse. His current production, Festen, based on the Danish film (and slated this summer on the programs of festivals in Avignon, Berlin, Vienna, London, Moscow and Belgrade) gets the cursory sign-off H7.
“I like provoking people,” Jarzyna tells reporters who ask about his aliases. “This is a trait of my personality that was slightly harmful in my childhood. Now I can get away with my passion in the theatre.”
For Jarzyna, that passion was kindled at the knee of the one Polish theatre figure who continued to work relatively unimpeded through the heavily censored years of martial law—director, designer and teacher Krystian Lupa. At 60, Lupa is associated today mainly with Crakow’s Stary Theatre, where in Jarzyna’s years as a philosophy and directing student he served as Lupa’s assistant and watched the older director’s landmark stage adaptations of Musil, Dostoyevsky and Thomas Bernhard. Though little known in the English-speaking theatre world, Lupa is a towering figure, a guru, to the new generation of Polish directors.
“His ideals are completely non-commercial—I can’t imagine an artist who is less American,” says Jarzyna’s colleague Krzystof Warlikowski, who points out that for much of his long career, Lupa’s productions, acclaimed for their delicacy and spiritual resonance, were performed for small, provincial audiences of aficionados. “In his work, Lupa is on a personal trip,” Warlikowski adds admiringly. “You can join it or not.”
Agnieszka Glinska, an exact contemporary of Jarzyna who directs for television and film as well as the stage, puts it even more strongly: “Lupa is a genius. His theatre is magic for me. His actors don’t play, they are.”
What’s surprising to an American observer is not that these young directors pay extravagant homage to Lupa, but that they make no mention at all of the two theatrical masters we know at home as essential icons of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor.
“There is no influence whatsoever on this generation from Grotowski or Kantor,” Warsaw-based critic and dramaturg Margaret Semil declares flatly, upending all sorts of preconceptions. “The work of both these directors has little relevance—in intellectual and artistic terms—for what concerns stage directors today. That’s why it became an international phenomenon instead of a Polish one.”
The directors more or less confirm her judgment. “Grotowski was someone I learned about in theatre history class,” says Glinska with a shrug. “His ideas were interesting, but not close to me.” Only Warlikowski acknowledges that he might owe a debt to Grotowski—a “largely unconscious” one, he says—but he became aware of it only after Peter Brook detected telltale Grotowskian traces in his directorial choices during a year Warlikowski spent with Brook in Paris.
For Jarzyna’s part, the radical ideas of Antonin Artaud have offered more sustenance than those of Grotowski—in his student years, Jarzyna even followed Artaud’s travel routes through Bali and Mexico, attempting to duplicate the aesthetic experiences that shaped his Theatre of Cruelty. But now, in Jarzyna’s third year at the Rozmaitosci, a juncture that finds him caught squarely in the glare of media attention and national expectations, there’s not much time for theoretical pursuits. There was time in March and April for a first-ever visit to the U.S., under the auspices of the State Department’s international visitor program (and through the talent-spotting efforts of impresario Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theatre Development), during which Jarzyna met one-on-one with his counterparts at several major theatres and got a marathon taste of new American playwriting at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival.
Currently, Jarzyna says—in tandem with the tasks of strengthening the Rozmaitosci’s perpetually shaky financial base and shoring up his close-knit company of actors—he’s fantasizing about producing a Mozart opera, but without the music part.
“I want to do a no-opera version of The Magic Flute,” the director offers, thoughtfully stroking a dandyish goatee that disappears sometimes for publicity shoots then reappears a week later. “I’m interested in the dialectic between beauty and the funny use of Masonic ritual, perhaps mixing ballet with operatic theatre. The point is to be discovering new forms.”
And if Jarzyna’s brief and deservedly starstruck past is accurate prologue, those new forms will fold seamlessly into a rich and passionate theatre tradition that has stayed alive through good times and grim times, and isn’t about to cry uncle.
Jim O’Quinn’s visit to Warsaw was supported by the Center for International Theatre Development, directed by Philip Arnoult. The center’s Eastern and Central European Theatre Initiative, which runs through 2005, encourages long-term artistic collaborations between U.S. artistic directors and their newly emerging counterparts in Eastern and Central Europe.
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