SEEP Vol.15 No.3 Fall 1995

volume 15, no.
3
Fall 1995
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A), Graduate Center, City
University of New York. The Institute is Room 1206A, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Editor of
SEEP: Daniel Gerould, CASTA, Theatre Program, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
David Crespy
George Brooker
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR
Jay Plum
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Beth Ouradnick
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Julie Jordan
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson
Leo Hecht
Martha W. Coigney
Alma Law
Stuart Liebman
CAST A Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies
in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 1995 CAST A
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that
desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared
in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in
writing before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately
upon publication.
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No.3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy 5
From the Editors 6
Events 7
Books Received 14
"Approaching Grotowski's Work-Without-Witness" 16
'Lisa Wolford
"Cricoteka: Kantor's (Un)Resting Place in Theatrical History" 26
Jeff Lawson
"Thoroughly Moderne Moscow" 33
Laurence Senelick
"Moscow Narrows its Sights and Hits the Mark:
The 1994-1995 Season" 40
John Freedman
PAGES FROM THE PAST
TARKOVSKY, OR THE BURNING HOUSE
Petr Kral (translated by Kevin Windle)
REVIEWS
"The Comic Struggle for Ideology after Communism:
Ia Petite Apocalypse-Costa-Gavras and the
51
Convert-Kazimierz Kutz" 58
David A. Goldfarb
"Mayakovsky's The Bedbug
Adapted by Snoo Wilson" 63
Elizabeth Swain
"Silviu Purcarete's The Tempest" 67
Marvin Carlson
3
"Antique Puppets and Ageless Tales:
the Czechoslovak-American Marionette
Theatres Production of The White Doe and other
Stories"
Eszter Szalczer
"Havel's The Memorandum at the
Independent Theatre Company"
Julie Gochman and David Crespy
Contributors
Playscripts in Translation Series
70
76
81
82
4 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. IS, No. 3
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and
film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works,
or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo! but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Submissions on
computer disk are strongly encouraged and will receive priority in the
printing queue. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified
after approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITORS
With the current issue Alma Law moves to the Advisory Board of
Slavic and East European Performance and leaves the post of editor which she
had so ably filled for the past nine years. A demanding schedule of
forthcoming publications (see BOOKS RECEIVED for the first of these)
requires that Alma devote full time to her own writing and research. Alma's
expertise in Soviet and Russian theatre, her wide acquaintance with its
practitioners and scholars, her deft and vigilant editorship, and her many
outstanding articles have all been central to the growth and success of Slavic
and East European Performance since the journal started to be published by
CASTA at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
Our work together has been for me personally a source of pleasure
and pride. I could not have asked for a more dynamic, effective and
congenial co-editor. I should feel the loss even more had Alma not assured
me of continuing support and guidance for Slavic and East European
Perfomance from her new position on the Advisory Board.
At this time I also welcome as new associate editors George
Brooker and David Crespy and thank the outgoing team of Patrick
Hennedy and Jay Plum who have dedicatedly served in that capacity since
1991.
Volume 15, no. 3--the last issue of 1995-provides rich and varied
fare, with features on Jerzy Grotowski by Lisa Wolford and on Tadeusz
Kantor by Jeffrey Lawson, articles on the Moscow season by John
Freedman and Laurence Senelick, and, in PAGES FROM THE PAST, the
first section of a three-part study (to be continued in subsequent issues) of
the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky by the Czech writer Petr Kral,
translated by Kevin Windle, plus reviews by David Goldfarb, Marvin
Carlson, and Elizabeth Swain. I urge readers to become contributors by
making submissions.
-Daniel Gerould
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
In New York
In September The Increased Difficulty of Concentration by Vaclav
Havel was performed by New Perspectives Theatre withAl Choy and Pat
Parks, directed by Melody Brooks and Carol Bennett.
Chekhov's one-acts, The Harmfulness of Tobacco, Summer in the
Country, and Grief, were performed in an evening entitled "A Chekhov
Trio" by M.B. Ghaffari (who has worked with Peter Brook and Andrei
Serban) with music by Yukio Tsuji at La Mama from October 12 to 22.
In Novembo:.r Colombi.za 's Suite, four one-acts about the plight of
women during the collapse of the Soviet Union by Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya, was performed by Next Stage at the Mint Space.
Tom Courtenay starred in Moscow Stations, a play based on Moscow
to Petrushki, a novel by Venedikt Y erofeyev, and adapted for the stage by
Stephen Mulrine. The production was directed by Ian Brown at the Union
Square Theatre in October and November.
In an evening entitled, The Magic of Czech Puppetry, two different
marionette shows were performed by the six-man Czechoslovakian
American Marionette Theatre at the Bohemian National Hall in October.
The White Doe, a musical hit from the 18th century was directed by Vlt
Hofejs. In Bremen Town Musicians, The Wandering Egg, and other tales from
Bohemia, Hofejs performed solo as puppeteer/storyteller. See Eszter
Szalczer's review in this issue.
Dark is the Night by Aleksandar Popovic, a Serbian writer, was
directed by Ivana Askovic and performed at La Mama, September 27-
0ctober 1.
Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum, directed by Michelle Gigante,
was presented by the Independent Theatre Company at the House of
7
Candles Theatre from October 18 to November 25. See review by Julie
Gochman and David Crespy in this issue.
Ivana, Princess of Burgundia by Witold Gombrowicz will be
performed at the Horace Mann Theatre on February 9 and 10, 1996, under
the direction of Gail Lerner, and produced under the auspices of the Oscar
Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University.
The Players Forum at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center
presented works by Semion Zlotnikov in a Meet The Playwright Program
under the auspices of the The Eastern European Theatre Company in New
York. Plays read included: The Scenes by the Fountain (Nov. 5, 7 pm), The
Mutants (Nov. 6, 7 pm), and Waltz for the Lonely (Nov. 7, 7 pm) . A full
production of Waltz for the Lonely will be performed at the Tribeca
Performing Arts Center in March.
Second Players Forum's Eastern European Theatre Festival will take
place at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on April 21-May 5. Six
productions from Central and Eastern Europe will be presented with
simultaneous English translations.
In Chicago
Provided by Effie Mihopoulos of This Week ON STAGE and This Month ON
STAGE.
The Single Action Theatre presented A Slav to Fashion (Or "They
Loved Us In Murmansk''), four one acts by Anton Chekhov, at the Shattered
Globe Theatre in April1995, including: On the Harmfulness of Tobacco and
The Celebration directed by Robert Koon; Swan Song directed by Chuck
Coyl; and The Bear directed by Jean Marie Conway.
Gombrowicz 's Ivana, Princess of Burgundia was performed in March
at the Trap Door Theatre, directed by Zbyszek Zasadny with set design by
Krzysztof Babiracki and costumes by Monika Poplawska.
In January 1995, Gianni, jan, johan, john, Juan, Ivan, Jean by Darek
Jakubaszek was performed by Teatre 3/4, a Polish theatre company (formed
in 1992) at the Chopin Theatre. The production was directed by Krzysztof
Rau, music by Bogdan Szczepanski, lyrics by Jerzy Defel.
In January, at LeCafe, Teatro Tout Bagail performed Pushkin's
Mozart and Salieri, directed by Deborah J. Crable, music by Allan Segall.
Film
In New York
In October and November, Cinema Village presented
Theremin-An Electronic Odyssey, written, directed and produced by Steven
Martin, about the Russian inventor of the pioneering electronic instrument
bearing his name.
In August, the Film Forum screened Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising According to Marek Edelman, written, directed and produced by
}olanta Dylewska with music by Jan Kanty Pawluskiewicz. The grainy
black-and-white silent films that make up the visual center of the movie
were taken by the Nazis and are narrated by Marek Edelman, who was
twenty-three years old when the uprising took place. In the words of
Stephen Holden of the The New York Times, "Dry and dispassionate in tone,
'Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising' is a sobering document of
remembrance."
Country Life, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, set
in a sheep ranch in Australia in 1919, written and directed by Michael
Blakemore, was presented in July at Cinema Village.
In November The Film Forum presented the films of Sergei
Paradzhanov including Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), Ashik Kerib
(1988), Little Flower on Stone (1982), The Legend ofSuram Fortress (1984), and
The First Lad (1958).
The Anthology Film Archives in New York presented a
documentary series entitled Stride Soviet! featuring the films of Dziga
Vertov: A Sixth Sense of the World, The Eleventh Year, Man with a Movie
Camera, Enthusiasm, and Three Songs About Lenin, October 20-21.
The Polish Film Festival, Kino Polskie Ill, was presented by the
Polish Community Center of Buffalo, Polish Arts Club, Adam Mickiewicz
Library and Hallwall's on November 2 through November 19, 1995. Films
included Agnieszka Holland's A Woman Alone and Provincial Actors;
9
Andrzej Wajda's The Promised Land; Krzysztof Kie.Slowski 'sA Short Film
A bout Killing, Night Porters Point of View, and A Short Film About Love; and
Last Gyspy in Auschwitz and Everybody Knows Who Stands Behind Whom
directed by Hallwall's Artist-In-Residence, Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz.
From October to January, the Jewish Museum of New York City
presented Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change: 1890-1990, including
works by Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Labas, Mark Antokolsky,
Leonid Pasternak, (father of Boris Pasternak) as well as 44 other artists and
300 works of art.
Performance Events in Europe and elsewhere
Two recent articles in the New York Times reflect on changes that
have occurred in Russia during the Y eltsin administration which threaten
the performing arts.
On 23 July 1995 in an article entitled, "Iron Fist Meets Rubber
Face," the Times described the crackdown on the popular satirical puppet
show "Kukly," a weekly program modeled on Britain's "Spitting Image" and
France's "Les Guignols de Lenfo." The prosecutor general opened a
criminal case against the creators of the show, which is aired on NTV,
Russia's only nationwide independent station. It was the first time since
Boris Y eltsin become president that a law prohibiting insults of high officials
was invoked against a television show. Times reporter Alessandra Stanley
noted that Kukly, in several cases, used references to Russian classics in
drama. During an episode about the Russian invasion of Chechnya the
puppets were dressed like the characters from Lermontov's A Hero of Our
Time which depicted the "fierce warriors of the Caucasus." The dialogue of
the novel was updated to reflect the Chechen fracas. On another occasion
Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths was used as the backdrop for a sketch on
the minimum wage of ten dollars a month. It depicted President Y eltsin and
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as "flophouse bums, drunkenly
rummaging through garbage and singing old Soviet patiotic songs that, for
Russians, recall Stalinist times." The Times quotes Aleksei Pushkov, director
of public affairs at ORT, the state-controlled television network, as saying,
"Definitely, with the election campaign in the offing, television has been
subject to more attention from the authorities. The real question is whether
the authorities plan to use a velvet glove or an iron fist. The Kukly case-
this was an iron fist."
10
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No.3
An article in the Times on 4 August 1995 entitled "In Moscow
Again, Clubs Cater to 'Members Only"' describes the plight of Yuri
Ananyev, a well-established animal trainer who had worked 30 years with
the well-known but recently impoverished Durov Animal Circus. He now
trains laboratory rats to race each other in an exclusive Moscow club called
Grand Dynamo. The club caters to gangsters and the newly rich. Gamblers
come to the club to bet on the rats that scurry through a neon-lit, glass-
encased race course, prompted by a hand bell run by a dwarf dressed as an
18th-century page. The Times quotes Ananyev as stating, "Unfortunately,
the only work these days is here. It is the problem of our lives. Instead of
making art, we have to get involved in gambling." Bulgakov enthusiasts will
be reminded of the cockroach races staged by Artur Arturovich in
Constantinople in the "Fifth Dream" of Flight.
On September 29 and 30 the Polish Institute in Stockholm and
Uppsala University held an international conference, "The Work of
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Its Reception in Sweden." Presentations
included "The well-deserved revenge of fate, or the Swedish reception of
Witkacy" by Andrzej Nils Uggia (University of Uppsala), "The Mother in the
interpretation of Alf Sjoberg at the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm"
by Sverker Ek (University of Umea), "Possibilities for Witkacy's dramas on
the Swedish stage" by Dag Hedman (University of Linkoping), "Strindberg
and Witkiewicz" by Keve Hyj elm (actor and director of the Theatre School
of Stockholm), "Autobiographical elements in Witkacy's novels" by Anna
Mici.riska (editor of the works of Witkacy), "Witkacy and Strindberg, distant
and close" by Lech Sokol (the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy) (See
BOOKS RECEIVED), "Witkacy's theory of the theatre" by Janusz Degler
(University of Wrodaw), and "Witkiewicz on the problems and subject of
philosophy and its place in culture" by Bohdan Michalski (director of the
Polish Institute in Stockholm).
From September 29 to October 27l'Association le Pont Neuf (31,
rue du Pont Neuf, Paris, France 75001) presented an exhibit "La Femme
dans L'Oeuvre de Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz."
Theatre Instituut Nederland, an information, research and
development organization for professional theatre, and De Balie, center for
culture and politics, both located in Amsterdam, have launched The dissident
muse, critical theatre in central and eastern Europe, 194589, a project to
stimulate the reflections on the scope and impact of theatre as a CIVIC
11
in various European societies in the altered circumstances of the post-Cold
War period. A symposium to be held in Amsterdam from November 29 to
December 1, 1995 with performing artists and experts of different
generations from East, Central and Western Europe will consider seven
extensive analytic reports produced by researchers from the former USSR,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, DDR, and from Poland, Hungary and Rumania
regarding the achievement of critical, nonconformist, and dissident theatre
in their respective countries. For more information contact Theater
lnstituut Nederland, Agatha Regeer, P.O. Box 19304, 1000 GH Amsterdam,
the Netherlands, phone +31 20 623 5104, fax +31 20 620 0051, Email:
tinib@gn.apc.org. Or De Balie, Chris Keulemans/Elly Ludenhoff, Kleine-
Gartmanlantsoen 10, 1017 RR Amsterdam, The Netherlands, phone +31 20
623 36 73, fax + 31 20 638 44 89, Email: balie@xs4all. nl.
In an evening entitled, A Very Special Benefit For East Coast Artists
Richard Schechner, Artistic Director hosted A Night of Music featuring
Russian songs (from the East Coast Artist's The Three Sisters by Anton
Chekhov) performed a cappella by ECA company members, the premiere
of a Song Cycle for string quartet and voice including poems by Anna
Akhmatova and music composed by Raph Denzer. The performance took
place on Saturday, November 18 at the NYU Loeb Student Center.
The Anna Akhmatova Museum in Saint-Petersburg, Russia plans
to convene a conference devoted to Marionette Theater of the Symbolist Era
from 4 to 8 June, 1996, conjointly with its international exhibition opening
16 May devoted to the same topic. Contact Keith Tribble at the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, College of Arts &
Sciences, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater Oklahoma, 74078-0602 or
call 405-7 44-5825 for more information.
Five members of the Ukraine Theatrical Institute visited the United
States in October under the auspices of the United States Information
Agency in order to study American Theatre Administration and explore
ways of funding non-profit arts organizations. The group, consisting of
Professors Rostislav Pulypchouk, Igor Bezgin, Aleksey Bezgin, Ms. Tatiana
Tershchenko, and Ms. Julia Dragan, met with members of university theatre
programs m Pittsburgh, Washington, New York, New Haven, and
Binghamton.
12 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No. 3
WITKIEWICZ FEATURED AT THE TOKYO ART
CONFERENCE AT THEATER X
Daniel Gerould
From September 29 to October 4 the Tokyo Art Conference at
Theater X presented a series of performances and symposia entitled
"Passage," taking its central theme from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.
Sponsored by Scorpio Project and produced by Hironobu Oikawa, the
Conference brought together artists, scholars, and critics for an
interdisciplinary, multicultural event that crossed many boundaries in its
exploration of new areas of communication.
Two of the evenings featured stage versions of works by Stanislaw
Ignacy Witkiewicz followed by panel discussions. The Molecular Theatre,
in performances conceived and directed by Shigeyuki T oshima, presented
Funnelled ("Theater of the Mouth"), based on both Wikiewicz's Report on
the Effects of Peyote and Kafka's Letters to Miiena and Facade ("Theater of the
Face"), based on Witkiewicz Rules of the S.l. Witkiewicz Portrait-Painting
Firm in two different Japanese translations of the text.
Toshima's Molecular Theatre is one of the outstanding alternative
theatres in Japan today and has frequently appeared abroad, most recently
in Warsaw, Tallinn, and Helsinki. Dr. Toshima (a psychiatrist as well as a
theatre artist) constructs performance spaces in which meanings are created
not by story, but by the materialization of words. The facade of words, of
faces, and of the stage itself coincide to create the "absolute theatre" that
T oshima proposes. These brilliantly visual productions using the
performers as elements in a total composition in which color, shape, and
movement dominate, can be seen as a contemporary artist's response to
Witkiewicz's theory of Pure Form in the Theatre.
Participants in the lectures and discussions dealing with the
Molecular Theatre and Witkiewicz included theatre critics Akihito Yasumi,
Tadashi Uchino, and Satoshi Yasumi, photographer Chihiro Minato (whose
works were exhibited), and philosopher Yujiro Nakamura, editor of the
book, The Witkiewicz World, as well as the director Toshima and producer
Oikawa. Four participants from abroad featured at the conference were the
French actor and director Pierre Chabert (who has staged Witkiewicz's
Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in Paris) in a performance of Beckett's
Krapp's Last Tape, the Canadian media-artist Hank Bull in his Teiecom-Art,
and Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka who talked about aspects of
Witkiewicz's life and art.
The site of the Tokyo Art Conference, Theater X, with Misako
Ueda as producer, has previously staged works by Bruno Schulz,
Gombrowicz, and Witkiewicz as well as presenting a Witkiewicz Festival in
1993.
13
BOOKS RECEIVED
Braun, Edward. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1995. 347 pages. An enlarged and completely revised
version of Braun's Theatre of Meyerhold of 1979. Based on the most
recent information and research about Meyerhold, contains a new
chapter about Meyerhold's final years, arrest, and execution, a new
conclusion, and 50 new illustrations.
Erdman, Nikolai. A Meeting about Laughter. Sketches, Interludes and
Theatrical Parodies. With Vladimir Mass and Others. Edited and
translated by John Freedman. Luxembourg: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1995. 211 pages. Volume 2 of Russian Theatre
Archives, edited by John Freedman, Leon Gitelman, and Anatoly
Smeliansky. Includes nineteen short pieces written between 1924
and 1968, plus an Appendix containing "The Suicide at the
Vakhtangov Theater: A Document" and "Two Fragments from The
Hypnotist." Includes an Introduction, Note on Translation and
Texts, and 25 illustrations (photographs and posters).
Kantor, Tadeusz. My Creation, My journey. Shigemi Oka and Takashi
Suzuki, eds., Tokimasu Sekiguchi, Supervisor of translation.
Tokyo: Sezon Museum of Art, 1994. 295 pages. Catalogue for the
exhibition of Kantor's work as an artist at the Sezon Museum of
Art, Tokyo October 27-December 24, 1994. Reproductions,
mostly in color, of all 181 works exhibited (paintings, drawings,
objects, and stage settings). Includes photographs and documents,
Kantor's texts, essays about Kantor in Japanese, plus three entries
in English: "Tadeusz Kantor: The Way of the Artist" by
Mieczyslaw "Diary of Tadeusz Kantor's Life" by Anna
Halczak, and a bibliography.
Law, Alma and Mel Gordon. Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor
Training in Revolutionary Russia. Jefferson, MI: McFarland &
Company, 1995. 264 pages. Includes photographs, notes,
bibliography and index. Gathered from private Moscow archives,
this is the first book-length study of Meyer hold's stylized training
method in practical detail, as well as Eisenstein's theoretical analysis
of Biomechanics.
Sokol, Lech. Witkacy i Strindberg: Dalecy i bliscy (Witkacy and Strindberg:
distant and close). Wrodaw: Wiedza o Ku!turze, 1995. 447 pages.
Contains the following chapters: Witkiewicz's Strindberg, the
metaphysics of sex, hermaphroditic and androgynous characters,
the battle of the sexes, the drama of initiation, and conclusion, plus
a seven-page summary in English and index.
Tsivian, Yuri. Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception. London:
Routledge, 1994. Translated by Alan Bodger with a foreword by
Tom Gunning. Edited by Richard Taylor. 273 pages. Includes
discussions of early cinema architecture and the evolution of the
social composition of cinema, projection technique as a factor in
aesthetic perception, the acoustics of cinema performance, the
reception of interference, and shifting textual boundaries. Contains
illustrations, notes, bibliography and index.
Wilson, Snoo. The Bedbug (adapted from the play by Vladimir
Mayakovsky), in Making Scenes 2 Four Short Plays for Young Actors.
Methuen New Theatrescripts in association with the Royal
National Theatre. London: Methuen, 1995. Includes "The
Grotesque Proletarian and Promenade Revolution," an interview
with Snoo Wilson by Jim Mulligan. For a review of the play in
performance, see Elizabeth Swain, "Mayakovsky's The Bedbug
Adapted by Snoo Wilson" in this issue.
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy. Teatr i inne pisma o teatrze (Theatre and other
writings about the theatre). Ed. Janusz Degler. Warsaw:
Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1995. 681 pages. Volume 9 of
the complete works of Witkiewicz contains his 1921 volume
Theatre plus all his other essays and articles on the theatre. Includes
422 pages of Witkiewicz texts, plus over 200 pages of notes, textual
commentary and variants, and an index of names, titles, and works
by Witkiewicz.
15
APPROACHING GROTOWSKI'S WORK-WITHOUT-WITNESS
Lisa Wolford
Performance theorists who examine the development of Jerzy Grotowski's
research emphasize the implications and significance of his decision at the
initiation of the paratheatrical phase to abandon the formal structure of
theatre production, eliminating the distinction between actors and
spectators. Even Eugenio Barba, who has always been among Grotowski's
most steadfast and visible supporters, finds himself at a loss when attempting
to categorize the Polish researcher's current work. "I have been told that
this is not a performance," wrote Barba in response to a rare public session
held at Grotowski's Pontedera Workcenter in 1990, "yet I see 'people who
are acting.' If what is happening here is only for them, then why am I here?
Why was I invited and why did I come?" (1995:99)
The question of how to situate Grotowski's ongoing research
remains contested, at times explosively so. Although he has not premiered
a new production since 1969 and clearly has no intention of returning to
public activity, Grotowski remains active in a multi-faceted role as creative
artist, performance theorist, artistic pedagogue and pioneer of innovative
performance genres. Figures as diverse as Jan Kott, Robert Brustein and
Charles Marowitz have questioned the validity of his post-theatrical work
on the grounds that it offers little that can be put to practical use in more
conventional forms of theatre practice. Such criticism reflects a common,
almost pervasive thread of negat ive response to Grotowski's post-theatrical
activity, focusing on the dubious legitimacy of work that utilizes artistic
means but is not mounted for public view. How is the value of such work
to be judged if it is not assessed by spectators and critics? What does it serve,
if its primary purpose is not to communicate with an audience? What is the
use of the actor's talent if the work does not culminate in a publicly-
accessible production?
Grotowski's current project, "Art as Vehicle," was initiated in 1986
at the Centro di Lavoro di Jerzy Grotowski in Pontedera, Italy. Together
with his essential collaborator, African-American performer Thomas
Richards, and a stable research team of highly-gifted artists, Grotowski
investigates the affective capacity of selected performative artifacts, focusing
primarily on ancient songs from Afro-Caribbean traditions. This work is in
some sense an outgrowth of Grotowski's previous research in Objective
Drama, which was founded on the premise that certain performative
elements derived from culturally t raditional practices exert a precise impact
on the physiological and energetic state of the practitioner. Objective Drama
was concerned with selecting and distilling such elements, as well as with
verifying their efficacy. "Art as Vehicle," which involves a much deeper and
16
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No. J
more thorough investigation of the impact of these elements, is premised on
what Grotowski terms an "itinerary in verticality" (1995:134), exploring
performance as a means which can enable the doer to "pass from the so-
called coarse level...to a level of energy more subtle or even toward the
higher connection" (1995:125).
The title of the project was taken from an article by Peter Brook
which evocatively summarizes Grotowski's aims:
It may thus be said that in another epoch, this work
would have been like the natural evolution of a great
spiritual tradition. Because the great spiritual traditions of
the whole history of mankind have always needed forms.
Nothing is worse than the need of the beyond taken in a
vague, generalized way. In the great traditions one can
see, for monks, who looking for a solid support
for their inner search, made pottery or those who found
music as a vehicle. It seems to me that today we face
something which existed in the past but was forgotten
over centuries and centuries; this is, that one of the
vehicles which allows man to have access to another level
and to serve more rightly his function in the universe is-as
the mean of understanding-the performing art in all its
forms (34).
In stating his conviction regarding the "living, permanent relation-
ship ... between the work of research which is without public witness and the
immediate nourishment that this can give to the public work," Brook
suggests that the relation of Grotowski's Workcenter to the broader realm
of theatre practice is analogous to that between the monastery and the
Church. Brook attests that the hidden work of the laboratory exerts a
strong and vital influence on other forms of theatre work, even if this
influence appears indirect.
Grotowski posits that performative art can be viewed as a chain
with many links. At one extreme, he places the normal artistic theatre, the
Theatre of Performances. At the other end of the chain, almost invisible
from the vantage of conventional theatre, Grotowski situates the closed
work of "Art as Vehicle" (Grotowski 1995:118). From the point of view of
technique, the work of "Art as Vehicle" has much in common with that of
artistic theatre. As Zbigniew Osinski observes, "precisely because dramatic
techniques are the vehicle, they must be mastered to perfection (1991:103).
In an extension of Brook's discussion, Osinski notes that the initiatory
aspect of Grotowski's work, which has been discernible since the earliest
phase of the director's activity, is now made explicit (1991:103). He sees
17
18
J erzy Grotowski, Chicago IL
April1995
Grotowski's renewed emphasis on technique as a necessary point of balance,
strengthening the rigor and structure of the work as it moves ever more
deeply into investigation of human interiority. Grotowski himself has said
that the work of "Art as Vehicle" is even more precise than that of the
Laboratory Theatre; following his experiments in participatory theatre and
active culture, he found it necessary to "take up again the old, heavy burden
of precision and discipline" that was the legacy of his Theatre of Productions
phase (1990). He cautions that however similar his current work may seem
to that of the Laboratory Theatre in their shared emphasis on artisanal
competence, the two projects must not be conflated. "This is not a return
toward art as presentation; it is the other extremity of the same chain!"
(Grotowski 1995:121)
Despite its emphasis on impeccability of craft, "Art as a Vehicle"
differs radically from conventional performance in its goals and orientation.
Grotowski highlights one distinction when he speaks of the respective places
of montage (Grotowski 1993:130-31). Art as presentation is concerned with
creating an image and/ or effect in the perception of the spectator. In "Art
as Vehicle," by contrast, the spectator has no established place; the work is
directed entirely toward the impact of the songs and performance techniques
on "the body, the heart and the head of the doer" (1995:122). The work of
"Art as Vehicle" shares with the participatory phases of Grotowski's
research an obliteration of mimesis. There are no actors in Grotowski's
artistic hermitage, only doers, and nothing in the work can be interpreted
as "character" or "role." "The Performer ... is a man of action. He is not a
man who plays another. He is a dancer, a priest, a warrior: he is outside
aesthetic genres" (Grotowski 1988:36). According to Osinski, Grotowski
has constructed a form of work so spiritual, so pure, that to describe it in
the vocabulary of production would be a violation (1991:102).
"Art as Vehicle" fundamentally challenges contemporary, secular
notions of performance as entertainment, with the attendant expectation
that the value of the work can be determined only in the context of its
reception by outside observers. Instead, Grotowski seeks to reconstitute a
type of performance practice which he describes in terms of "art as a way of
knowledge" (Sullivan). He suggests that performative techniques can operate
in a manner analogous to a primitive elevator by means of which "the doer
lifts himself toward a more subtle energy, to descend with this to the
instinctual body" (1995:125).
1
From this vantage, the work of "Art as
Vehicle" is perhaps better understood in relation to traditional ritual
practices such as that of the Mevlevi dervish whose dance, precisely
structured and impeccably performed, does not find its meaning in the
perception of the spectator, but in its function as a form of embodied
prayer. "What is at stake," observes Osinski, "is not a performance or its
19
evaluation .... the game is played for different stakes. Surely the highest
possible" (1991:107).
To return to the question of what such impeccable craft might
signify if public audiences are not granted access to the work, there are two
distinct 'vantage points from which one can approach a response. The first
is more explosive, because it is founded on the premise that the
transformational impact of the performative material on the doers is
sufficient as an end unto itself. During his Theatre of Productions phase,
Grotowski used the structure of theatre to address sacred issues and themes;
such a strategy is by no means unique, and the work remained consistently
(if subversively) within the framework of Polish Catholicism. In "Art as a
Vehicle," Grotowski's aim is far more radical; he appropriates the means and
structure of performance to serve an explicitly esoteric goal, establishing a
type of performance which attempts to reconstitute certain elements
associated with ancient Mystery schools. This particular transgression of
boundaries is not an issue of experimentation with form or genre, but rather
problematizes a fundamental division between sacred and secular (within
which realm performance is generally positioned in contemporary Western
culture). Grotowski's current research is even more suspect in that it
corresponds to no recognizable orthodoxy, drawing from various North
African and Near Eastern traditions. Osinski suggests that the only
Occidental practitioner in the 20th century to develop a concrete
metaphysical technique comparable to that of Grotowski was G.I. Gurdjieff
(1990:278); one could hardly imagine a more controversial model for
companson.
To suggest that Grotowski's activities can be legitimated only
through public performance negates the fundamental premises of his
research. The Workcenter, which Osinski refers to as an "artistic/creative
hermitage" (1991:99), functions in a manner analogous to a monastic
community, insofar as the locus of significance of the group's work lies in
the impact of the day-to-day praxis on the community's members, the doers
who have elected to pursue self-evolution by means of a long-term
commitment to "Art as Vehicle."
In an early interview, Grotowski said he believed that true
creativity is possible only for those who are "condemned to create. It must
be for us the only thing possible in life, the essential task" (1968:45).
Participants at the Pontedera Workcenter, who commit to arduous work for
which they receive no financial remuneration, must surely be "condemned"
in the sense Grotowski evokes. One can endure the demands of this work
only if motivated by a true compulsion. The Workcenter addresses the needs
of a very limited segment of the population--individuals who have both the
capacity and the desire (one might almost call it a vocation) to work in the
specialized context of Grotowski's creative hermitage. But the needs of those
Jerzy Grotowski, Chicago IL
April1995
21
few are legitimate, and the Workcenter is perhaps the only institution
currently existing which investigates the affective capacities of performance
in so profound a way.
In each of the separate phases of Grotowski's research, the "former
stage director" (as he prosaically calls himselD has repeatedly redefined and
reinscribed the boundaries of performance practice. He has recurrently
questioned and challenged the category of theatre, not in order to pursue
formal innovation as an end unto itself, but to subvert the conventional
form in such a way that it might more adequately address his underlying
goals. To view Grotowski's current work solely in terms of the paradigms
and criteria of theatre-as-aesthetic-performance reifies an extremely limiting
definition of the range and purpose of performative phenomena.
Grotowski would never suggest that work beyond the boundaries
of aesthetic performance should replace artistic theatre, nor has he ever
attempted to "convert" artists whose needs are well-served by other forms
of professional work. He has said that the long chain of performing arts
requires many Theatres of Presentation in order to flourish, and only a very
small number that pursue Art as Vehicle (1990). Although he has long
abandoned public production, Grotowski maintains the highest respect for
a number of contemporary stage directors, and was moved to rapture by
Andre Gregory's production of Uncle Vanya. Even during the most recent
phase of his work, Grotowski acknowle.dges that one of his objectives was
to share with Maud Robart, leader of the second research team based at the
Pontedera Workcenter, everything he had learned about the craft of stage
directing; participants in Robart's work group were consistently addressed
as actors, with the assumption that they would eventually return to public
performance.
Grotowski himself acknowledges that a project such as "Art as
Vehicle" would be of limited value if it were entirely cut off from the
outside world. "This work is not destined for spectators; however, from
time to time, the presence of witnesses can be needed. On one hand, so that
the quality of the work is tested and, on the other, so that it's not a purely
private matter, useless to others" (1995:131). The solution Grotowski
proposes is a "School of demonstration," which he associates with
traditional initiatory practices in which performance was used as a means to
instruct devotees or to remind them, in a tangible way, of the Mysteries that
had been revealed to them (Slowiak). Grotowski's Workcenter hosts
periods of practical exchange involving observation and analysis with young
theatre companies who present examples of their own activities (both
training and creative work) and witness the research of Grotowski's
collaborators. The visiting companies do not work actively with artists
from the Workcenter; their exchange is discursive, dialogic, based on the
creative work of the separate groups (Grotowski 1995:131). More than sixty
22
theatre groups have visited the Pontedera Workcenter since Grotowski and
his collaborators initiated this form of meeting.
In terms of dynamics of reception, this structure is in some sense
analogous to Odin Teatret's work with barter, although in the case of
Grotowski's .work all partners in the dialogue are theatre professionals
rather than random spectators.
2
As in the format of Odin's barter work,
such a dynamic disrupts the conventionally passive role of the spectator and
dissociates performance from the realm of economic exchange. These
encounters are relatively brief; Grotowski insists that there must be no
grounds for misunderstanding that these visitors are in any way his
"disciples." The purpose of these meetings is not to change the orientation
of the visiting companies, to "convert" them to a Grotowskian line of
research beyond the boundaries of conventional theatre practice, but rather
to address certain principles of craft, which Grotowski maintains are valid
at both extremities of the chain. "Art as vehicle poses in practice questions
linked to craft as such, legitimate on either extremity of the chain of
performing arts ... " (Grotowski 1995:133). He asserts that such exchange
demonstrates one way in which his work "more or less isolated, can still
maintain an alive relation in the field of theatre" (1995: 132). He observes
that both extremities of the chain of performing arts, Art as Presentation
and Art as Vehicle, "belong to the same large family. A passage between
them should be possible: of the technical discoveries, of the artisanal
consciousness. It is needed that all this can pass along, if we don't want to
be completely cut off from the world" (1995: 134).
Thus Grotowski's work, even in its most apparently reclusive and
esoteric form, has never been entirely without witness. In the work of the
paratheatrical period, the spectator was recast as co-participant; in the
current work, she is addressed as a colleague who is invited to engage in
dialogue on the level of performance craft. Admittedly, the spectator in this
context is deliberately selected, yet even during the Theatre of Productions
phase, Grotowski attempted to limit and to some extent control t he
composition of the audience--a factor which created controversy even then.
In a recent conference at Northwestern University, Grotowski
answered a question posed by a South African director regarding the
problem of isolation in the research of the closed laboratory by
acknowledging that withdrawal from the world should be neither
permanent nor absolute. "I am very much against anyt hing that suggests the
spirit of the convent," he said of the community that has formed in relation
to his current work, stating that he frequently encourages young actors to
leave the research team after a year or at most two, even if this goes against
the interests of the work itself.' He concluded by drawing an analogy to
The Well hexagram of the I Chmg, noting that even if the well has been dug
23
and the water is pure, unless people come to drink the water, it will spoil
and become a place where only fish can live.
Notes
1
In art as presentation, by contrast, the performance as "elevator" works to
transport the spectator from one state to another-
2See Watson 1993 for a discussion of barter as it is practiced in the work of
Odin Teatret.
3
Privately, he acknowledged that this was also in the best interest of the
participants, as too long a sojourn in the protected atmosphere of the
Workcenter could cause people to "loose their claws," making it more
difficult for them to survive in the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barba, Eugenio
1995 The Paper Canoe. New York: Routledge.
Brook, Peter
1988 "Art as a Vehicle." Workcenterofjerzy Grotowski, 31-35.
Pontedera, Italy: Centro per Ia Sperimentazione e Ia Ricerca
Teatrale. Privately distributed pamphlet.
Grotowski, J erzy
1995 Conference at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, April18.
1995 "From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle." In Thomas
Richards, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, New York:
Routledge.
1990 "Ensemble Since Stanislavski." Lecture, UC-Irvine, May 27.
1988 "Performer." Workcenter of jerzy Grotowski, 36-41. Pontedera,
Italy: Centro per Ia Sperimentazione e Ia Ricerca Teatrale.
Privately distributed pamphlet.
1987 "Tu es le fil s de quelqu 'un." TDR: A journal of Performance
Studies (T115), Vol. 31, no. 3:30-41.
Osinski, Zbigniew
24
SLavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No.3
Osinski, Zbigniew
1991 "Grotowski Blazes the Trails." TDR: A journal of Performance
Studies (T129), Vol. 35, no. 1:95-112.
1990 "La t radizione di Reduta in Grotowski e nel Teatro Labora-
torio." Teatro e Storia, Vol. 5, no. 2: 259-300.
Sullivan, Dan.
1983 "A Prophet of the Far Out," Los Angeles Times, 2 October: 1,
42.
Slowiak, James
1995 Personal communication with author. New York, March 17.
Watson, Ian
1993 Towards a Third Theatre. London: Routledge.
25
CRICOTEKA: KANTOR'S (UN)RESTING PLACE IN
THEATRICAL HISTORY
By Jeff Lawson
When Tadeusz Kantor died on December 8, 1990, his theatrical art
went with him. No one in Teatr Cricot 2 was artist enough to carry on his
work, much less take his place in performance. Nor did Kantor provide for
such an artist. He did not train his actors; he thought they just played them-
selves in performance. They were not, therefore, embodied with the
"Kantorian" performance technique that would allow them to pursue their
own life in art, much less to perpetuate his. They didn't even have the
wherewithal to create a Kantor-inspired, collective work that would have
kept his art alive; for Kantor just used them, not unlike marionettes, to fulfll
his artistic vision. Moreover, it was a vision that did not express itself in the
kind of plays or scenarios which, as represented by other theatre artists,
would thereby disseminate itself. Finally, Kantor left no account of aspects
that were key to the staging of his art. He wrote nothing about how he
built his distinctive stage objects and costumes. He did not speak to how he
used music to structure his productions into artistic wholes or how he mani-
pulated music to set up if not evoke the powerful emotional reactions of his
performances. Nor did he write about how he used light to create and
define the space of his performances or the role it played in giving his
scenography the distinctive color, tone, and texture that he called the reality
of the lowest rank. Kantor did little to secure himself a traditional place in
theatre history.
Cricoteka
Instead, he created a Cricoteka, his archive and museum in Cracow,
Poland, whose holdings he hoped would keep his presence alive in the world
of theatrical art.
1
The archive takes up a large room on the ground floor of
No. 5 of the Gothic rowhouses that run the length of Kanonicza, a narrow
cobblestone street in the southern part of Cracow's Old Town. Across the
corridor is the administrative office of The Center for Cricot 2, which over-
sees the activities of the theatre; the cellar space of this building served
Kantor as a museum for mounting exhibitions of his stage objects, costumes,
and even pages from his theoretical writings. A few doors away from the
Cricoteka is a museum dedicated to the work of the great Symbolist artist
26
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 15, No. 3
and playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski; across from it is a plaza commemor-
ating the art of the medieval master sculptor Wit Stwosz. Carmelite and
Jesuit monasteries of the Catholic Church are nearby; just north lies
Jagiellonian University, the second oldest university in Europe. Kanonicza
street ends at the base of the hill from which rises the majesty of Wawel
Castle, the seat of government for the first five hundred years of Poland's
history, which today holds the entombed remains of its kings, honored
poets, and such twentieth century heroes as Marshall Pilsudski. Everyday
I went to the Cricoteka, which I did from September 1989 to June 1990, the
streets of this culturally and spiritually rich neighborhood were alive with
double columns of monks, priests, or nuns heading off to some service or
another, small knots of students making their way to and from classes, or
groups of tourists heading from the city center of Cracow's Old Town to
visit Wawel Castle.
The story of how Kantor came to this space begins in the 1960s.
It was a time when, in exchange for the government's restoration of war-
and time-ravaged buildings along Kanonicza, the Church turned over a few
of the rooms at No. 5 to the city for use as artists' exhibition spaces; and so
they served Cracow's artists through the 1970s. In 1979, Kantor's artistry
won him the patronage of the city of Florence, Italy to create the work that
would become Wielopole, w ~ e l o p o l e The Florence city government also
provided the artist with a place to serve him as a Florence Cricoteka. Not
long after, the Polish Government, its Ministry of Culture and Art, and the
Cracow city government turned over the exhibition spaces of No. 5
Kanonicza to Kantor and provided him with the necessary monies to run an
archive and museum in his native country. The Cricoteka opened on
January 19, 1980 with an exhibition entitled "Tadeusz Kantor's Cricot 2
Theatre in the Years 1955-1980"; the Florence Cricoteka opened shortly
thereafter in February 1980, with much less fanfare, and closed not long
after Kantor returned home to Cracow. Kantor hired an archivist, Anna
Halczak, and even willed to her the future of the Cricoteka when he died.
However, Krzysztof PleSniarowicz, an associate professor at Jagiellonian
University who has had a long association in promoting Kantor's art, was
chosen in April1994 to oversee the archive's activities.
The Cricoteka was Kantor's "Ithaca," the center of his theatrical
universe. Whenever he was in Cracow, he spent his days in his archive
meeting with his performers, working with his technicians, and talking with
writers and admirers. To this day, students from Jagiellonian University's
theatre department go there to visit, as do scholars from around the world.
For the Cricoteka holds what remains of Kantor's theatrical art. It houses
27
reviews and critical articles written in response to the provocation of
Kantor's performances; collected from around the world, they make up the
bulk of the archive's holdings. Also collected are accounts of the press
conferences, public meetings, and interviews Kantor held to discuss his art.
A large number of production photographs are in the Cricoteka and these,
along with a few videotape recordings, provide visual documentation for all
of Kantor's performances with Teatr Cricot 2. There are also many
programs, posters, handbills, and even some tickets which evidence when
and where a particular performance took place and which players were
involved. Yet, the Cricoteka's two most important holdings are Kantor's
theoretical writings, many of which are unpublished, untranslated, and
found only in the Cricoteka, and some of the stage objects and costumes of
his productions, which he stored once he had played a production for the
last time.
Kantor's Legacy
This material is Kantor's legacy to theatrical art. When he housed
it in the Cricoteka, he cast that legacy within the context of his most
universally acclaimed phase of work: the Theatre of Death.
This entailed his staging the Cricoteka in a Theatre of Death
setting. Black panelled flats make up a box set of a reading room. In it sits
an old metal-legged table and the kind of beatup wooden foldingchairs he
has used in his productions. Everything that comes into that reading room
is clothed in black. Written texts are in black paper folders; photographs are
matted in black; and everything comes in and out of black, cloth-covered
boxes.
The Theatre of Death context is most evident, however, in each of
the artifacts that are stored in this black coffinbox of an archive. For each
has been cast on the same conception of memory that guided Kantor in the
creation of the works that made up his Theatre of Death. It is therefore
worth briefly retelling Kantor's conception of memory and its workings.
He thought that every memory was not unlike a photographic
negative. For memory recorded everyday life with all the finality of a
photograph; like a negative, each memory record was transparent, for
through it could be seen the unique movement or pose or singular sound
heard embraced the whole life event of which it was a record. In recalling
any memory record however, the workings of memory never brings forth
anything like what was recorded. Rather, it overlays and repeats each
28
memory record along with others. All that can ever be recalled of the past,
then, are composite memory/history-informed images. Consequently,
Kantor the rememberer stood at the side of the stage as personas showed up
in his Theatre of Death productions like You-Know-Who did in Let the
Artists Die. Memories overlaid with memories-Poland's Marshall Pilsudski,
in the person of his wife Maria Stangret-Kantor, sat astride the skeletal-horse
remains of his favorite charger, dressed in a tattered and worn uniform of his
First Brigades, his several generals arrayed around him as they were during
his funeral cortege only to then stagger and fall as if shot down from behind.
All of this took place as a dirge tempo version of the march "We, of the First
Brigade" blared overhead from the loudspeakers. Instead of a psychoanalytic
perspective, which sees memories of the past, particularly repressed ones,
rising up from the unconscious to impress themselves onto a subject's
present, Kantor suggests that the past is rewritten by the present, its photo-
negatives of memory reshuffled and read through on every present occasion
when remembrance takes place.
Kantor cast the holdings of the Cricoteka, which he meant to
preserve and disseminate the memories of his work, on this very same sense
of memory. This most obviously occurs in his having stored everything,
and thus overlaid it, in a black that impresses a decidedly Theatre of Death
frame over how it is read.
It shows up significantly in the historical accounts by which Kantor
wanted his theatrical art to be remembered. The one entitled "My Way
Towards The Theatre of Death," published in 1978 by International Theatre
Yearbook in Warsaw, is typical. In it, Kantor recounts artistic projects
which he furthered during each of his carefully delineated phases of
theatrical art. As he does so, he shows what he alone among Poland's avant-
garde discovered-all of which inexorably set the stage for his artistic
triumph, The Dead Class.
Kantor's chronologies, as an intimate perception of his artistic
career, provide a fascinating history. Unfortunately, he goes on to use these
accounts to support the untenable claim that he anticipated much that came
to be internationally regarded as some of the most important aspects of late
twentieth century avant-garde art. He thinks that his conception of a
reality of the lowest rank, which is not much different from what certain
Italian artists in the 1960s called arte povera, was foreseen in the clandestine
production of Stanislaw Wyspianski's The Return of Odysseus he staged
during World War II. This production, he also asserts, anticipated the
happening because it was the first time anyone ever annexed real, found, and
ready-made objects, along with performers, to create real environments. As
29
30
... \ \
~ 2 ~ r ~
, .B-.t.l.a:J.)',..,
Figure 1. The central, sculptural figure Kantor built for his 1942
clandestine staging of Juliusz Slowacki's Balladyna.
Plesniarowicz charitably sees it, this is all the consequence of Kantor's
ongoing artistic self-inventions. I want to suggest, however, that such
inventions are a consequence of a theory of memory. And the memory that
turns up most in Kantor's rememberings is his desire and need to have been
one of the most original of late twentieth century artists. Even his partytura,
the descriptive accounts of how he wanted the singular production that
expressed the artistic project he marked out with each phase of work
remembered, were very much a composite of remembrances overlaid on top
of remembrances. Since many of these partytura were completed in the late
seventies, it is the considerable light of Kantor's successful The Dead Class
that shines through them and makes them memorable.
Kantor's rewriting of his artistic past turned up in his rebuilding of
several stage objects for the Cricoteka, and all on the workings of Theatre
of Death memory. In Figure Number 1 is seen Kantor's remembrance of
the central, sculptural figure he built for his 1942 clandestine staging of
Juliusz Slowacki's Balladyna. It is his conception of Goplana, the central
character of the drama. A large, silver-white, luminous sculpture, he meant
for it to undercut the theatrical tradition of using an attractive leading lady
to play this role. Formist-inspired, it suggests a face, the single hole running
through it being its eye and a semi-circular cut-out beneath the hole its
mouth. However, the remembrance shown in this figure has been overlaid
with those of the Theatre of Death right down to the two, dark, rounded
stovebolts heads at the end of every weathered, worn, and stressed piece of
lumber of the "Theatre of Death" platform on which the figure sits. Then,
he gave this redrawing the date of the production during which the original
object appeared- 1942-4- not the date on which he redrew it. When
such drawings turn up in print, as they do even in Cricoteka publications,
it suggests to the reader that the object depicted is just like the one that
appeared in performance. This leads to much confusion about what is truly
original and unique in Kantor's theatrical art.
1
On the face of it, the Cricoteka stored the artifacts of the theatrical
art Kantor created with Teatr Cricot 2, it was their final resting place.
When he created the Cricoteka, Kantor did everything he could to make
them take up their place in the inexorable progression of artistic
achievements that he saw leading to his Theatre of Death. Yet, overlaid and
read through by the workings of memory, these remains are unsettled if not
unsettling. They are so interweaved with remembrances, hopes, and
expectations that they will never fall into neatly finished histories and
accounts. They thereby truly touch on the reality that Kantor thought was
the substance of his art: the Reality of the Lowest Rank. For they
31
sidestepped his attempt to make them useful and purposeful in his telling the
history of his theatrical art.
Notes
1
Cricot was a name used by a group of Cracovian artists who created
cabaret-theatre performances during the years between the World Wars.
Kantor adopted their name for his theatre company, added a 2 after it, and
thereby honored their work and grounded his theatrical art in their
tradition of performance. Cricot, coincidentally, is an inversion of the
Polish phrase "To cyrk" which means, "This is a Circus": To cyrk < >
Kryc ot = Cricot, with the c's in Cricot pronounced with a hard, "k" sound
rather than the "ts" sound of the Polish c, as in Cyrk [Tsyrk].
Kantor came up with the name Cricoteka by turning the word Cricot into
a prefix and adding it to the ending of the Polish word for library: Cricot +
[biblio]teka = Cricoteka. He had previously used this practice of coining
words from Cricot when he named certain of his short theatrical works,
"Cricotages," with the -ages suffix resounding of artistic practices that were
important to his art: assemblages, collages, and his own emballages
[packagings].
In this vein, perhaps theatrical work created to honor Kantor's theatrical art,
such as Teatr Cricot 2's posthumous performances of Today is My Birthday
and The Dead Class, might best be called "Cricommages" (Cricot +
hommage).
2
To take the most readily available example. The caption to Figure 1 in
Michal Kobialka's study of Kantor's theatrical art in journey Through
Other Spaces reads: The Return of Odysseus (1944) (Kobialka 1993:272).
Kobialka suggests, thereby, that the photograph is of the original, 1944
set and goes on to uses it to substantiate his discussion of Kantor's
clandestine production. Yet, the photograph is of a mockup that Kantor
made of how he remembered the setting (When Bablet used the
photograph in the first volume of Les Voies de la Creation which
he devoted to Kantor's art, he was careful to note that it was a mockup
(Bablet 1983:27)); Kantor even remembered into the photograph one of
the three lamps that hung from the ceiling for The Dead Class and for
Wielopole, Wielopole.
32
THOROUGHLY MODERNE MOSCOW
by Laurence Senelick
A curious accompaniment to the triumph of capitalism in present-
day Russia is a fascination with the Silver Age. Not that Ivanov, Blok and
symbolism have gained new adherents. Rather, as the last period of luxury,
elegance and conspicuous consumption before the onslaught of war and
revolution, it has a natural attraction for the nouveaux riches. Studies of
indigenous art nouveau, the so-called russkij modern, are much in demand,
and the word modern itself is as trendy as mod was in England in the 1960s,
a token of sophistication and being with-it.
In the theatre, this has some surprising effects. The Bat Cabaret has
reopened in the premises of the GITIS theatre, and, although its stout
compere Grigory Gurvich is a pale shadow of Nikita Balief and its program
is a strange melange of Edith Piaf, Arkady Raikin, Elvis Presley and tap
dancing, the general effect is invigorating. One of the latest additions to the
vocabulary is step, -- not steppe meaning the vast Russian plain, but tap, a
current craze.
Despite a glut of somewhat outdated American plays (the
predictable Williams, O'Neill, Inge and Miller as well as works by Lanford
Wilson, Dennis Patrick and Paul Zindel), the drama of the Silver Age is
being discovered and resuscitated. The lashings of Dostoevsky, Hamsun,
Strindberg and even Artsybashev bring to mind Moscow repertoires
between 1905 and the outbreak of World War I. Just as two years ago
Ostrovsky was the favorite Russian playwright, partly from nostalgia and
partly because he provided an introduction to a native form of capitalism,
the present favorite is Leonid Andreev. Andreev, who was all but a literary
non-person during the Soviet era, now bestrides the Moscow stage, as plays
neglected since the Revolution are getting a hearing.
To some degree, this is because Andreev deals with pathological
states of mind, especially neurotic sexuality. It is now axiomatic that
glasnost' released the Russian stage from its former puritanism. Like Lear,
directors declared, "Let copulation thrive." Nudity, so-called deviance and
graphic displays of coitus abounded. (For the record, the first full frontal
male nudity appeared in Wiseman, the Lenkom's version of Ostrovsky's
classic No Fool like a Wise Fool; when Glumov confesses his duplicity in the
last act, he strips to the buff.) What Andreev has to offer is an unbeatable
combination of debauchery and style modern.
This is blatant in the new production of Andreev's Katerina
33
lvanovna (1912) at the aptly-named Teatr Modern, run by Svetlana Vragova,
now in its seventh season in new premises. The play, subtitled "a new
drama for a new theatre," tells of the high-strung wife of a member of the
Duma who is so shattered by her husband's unjust accusations of infidelity
that she does indeed take a lover, and by the finale has so descended the scale
of depravity that she wallows in bohemian orgies while her husband looks
on. It is not easy to determine whether the misogyny or the misanthropy
of this sub-Dostoevskian penny-dreadful is uppermost.
The Modern has bestowed on it a lavish environmental staging,
taking advantage of both its entire theatre building and a munificent subsidy
from the Ispolin corporation. (All new productions have their corporate
sponsors nowadays, fully acknowledged in the playbill.) The set designers,
L. Nagolova and M. Kruchenko, have varied the locales to suit the space.
Act One takes place in a small dining-room, deeper than it is wide, lined by
doors to other chambers, and set on a smallish stage at one end of a smallish
room. The sense of claustrophobia is patent. After a half-hour's interval,
the audience moves to a slightly larger space, where an even deeper but
narrower stage depicts a sun-drenched morning room, its floor strewn with
apples. The fact that the upstage door to this set opens into a corridor
leading t o the back of the building allows the director to provide some
stunning effects of approaching and retreating maskers.
The last two acts, after another leisurely interval, take place in the
theatre proper: t he stage, opened out to its full extent, presents the studio of
a fashionably decadent artist: lined with mirrors, covered by a glass ceiling,
and studded with genuine art nouveau antiques, it reeks money. An Aleister
Crowley-like black mass in Act IV may seem tame by Western standards,
but in Moscow is t he epitome of perversion, especially since a ten-year-old
boy is one of the officiants. This is Dallas Slavic-style.
I was there on opening night, an invitation-only affair for critics,
sponsors and similar V.I.P's. The money spilled from the stage to the
auditorium, for, after the performance, a lavish banquet was held in the
buffet, and hired cars laid on to whisk the spectators back home. For all
the enthusiasm of the sponsors, the critics maintained a mild scepticism
about the whole enterprise. Still, the acting was very strong, its belief in
Andreev's hysteria went a long way to make the play palatable. In her
impossible role, A. Yakovleva (of the Satire Theatre) did her best to find a
style that could embody Katerina's descent (or ascent) from wounded virtue
to exuberant sinning. There was a good deal of what the Mock Turtle calls
"reeling and writhing and fainting in coils," her limbs fleshly counterparts
of the sinuosity of art nouveau tendrils.
34 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. IS, No. 3
Oddly enough, the theme of misplaced jealousy driving a woman
to nymphomania crops up again in the Satirikon Theatre's prize-winning
revival of Crommelynk's Le Cocu magnifique. This is, of course, the same
play, which, as Velikodushnij rogonosets (The Magnanimous Cuckold), initiated
Meyerhold's constructivist phase in the 'twenties. To show its departure
from that illustrious model, the Satirikon calls its version Velikolepnij
rogonosets (The Magnificent Cuckold) and eschews biomechanics for a style no
less physical, but much more emotional. Unlike Popova's setting for
Meyerhold, a machine for acting that suggested a skeletal mill, Stanislav
Morozov has set four windmill sails, like a ceiling fan, hovering over a small
revolve in the theatre's bare rehearsal space. The director, Petr Fomenko,
is at a premium now for his recent production of Ostrovsky's Guilty though
Blameless at the Vakhtangov; and Cuckold shares many of the elements of
that show: manic in its action, eclectic in its design, simple but metaphoric
in its movement patterns.
However, where the Ostrovsky was an object lesson in ensemble
playing, Cuckold exists as a showpiece for the Satirikon's actor-manager
Konstantin Raikin. As the obsessed miller, whose misguided attempt to
identify his wife's non-existent lover drives him to make her the town
whore, Raikin has plenty of opportunity to run the emotional gamut.
Climbing rope-ladders, locking and unlocking his wife's chastity mask,
crooning and extenuating his words, Raikin turns everything into a
"moment," and his Bruno grows progressively and unbearably uglier as the
evening wears on. By the last act, it is he, seated on the mill-wheel, who
revolves slowly, his once frenetic activity compressed into a hunched
concentration on his idee fixe.
Female promiscuity also surfaced in the only new play I saw in
Moscow (revivals are far more common). By the Light of Others' Candles (Pri
chuzhikh svechakh) by a recent graduate of GITIS, Nadezhda Ptushkina, is
a two-bander for actresses: a youthful prostitute has been picked by a
smooth-talking young man and installed in what she believes to be his
apartment. After looting and trashing the place, he abandons her. She half-
heartedly attempts suicide, but her grief is interrupted by t he return of the
apartment's real tenant, a novelist coming home from a writer's conference
in Italy. In the ensuing melee, the infuriated novelist hamstrings and
humiliates the prostitute, and threatens her with a hot steam iron; but the
roles are soon reversed, with the mistress of the house brutalized by the
intruder. They soon discover affinities, for it turns out they are both
victims of the same man. In a predictable accident, however, the prostitute
is shot and killed.
35
Konstantin Raikin as Bruno and Nataliya Vdova as Stella in Petr Fomenko's
staging of the The Magnificent Cuckold at the Satirikon Theatre, Moscow.
It has been remarked that modern drama might not have existed
without the telephone and the gun, and this play proves it. There's plenty
of opportunity for Strindbergian shifting of identities and the dialogue is
replete with such up-to-date coinages as seksappilochka (an insult roughly
equivalent to "bimbo"). But the effects are crude and t ~ opening-night
audience, made up primarily of critics, was quick to shrug it off. To
Western eyes, the similarities to such American plays as P.S. Your Cat Is
Dead, and Extremities are glaring; one wonders if the more conspicuous
violence in Russian society is engendering this kinship.
Both acts of Candles were, as one might expect, lit largely by candle-
flames, which was also true of the last acts of Katerina lvanovna and
Magnificent Cuckold. This effect, which would be prohibited by fire laws in
American cities, is ubiquitous, whether the theatre is a small poorly
ventilated black box or the grandest of tsarist playhouses. Candles
illuminated the night scenes of At the Jolly Spot (Na boikom meste), a
musicalized version of Ostrovsky's comedy by Gennady Gladkov and
Dmitry Sukharev. The lively and colorful production by Leonid Kheifets
at the Central Army Theatre 0ate, the Red Army Theatre) was an attempt
to take indigenous material and remake it in a popular genre. In a white suit
with shoulder-length blond hair, A. P. Egorov as the landowner Milovidov
had t he allure of a rock star, an effect abetted by his sorties into the
audience. The staging's energy belied the fact that Kheifets, one of Russia's
most respected directors, had recently been savagely beaten and his
apartment vandalized by the "mafia," because he refused to allow a casino
and restaurant to open in his theatre.
Tapers also played a major role in the church episodes of Memorial
Prayer (Pominal'naya molitva), Grigory Gorin's adaptation of the Tevye the
milkman stories by Sholem Aleichem. When it first opened in 1989, as
Mark Zakharov's latest production at the Lenkom Theatre, it was the
hottest ticket in town, for ethnic Jewish material had long been banned
from the Russian stage. At that time, Tevye was played by the beloved
Evgeny Leo nov, the moon-faced comedian who was the voice of Winnie the
Pooh in Soviet cartoons. Now, after his death, the part has been given to
Vladimir Steklov, a sallow, red-haired ironist, whose Tevye displays much
more bitterness and hardness than Leonov was capable of. Luckily,
Aleksandr Abdulov continues to play the luftmensch Menachem Mendel; a
gangly scarecrow in tatters, all his possessions secured to his person by
strings. This Menachem is devoid of Yiddishkeyt, but becomes a kind of
universal emblem of quixotic enterprise. Punctuated by odd stutters and
gasps, Abdulov creates a brilliantly eccentric comic characterization in the
37
tradition of Igor Ilinsky and Michael Chekhov.
The interest for the Westerner lies in comparing the musical Fiddler
on the Roof, based on the same material, with Memorial Prayer. The whole
atmosphere of the Russian work, even though interspersed with song and
dance, is more somber: the pogrom, which here ends the first half, is both
more sardonic and more ambivalent. The peasants, at the prompting of a
baryshnaya, turn on the Jews at a wedding and shout, "Why did you kill
Christ?" The Jews all bow their heads, in unison, as if long accustomed to
this. "Who asked you?" the peasant goes on, raising a laugh in the audience.
But the ensuing tumult has Tevye cross the stage with the body of a bleeding
little girl in his arms, an effect Broadway avoided until Les Mis. came from
England.
The emphasis in the second half is primarily on the issue of the
mixed marriage between one of Tevye's daughters and the Ukrainian
scrivener Fedya. Since Mark Zakharov is himself a Jew who converted to
Russian Orthodoxy, he weights the scales heavily towards Christianity,
staging their wedding with full ceremonial and choral singing, and allowing
the priest a rational defence of such unions. The climactic moment of this
production is not the Jews' expulsion from town (and their presumed going
to America, which for their American descendants would seem a logical
happy ending), but Tevye's reconciliation with his unrepentantly Christian
daughter.
Lit candles turn up on the music-stand for Uncle Vanya's cello-
playing in the Maly Theatre staging of Chekhov's play. Not so much a
coherent production as a collocation of performances, this Vanya goes the
original one better in the music-making department. Whereas Chekhov
simply had Waffles strum the guitar and kept Elena from playing the piano,
S. A. Solovyov gives Vanya a cello and has Sonya reveal her keyboard
virtuosity. Other music comes from an on-stage Victrola (an indispensable
Chekhovian prop for the last decade), and from the recorded sound-track
composed for this staging by I. I. Shvarts. This must be designer Valery
Levental's dozenth set for Vanya, and he has simply dumped all the standard
detritus - desks, chairs, books, a samovar, medicine bottles - in the open air,
as if this were the Cain's Warehouse of bygone Chekhov productions.
There's something rather postmodern about the clutter.
Vanya, as played by S. A. Solomin, is a wry twerp, his intense grief
so bottled up that the slightest leak can well into a torrent of self-pity. More
interesting is his brother V. M. Solomin, whose Astrov has nothing noble
about him: a caustic alcoholic prone to self-deprecating buffoonery, he even
makes his ecological statements sound ironic. His attraction to Elena is
38
nothing but lust, and his treatment of Sonya has more than a tinge of
knowing cruelty about it. Chekhov is on his way to turning into Andreev.
One last note about the current theatre scene in Moscow. The city
now has its own entertainment magazine, Razgulyai (Live It Up), edited by
Valery Semenovsky, who also heads the theatre journal Moskovsky
nablyudatel'. More a What's On than a Time Out, Razgulyai provides
monthly listings of films, opera and operetta, ballet, legitimate theatre,
circus, concerts, galleries and museums, fashion shows, restaurants, sports
events and radio programs, interspersed with stories about celebrities and
openings. The only trouble is, this being Russia, one had better phone the
theatre first to make sure the information is correct. The biggest
disappointment in terms of cancelled debuts has been Lyubimov's Medea.
Announcements of its opening were made on a weekly basis throughout
May and June, but it has now been postponed indefinitely, following the
negative reviews it got in Athens and Tel Aviv.
39
MOSCOW NARROWS ITS SIGHTS AND HITS THE MARK:
THE 1994-1995 SEASON
John Freedman
A tendency, which had slowly been working its way towards becoming a
trend since the beginning of the '90s, finally turned the corner and hit full
stride during Moscow's 1994/95 season. Almost every production of note
last year was staged either on a small stage or in a small, unorthodox space
adapted for performance. An abridged listing of the shows from the later
category reveals the variety that existed in spatial design: Kama Ginkas's
adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, performed as K.l. from
"Crime" at the Young Spectator Theatre, started in a foyer and ended in a
rehearsal room (SEEPvol. 15, no. 2 Summer 1995). Valery Fokin's staging
of The Metamorphosis at the Satirikon, played in a specially constructed,
expanding box. Andrei Platonov's IvanO'U's Family, adapted and directed by
Yury Y eryomin at the Pushkin Theatre performed in a circle around the
audience seated on the stage itself. Alexander Moiseyev's production of
Hamlet at the Taganka, entitled Waiting for Hamlet, was played in the
theatre's foyer and on its numerous staircases leading to the coat rack, the
second floor buffet and the balcony of the old stage. A rare production of
Yevgeny Shvarts's One Night, directed by Alexei Borodin at the National
Youth Theatre, was staged in a hatch beneath the theatre's main stage.
Characteristic of the pull towards the small stage was the Novy
Drama Theatre's year-end premiere of A Heroic Comedy. Director Boris
Lvov-Anokhin, who is known for his opulent, historically-veracious, grand-
scale productions, surprised everyone by going miniature with a fast-paced,
modern-dress interpretation of Ferdinand Bruckner's play set in the
Napoleonic era.
The season began auspiciously with a spectacular show called The
Death-Defying Act, directed by Vladimir Mashkov for the Tabakov Theatre,
and performed on the small, New Stage of the Chekhov Art Theatre.
Mashokov has emerged in the last year as one of Russia's top movie stars,
but, as is evidenced by The Death-Defying Act (his third production as a
theatrical director), he is not only a talented actor.
The excellent play, written by Oleg Antonov, is set in a circus
environment and tells the allegorical story of a man who appears to have
succumbed to his own inner battles. The action begins as a clown ties a rope
around is neck, climbs a ladder and, when he reaches the top, tries to play
a jazzy riff on the sax. Suddenly, the hall goes black, and, shrieking, he
40
41
tumbles down in a heap on the arena floor. Then, as if by magic, the body
is suddenly surrounded by four other frightened clowns. As they start
bickering in animated whispers about what they're going to do without
their late, great comrade, we begin to notice that their movements, their
memories and their aspirations are strikingly similar: in fact, they are
incarnations of the dead clown's various personalities.
Antonov created a sparkling quartet of characters, each severely
limited, but all clear-cut and fully developed. Whether it is the shifty Red
(Andrei Panin), the sensitive Whitey (Vitaly Yegorov), the devilish Blackey
(Andrei Smolyakov) or the endearing Fatty (Sergei Belyayev), all are as
united by their secret desire to break free of one another as they are bound
by their past misfortunes or their nagging dreams for the future.
Mashkov took Antonov's incisive play and applied to it the
principles of the distinctly Russian t radition of clowning. More pensive,
resigned and philosophical than its western counterpart, Russian clownery
has no fewer pratfalls and thumps on the head, but it plays them in a minor
key, invariably just barely concealing the disturbing tone of fateful
revelations soon to be made. That is the very essence of The Death-Defying
Act, which might be described roughly as a play about achieving freedom
and discovering limits.
In the end, freedom is an unattainable dream, at least if the only
way it can be achieved is by every man selfishly fending for himself. Like
burning filaments released from the confines of a light bulb, the four
clashing personalities are capable of burning brightly only for an instant,
before quickly running the risk of burning out altogether. It is when they
realize that they cannot exist without one another that they "resurrect" the
dead clown who comes back to pull off his "death-defying act" to the mad
ovation of the crowd.
As sheer spectacle, The Death-Defying Act had no peer among
Moscow shows. The magic tricks, performed brilliantly by the entire cast,
were worthy of the finest circus acts. Flying balls of light, fiery explosions
in mid-air, handkerchiefs that take on a life of their own, and a chopped-off
arm that comes back to life, are only a few of the dazzling deceptions. But
the most astonishing element of this show may have been Y efim Udler's
swirling, sculptural light. Using heavy smoke and dense spots of hot and
cool colors, Udler gave the light an actual physical presence, its floating
marble curls assuming the form of columns, impenetrable walls or layered
curtains which interact beautifully with Alexander Borovsky's set of red,
wooden walls and trap doors.
Another small stage triumph, this time coming in May, was Andrei
42
My Poor Marat, Mossoviet Theatre
43
Zhitinkin's updating of Alexei Arbuzov's play, My Poor Marat, one of the
Soviet Union's most popular plays in the 1960s. But Zhitinkin's version at
the Mossoviet Theatre, which opened to coincide with the celebration of the
50th anniversary of VE Day, was much more a look forward than a glance
backward.
Arbuzov wrote about three teenagers - two boys named Marat and
Leonidik, and a girl named Lika - who share an apartment during the siege
of Leningrad. Naturally, a love t riangle arises, and, naturally, over the 20
years that the play spans, the "wrong" pair ends up together keeping the
drama high right to the end. But Zhitinkin shook that all up, setting it in
pristine, all-white surroundings designed by Andrei Sharov, and filling it
with a sparkling, tasteful and mysterious sexuality that completely renewed
Arbuzov's rather formulaic and sentimental war/love story.
There are more than passing hints that the two men are as much in
lover with each other as they are with the girl, although Zhitinkin teasingly
leaves that in the shady realm of conjecture. It was a prudent, not prudish,
move, because the real gist of this revamped story is that all three of these
people love each other, and there is no satisfactory way of pairing off two
and leaving an odd one out. Effectively breaking through the taboo against
homoeroticism which still grips Russian theatre despite - or perhaps because
of- Roman Viktyuk's florid stagings on thinly-veiled homosexual themes,
the show was acted with humor and verve, even as the hard decisions are
made which eventually break the threesome up. Especially memorable was
Larisa Kuznetsova, who was dazzling as the peppery, indomitable Lika.
The Taganka Theatre produced two shows of interest by way of
the young actors and directors who have moved in to fill the void left by
Yury Lyubimov, a rare visitor in Moscow these days. One was a vivacious,
tongue-in-cheek modernization of Moliere's The School for Wives, while the
other was a swift, imaginative gallop through Shakespeare's Hamlet.
In The School for Wives, director Alexei Kiryushchenko pulled off
the theatrical equivalent of slipping a ship in a bottle. The actors,
performing a shortened text in rapid-fire style, played on a stage barely big
enough to hold them and the only notable piece of decoration- a lacy, pink
structure that looked as much like a woman's armoire as the facade of a
country house. It was a breathless leap into hyper-theatricality, with the
players ecstatically laughing too hard, weeping too loud, and opportunely
bursting into song. Physical humor, from the cornball to the bawdy, and
moments of inspired silliness, such as everything coming to an abrupt halt
for a character who leisurely chases a butterfly across the stage, made for a
delirious celebration of "provincial" theatrical shenanigans. Matching the
School For Wives, Taganka Theatre
45
uniformly energetic cast were Oleg Stepchenko's dazzling costumes, as busy
as bee-hives with bows, buttons, frills and folds everywhere. The
masterpiece was Agnes's dress, looking every bit a lamp-shade cut from a
bed spread.
Waiting for Hamlet, performed in the Taganka's foyer, took
liberties with the play, although they served more to refresh it rather than
overshadow or obscure it. With the actors dressed in an eclectic mix of
costumes wedding medieval and modern styles, the space they performed in
curiously took on the feel of a monastery. The men's jeans, jack boots and
baggy black sweaters were an obvious nod to Lyubimov's famous 1971
production of Hamlet.
When things commenced, three was no need to wait long for
Hamlet (the Shakespeare look-alike, Anton Lutsenko). He immediately
seated himself in a corner and took up reading a book. Meanwhile, the
others whipped crisply throughout the text, occasionally taking over his
lines. Standing on a long stairwell, candles in hand, Claudius (Alexei
Grabbe) and his new bride Gertrude (Y elena Laskavaya) led the entire cast
minus Hamlet in something like the Lord's Prayer: the text was Hamlet's
famous "to-be-or-not-to-be" speech, which was repeated several times
throughout the evening, elevating the words to the level of a leitmotif. The
yes-man Polonius (Igor Pekhovich) occasionally led everyone in lilting songs
and circular, spinning dances, as if to say, "everything is fine; we have no
problems here."
When Lutsenko's Hamlet finally emerged from his reverie, he
appeared as a soft-spoken intellectual with a quick mind. He was not so
much incapable of taking action as he was doubtful that there is any point
to it. Yelena Litvinova's Ophelia was not the vague, romantic waif one so
often sees, but was alert, subtle and intelligent, a woman more than worthy
to be Hamlet's match. Her final descent into madness- never hysterical or
pitiful, but handled with supreme understatement and concrete detail -
bordered on the brilliant.
Valery Fokin's production of The Metamorphosis, a joint project of
the Meyerhold Center and the Satirikon Theatre, was performed inside a
specially-constructed box designed by Vyacheslav Koleichuk. The tiny stage
depicted a modest domestic interior fronted by Gregor Samsa's bedroom
which was wrapped on three sides by two high rows of seats accommodating
65 people. The interior disappeared with specific light changes thanks to a
fine screen hanging in front of it, while the bedroom floor dropped to create
a deep, threatening pit out of what was once a normal room. Strange,
suggestive music by Alexander Bakshi wafted in from different backstage
The Metamorphosis, Satirikon Theatre and the Meyerhold Center
" v
angles. While on stage, the spoken word was reduced to a role subordinate
to expressions, movement and intricate sounds.
The sight of Konstantin Raikin's Gregor-turned-insect waking in
his hard, narrow bed was both chilling and theatrically exhilarating.
Preceded by a sleepful pause so deathly silent you could hear the air hum,
the scene began unfolding as Gregor noticed that his arms and legs were
cocked stiffly in the air. Raikin brilliantly ran the gamut of possible
emotions - from alarm and comic relief that it all is a dream, to the
realization that the nightmare is a reality. He finally was gripped by terror
when he realized that his voice had been replaced by a guttural ticking
sound. Gregor's beloved, violin-playing sister (the graceful Natalya
Vdovina) tried to reconcile herself to what had transpired, but she, like the
rest of her family, eventually rejected him cruelly, shattering his last link to
life. There was occasionally a sense that The Metamorphosis was so focused
on brilliant technique and minute detail that its spectacular facade lacked an
inner ballast. But such suspicions were fleeting. By any standards, Fokin
came up with a triumph.
In Ivanov's Family Yury Y eryomin seated the 60 spectators in a
shallow semi-circle in the center of the stage, facing the ragged contours of
the closed fire wall which blocked of the view of the empty hall behind it.
Once the action got underway, the stage often spun slowly to the left or
right, providing views of Valery Fomin's set; the modest interior of Ivanov's
apartment and the birch woods outside it.
During a brief, incisive prologue, we get our first glimpse of the
grizzled Ivanov (Alexander Y ermakov) waiting for the train that will take
him home after the end of World War II. There he meets Masha (Viktoria
Lebedeva), a young family friend, whose freshness intoxicates his war-weary
senses, although the encounter ends when he reaches his hometown.
Finally, tentatively, he approaches the long-awaited reunion with the wife
and two children he hasn't seen for four years. It does not turn out as
Ivanov had expected, however. He is greeted coldly by his young son
(Fedya Novitsky) and when his wife Lyuba (Irina Byakova) comes home
from work, they throw themselves into a clumsy embrace that says more
about fear than passion. In Yeryomin's hands, Ivanov and his wife struggle
as much with their own demons as with each other. He is horrified to learn
that, in a moment of despair, Lyuba broke down and had a one-night fling
with another man, while Lyuba is appalled at her husband's misplaced
intolerance. But the real pain for both is in the rift between the dreams they
had of their meeting and the reality of it.
Platonov's story, like an exquisite, fine-l ine drawing, traces the
48
hopes, the desires, the doubts and the disillusionments that await this
essentially good but lonely couple. And Y eryomin masterfully brought
those moments to life, training a hungry, intrusive video camera on the
characters, catching them in a rarely interrupted flow of grainy, pained and
thoughtful close-ups. No matter which way the revolving stage turns the
spectators, the large-screen monitor is always planted firmly between them
and the actors. It creates a tensile second reality, a tangible inner world that
not only focuses the slow, pause-laden action, but gives it deeper meaning.
The Stanislavsky Theatre has been using its 30-seat "mirrored hall"
more and more to good use in the last two seasons, and in June it was the
site of an especially admirable premiere. By The Light of Others' Candles
directed by Vitaly Lanskoi, was not only an effective production, it marked
the Moscow debut of Nadezhda Ptushkina, who would appear to be a major
new playwright. I say "new" advisedly, since Ptushkina is the author of
some 50 plays, although almost none of them has never been produced. By
The Light of Others' Candles is a tough, wonderfully farfetched and killingly
funny work for two actresses which explores the unusual relationship
between a jaded, aging critic and a slightly goofy, sublimely sincere young
woman. They are thrown together unexpectedly when the critic thinks
(with good reason) that the girl has robbed her apartment, and before long
they are careening forward on an inner journey that takes them through
torture, friendship and self-revelation, and winds up with murder.
Ptushkina has an uncanny ear for juicy, comic dialogue which is best
displayed in the part of the critic, who, when she isn't spouting meaty,
cutting phrases about men, women and the inadequacies of both, is cruelly
bent on destroying the young girl's joyously unprincipled romanticism.
Tatyana Pushkina's eccentric performance of the critic, with her gruff
mannerisms, her rumble-to-a-scream voice and her venomously expressive
face, was a sight to behold.
The interest in small-scale theatre, which first surfaced with Ivan
Popovski's production of The Adventure in a corridor at the State theatre
Institute in 1991 and recurred in several major productions over the next
few years, is now clearly paying dividends. In a society that continues to be
rocked by mind-bending and often frightening political and social
developments, it provides the intimacy and direct human contact which has
always been good theatre's calling card.
PAGES FROM THE PAST
T ARKOVSKY, OR THE BURNING HOUSE
Petr Knil
for Ivan Divis
On mystery
The work of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), the film director,
whose career was cut short by his premature death, is undoubtedly among
the most significant in the entire history of the cinema. In Tarkovsky's
work, coming after Fellini's, the attempt to put cinematic images to the
service of poetry, to make them an instrument of the inner vision and of
dreams reaches its apogee. Bernardo Bertolucci's observation, that films
linger in us thanks to their unique visual quality, applies to Tarkovsky more
than to anyone else: his images, at once fiery and liquid, as if they had arisen
spontaneously from that union of fire and water which is central to his
oeuvre - act on us by the extraordinary "aura", which alerts us at once to
their visionary quality.
It is not simply that everything in it is inseparably tangible, sensual,
and "spiritual", that the outward form of things cannot be divorced from
their emotive significance, from the investigation of their inner meaning, his
films are unmistakable evidence of the functioning of one person's subjective
vision. They also somehow transcend the limits of art by uniting deliberate
creative endeavour, with sensitivity, to mystery in its "natural" state. If
Tarkovsky's vision is utterly self-generating, it needs spontaneous fixing in
images which the director did not invent, but which he allowed to ripen
within himself and crystallize. A dark, irreducible kernel remains, like a
mysterious situation in life, or like those bewitching films that owe their
unique poetry less to the director's designs than to the whim of
circumstances. In brief these films are created almost in the biblical sense,
as something with an independent existence; in them people and things seem
to us to have exceptional clarity, urgency, and grace, as if we ourselves were
in love and suddenly experienced the world with redoubled intensity.
In Tarkovsky's last film, The Sacrifice (1986), we see the hero, in a
black-and-white sequence, running from a house in which we have just seen
a nude young woman in a bedroom (or rather her reflection in a mirror- she
is partly hidden by a screen); we then see him wandering in a large garden,
where he picks up some small coins from the mud and rotting leaves, before
51
freezing into immobility amidst the falling snow and the old trees, which,
thanks to the slowly panning camera, begin a slow dance around him. The
calm and self-evident power of this scene is redolent of both a recollection
and the sensation of waking from sleep, but it is neither one nor the other.
It is simply a visual thought, remote from the strangeness of dreams and
from realistic description, and seeming to convey as precisely as possible our
inner breathing itself. It is not only at once extraordinary and simple, but
at the same time, in its "content", literally inexhaustible.
The lighting of Tarkovsky's films consists of illumination and
eclipse, the light of revelation and of enigma. From the beginning, objects
possess for the director a kind of dark visibility, which defies all
preconceptions. An understanding, and a spiritualization, of the world
begins to take shape here, as a language of signs, in which mystery alone
speaks to us, and in which sharp visual definition is more important than
abstract symbols and ideas: the bolts wrapped in strips of surgical gauze and
scattered in the grass (Stalker, 1979), the pulsating skin of a wounded scalp,
or the wet circle left on a table by a teacup (The Mirror, 1974) speak to us
first only via their material or immaterial nature-or sometimes both, like
the bolts "lent wings" by the gauze-via their presence, whether insistent or
fleeting, which has all the more meaning in itself for being inexpressible in
words. Likewise the mysterious groupings and "constellations", which
objects seem to produce almost of their own volition, as if they wished to
join in some secret conspiracy. We find them at the level of details
(inCluding those gauze-wrapped bolts-in a way, a paradigm representing the
whole of Tarkovsky's imagination), and of whole scenes: the car buried in
a bush at the side of the darkening road, along which the hero of The
Sacrifice was driving to complete his mission, stuck there (with a strip of
fabric flying in the breeze) like a palpable fragment of mystery in the arteries
of the world.
The director's vision literally breathes life into the material mass of
objects, awakens life in them, and shows us their secret existence, or their
hidden essence; the gradually fading imprint of the cup on the table
"breathes" (1he Mirror), just like the cupboard in 1he Sacrifice, whose door
twice opens beside one of the characters without anyone touching it. The
mark of the teacup and the wounded soldier's pulsating scalp (The Mirror)
also take on the force of a cryptic proclamation thanks to another
characteristic feature: their urgent, insistent appearances are emblematic
fragments of memory lodged in the mists of one person's consciousness and
resisting the destructive force of forgetfulness and the passage of time. The
force which gives objects an intensified presence is, paradoxically, their
constant slipping out of direct reality into internalized concepts, into the
sphere of dreams and ideas, where only the shimmer of blurred images
survives. Evidence of this is also provided by those mysterious scenes,
sometimes memory-like, sometimes dreamlike, in which objects are replaced
by the metaphors, and this also signifies a paradoxical "compression" of
them, rather like the results of improbable accidents in silent comedy films.
We see this in the books spattered with earth, dreamily recorded in Safaris,
or the spectral soldiers coated in sand who appear in the labyrinthine Mirror
in a scene from an old newsreel: earth and sand seem to make palpable the
burial of people and objects in the depths of memory and history, and
heighten their own palpability-like the cream in those silent-movie
bunfights-to the level of "hyper-reality." Something similar is displayed in
those striking sequences-sometimes composed solely of black-and-white
images, as if purely in the mind-which Tarkovsky inserts like independent
lyrical interludes. Some particularly fascinating examples are included in The
Sacrifice (among them the hero's stroll in the garden): the camera gradually
explores from above a staircase and a narrow litter-strewn courtyard, lingers
on a chair with a hole in the seat, and finally glides to a puddle in which the
decor of the yard is mirrored, as if wishing to "internalize" it definitively,
while looking back up at it from the water, to return to reality and "real"
life. A single slow pan, literally welding together these fragment ary pieces
of reality, turns them into a condensed definition of a whole unified world.
A sequence which is also an enigmatic recollection again owes its
inner cohesion to the collective placement of objects in the memory. It is
no accident that most such scenes are dominated by water, the primal
element, and some consist of a prolonged glissade over the surface of water.
Consider the travelling shot in Stalker, monochrome and technicolor by
turns, when the hero dozes off on a grassy island in a river and the camera
gradually moves away from the sleeper to offer a surprising survey of
submerged objects thrown into the water: a syringe, a sodden piece of
newspaper, a gold coin , and-a little way off-an icon.
The beginning of the garden sequence in The Sacrifice, when the
hero picks out of the mud and rotting leaf-mould the coins that have fallen
into it, along with the scraps of newspaper and rag, is another such descent
to the bottom. Like the bicycle and the bottle raised from the bed of the
drained reservoir-coated in slime, just as the soldiers in The Mirror are
covered in dust-where the hero carries out his mission in Nostalgia, the
objects buried in the mud come to embody those uncertain and varied
treasures that lie at the root of our memories and which are our only riches.
Remarkable only for the freshness that sparkles before us, as it once did in
53
childhood, the coin has no more value (and no less) than the humus it has
fallen into and with which it is equated, as in the well-known story in which
a basket of leaves turns into a bag of gold coins and vice versa; the objects
coated in earth or slime are lent a fabulous power of attraction and a value
by the very thing that strips them of their practical worth.
Similarly, the dilapidated, apparently burned residence of the hero
of Stalker seems at the beginning of the film at once wretched and splendid,
thanks to the paradoxical abundance of stains on the door, cracks in the
plaster and artistic effects etched in by the dark outlines of the iron
bedsteads, in striking harmony with the network of cracks. The boundaries
between riches and poverty in Tarkovsky's work are blurred. Just as in life,
true luxury is concealed beneath the most ordinary of things.
The ascent to the surface, signalled in 7he Sacrifice at the conclusion
of the descent to the bottom of the courtyard, or rather the spiritual uplift,
which Tarkovsky seems to blend into (and which is indicated, in a way, in
Stalker by the reflection of a tree suddenly falling into the water and
obscuring our view of the submerged objects), is possible only after
immersion in the primal waters of the past-seemingly a redemptive return
to the source.
Glimpses of Infinity
Tarkovsky's images are not merely the product of his inner vision;
they also have the ability independently to increase and multiply infinitely.
Each one, inseparably literal and metaphorical, with its own unique
specificity and its figurative echoes, expands and takes on multiple meanings,
until it acquires the autonomy and limitlessness of a poem in free verse
composition. Like a poem, it seems to hold the potential for a complete
narrative, captured, shimmering infinitely, at its threshold. This
multiplicity of meanings blurs the linear nature of the narrative (or what
was left of it) and replaces it with the organization of the images in depth,
in layers formed one on top of another, thanks to which they break free of
their narrow limits and reach beyond them into infinity, both in time and
space.
In this sense, fixed-camera sequences are just as evocative as those
shot with a moving camera. In the opening scene of 7he Sacrifice the hero's
son and a postman appear on the shore of a bay, where the hero-before a
motionless camera-is transplanting a withered sapling. They approach as
if they were dragging along the vastness of the whole world outside from
over the horizon.
1
Their garrulousness (the postman) and their silence (the
mute son) seem to form a complete, "synthesized" chord with the hero's
soliloquy, in which they gradually join. The wealth of sound in
Tarkovsky's films is legendary, however. His unique "music", disturbing
and soothing, intrusive and discreet by turns, at odds with, and in harmony
with the images, is an inseparable element of the director's vision. Even if
we take only The Sacrifice, we find images on the screen accompanied by the
sound of an unseen coin tapping (as the tired hero falls asleep on the couch),
a loose sheet of corrugated iron clattering in the breeze (as the introduction
to a scene showing the hero's son asleep), and distant music and ancient
chants in Swedish or Japanese (hence remote in space and time). The sounds
themselves transport the visual to a distant setting, to other lands and other
times, which provide the indispensable counterpoint to its present reality.
This inner accumulation of scenes is also an expression of a quest
for social oneness, or rather the blending of the individual into the
communal. Tarkovsky's vision, be it ever so unique and personal, tends
from the very outset to transcend itself; the concrete tangibility of his
images, "hyper-real" to the point of being hallucinatory, is, as it were, filled
to the limit by an infinite quantity of barely perceptible, quivering, teeming,
detail, irresistibly spreading and intermingling, against which the form of the
images is no more than a fleeting, fragile reflection, at once giving shape to
the image and eroding it. Suffice it to mention the forest in Andrei Rublev
(1966), with its seething masses of ants and midges, murmuring streamlets
and rills, its web of branches and twisted roots-like streams themselves, but
made of wood-and on this tangled labyrinth the camera pauses for a
moment, on the bank of a stream. The seething life of nature seems to have
fashioned the living soil t hat gave birth to both Rublev's painting and
Tarkovsky' s art itself. The ending, the remarkable sequence showing the
casting of the bell, also emerges from a teeming procession of objects, places,
sounds (the ominous creak of the scaffolding, on which the bell is raised by
a rope), and individual and group actions. In the course of the kaleidoscopic
excursus through Rublev's paintings with which the film concludes (in black
and white), as with a closing message of reconciliation, the works are first
fragmented into details which are hard to read, as if they-the paintings-
were meant to resemble the woodland labyrinth, and only then do the icons
emerge before us in their entirety. Thus the quest for a particular vision (the
artist's work) could lead only through a return to primal chaos and through
dispersion into seething, anonymous life, represented, to the hero of the
film, by the experience he gradually gains of the harsh world and the
suffering of his nearest and dearest.
It is true that the creative individuality embodied in Rublev is also
55
the only force capable of giving meaning to the experience of cruelty and
evil, and including it in the nature of things. When, after a survey of the
icons, we see a colour scene showing real horses at the water's edge, it is as
if reality itself can be made accessible thanks to the vision of the artist. At
the same time, however, the artist in Tarkovsky applies this capability of his
only when he is able to forge a connection with reconciliation, when he can
bow down before the untold riches of the world and open up fully to the
life which is progressing through him, and of which he is no more than an
elected spokesman. In this sense art finds its model in the paradoxical
"work" of the aged madman in Nostalgia, in which the blurring of
boundaries between poverty and wealth can clearly be seen, and in which
the man-made world order blends with the order of nature, or
rather, with its natural "disorder".
2
Here the old man-rather like a visitor-
inhabits a territory cluttered with pots and pans and empty, unforgettably
green bottles, endlessly flooded with shafts of light and ringing currents of
rainwater, bottles whose "construction", however shaky and impermanent,
changes the decor into that of the most splendid exhibition hall, or concert
hall, that one could hope to visit.
The overlapping of different temporal planes also belongs among
the conjunctions and intersections of innumerable signs, events, and
movements of which Tarkovsky's images are composed and which
collectively go to form a scene. Such an intersection is the scene in Ivan's
Childhood (1962) in which the young hero leafs through a volume of Durer's
etchings and wonders whether they show the German enemy. His youth
interweaves with-and collides with-the supratemporal nature of culture,
which itself is interwoven with the historical period of the Second World
War. In this respect the kernel of the director's entire work is The Mirror,
in which the deliberate mingling of generations and eras spans the uncertain
waves of one person's memory: the narrator's mother merges with his wife
(both are played by the same actress); at moments he himself is identified
with his father (if only in the commentary); different events from the
history of the family sometimes interweave within the framework of a single
scene. Together with the varied spatial scenes, the temporal planes
intermingle in the extraordinary juxtaposition of images in which Solaris
(1972) and Nostalgia culminate. The hero's own house, which the rapidly
ascending camera unexpectedly shows us surrounded by the sea (Solaris), is
lost here like a fragment of the past in the waters of oblivion (as well as in
the uncertainty surrounding the future of the cosmos itself). Likewise the
grass-covered islet in the middle of a stream, on which the hero of Stalker
falls asleep (in fetal position), also recalls birth and a safe union with the
mother, and is symbolic of irreversible disappearance (the islet, hardly bigger
than the hero's body, is itself no more than an embryo fashioned out of
turf), while in Nostalgia the Grecian or Roman ruins in which the hero's
humble Russian hut is set, as in a frame, at the conclusion, bind the time of
his childhood into the memory of the whole of Western culture. An
unexpected change of scale, common to both scenes, is repeated in The
Sacrifice, when in a nearby meadow we find a replica of the hero's house
reduced to the size of a child's toy. As it was evidently placed here by the
hero's son, as a birthday present for his father, it suggests an image of the
future taking shape in the present, the reduplication of the present in the
future.
Petr Kral is a well-known Czech poet and essayist. His study of Tarkovsky
appeared in 1990 in the Paris-based Czech language quarterly Svedectv{.
[Two installments (four sections) to follow; translated from the Czech by
Kevin Windle. Originally published in Svedectv{XXIII, No. 91, 1990]
Notes
1
A comparable scene in which the outside world is drawn onto the set can
be seen in the classic silent comedy Catino Plays Billiards. Not only does the
cue-wielding hero smash mirrors and the imagined depths behind them, lit
by reflected candles in the room. He also breaks into his neighbours' flats,
evoking an angry reaction from the tenants.
2
The need to have human order embrace primal chaos also finds expression
in a childhood recollection of the hero of The Sacrifice: when he once tried
to clear his mother's overgrown garden, he found, to his surprise, that he
had destroyed its charm.
57
THE COMIC STRUGGLE FOR IDEOLOGY AFTER
COMMUNISM: LA PETITE APOCALYPSE-COSTA-GA VRAS
AND THE CONVERT -KAZIMIERZ KUTZ
David A. Goldfarb
With the former regimes in Eastern Europe safely in remission, The
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, is allowing us to laugh at
Europe's old ideological struggles as we seek a new ideological center.
Without a clear enemy, politics has devolved into a muddle, producing both
the horror in the Balkans and the comedy of manners that has been
traditional in France and Italy since the time of Moliere. Konstantin
Costa-Gavras's La Petite Apocalypse (The Minor Apocalypse) and Polish
director Kazimierz Kutz's Zawr6cony (The Convert) reveal that, in days of
bourgeois Maoists and Catholic liberals, the confusion exists on both sides
of the former Iron Curtain.
La Petite Apocalypse (1992) is loosely built over Tadeusz Konwicki's
Mala Apokalypsa (A Minor Apocalypse, 1979), which more than any other
novel Captured the sense of political tension and personal anxiety of the
period immediately preceding the Solidarity uprising.
Costa-Gavras acquired film rights to the novel shortly after the work
appeared in French, but waited about ten years before making the film.
Logistical problems aside, one might ask why Costa-Gavras did not make
the film in 1982, when the Gdansk Shipyard strikes and the subsequent
imposition of martial law would have assured him a large audience?
Konwicki is himself a filmmaker, and his highly cinematic narrative might
easily have been converted directly into a screenplay. Unfortunately,
Costa-Gavras missed his scheduled appearance and opportunity to answer
that question at the screening, but the possibilities for speculation are
interesting.
In 1982 we might have asked, "who was Costa-Gavras to take up
the Polish cause?" He would, ironically, have been in competition with
Polish directors who were producing some of their best work immediately
before and during Solidarity's stand: Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble,
Krzystof Zanussi's Camouflage, and Ryszard Bugajski's Interrogation, the last
film to slip in before martial law. Konwicki's novel is filled with local
58 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. IS, No.3
allusions that would have been largely inaccessible to a Western European
audience. These include jibes at other Polish film makers, whom Konwicki
could criticize as an insider in 1979, but Costa-Gavras could not as an
outsider in 1982. Obtaining the rights, in the midst of world attention on
Poland, to the most important Polish novel of its period must have seemed
a great commercial coup at the time, but it immediately presents an artistic
conundrum. By waiting ten years and distancing himself from the original
text, the director regains the opportunity to make a film that can stand on
its own, and is perhaps even a parody of the film he might have made in the
early 1980's.
Czech director Jiii Menzel plays a bumbling Polish emigre writer
named Stan who lives in t he garret of the home of his ex-wife and her
husband, Henri (Pierre Arditi) in Paris. Unable to market his works, Stan
falls into stagnancy and alcoholism, and Henri is anxious to get him out of
the house. Stan nearly hangs himself and sets himself on fire while changing
a light bulb, and his hosts take it as an attempt at suicide. Henri and his
fri end Jacques (Andre Dussollier), both bourgeois ex-radicals of 1968, think
of capital izing on Stan's supposed suicidal tendencies as a way to help him
achieve his desired fame. Inspired by Konwicki's novel, the two arrange,
with ex-Maoist, media-magnate Arnold, for the author to burn himself as a
"protest" against the media at an ecumenical conference in St. Peter's Square,
where the Pope, George Bush and Boris Y eltsin plan to honor the world's
poor. An American TV crew follows/pushes Stan as he proceeds toward his
protest while the publisher prepares a 100,000-copy run of his works, hastily
translated into French. In a surprise ending, the comic-book media moguls
are foiled by real third-world protesters, reaffirming the commitment to
authentic protest for which Costa-Gavras earned the Irene Diamond award
at this year's festival, and in another twist, revealing that economic
conditions in post-Communist Europe have created a world in which East
Europeans of all ideological persuasions have more in common with each
other than they do with the West Europeans who may take up their causes.
The Convert, produced originally for Polish Television, is a
lighthearted attempt to sort out the place of the Catholic Church after
Communism, but in the end the film may be more syqJ.ptomatic of the
effect the Church has had in the new hierarchy than suggestive of what it
should be.
59
Zbigniew Zamachowski, who gained world recognition as the lead
in Krzysztof Kieslowski's White, plays Tomasz Siwek, a bumpkin faithful
to the Communist Party, who drives a delivery truck in a Silesian factory.
When Solidarity begins to organize a rally in Katowice, the boss entices him
to become an informant with alluring promises of vacations in Bulgaria and
"Ideology Courses." While attending the rally, he becomes so inspired by
the protesters' nationalist, religious hymns that he enthusiastically sings
along, is caught on camera, and is chased down alleyways and over fences by
a band of Keystone-ZOMO. In a land where cars sometimes run on
two-stroke engines and gas is a luxury, high-speed car chases would be even
more absurd than they are in American films, so the crack-ups all happen on
foot.
The police, still hoping to salvage Tomek as an informer, send an officer,
Albin, to his home with a bottle of vodka and cash to buy his garden at an
inflated price. The next day he is arrested and given "the sisyphus" when he
fails to turn in his neighbors. "The sisyphus" consists of running up and
down stairs continuously under the observation of two prison guards,
providing Zamachowski opportunities for more pratfalls and balancing acts.
Off camera he receives a drubbing at the hands of Albin. Confused and
battered, Tomek decides to visit his family in the country, where they are
celebrating his brother's wedding and acceptance into the ZOMO. Tomek
tells his mother of his run-in with the ZOMO, but she sides with the
brother in his smart new uniform. Disenchanted with the Communists by
this point, Tomek returns to his ever-faithful wife, Fela, who is always
waiting with an idyllically photographed bowl of gruel in the morning and
zurek, a soup made from fermented grain juice, in the evening. He literally
tosses his Party ID to the dogs, and takes up work building a new church
near his home. The church goes up faster than anything I've ever seen built
in Poland-even churches- and to the surprise of his co-workers who knew
him when he was in the Party, Tomek becomes an acolyte of the new
parish. At the consecration of the new edifice, while passing the collection
plate in his white vestment, Tomek spots Albin and, at a moment when a
more serious film would have called for Christian forgiveness, a white robed
Tomek chases Albin out of the church, shouting a litany of creative and
delightful Polish curses.
While the anchor of positive feeling in this film is the labor of
ordinary individuals in the building of the church and of the Solidarity
movement, their leaders do not get off scot free. The Church officials at the
consecration seem bored and smug. Walesa holds a place of honor in the
photographs of demonstrators Tomek is asked to identify, but Kutz
60
undercuts the overblown image of the Solidarity-leader-as-savior when the
demonstrators sing a hymn in honor of "God," "the Virgin," and "Lech"
(which happens to be the name of the mythic founder in Poland's Romulus
and Remus legend). On the more sensitive topics of the Catholic Church
and Solidarity, Kutz is much more subtle and circumspect than he is toward
the easily demonized ZOMO, but his skepticism seems healthy.
As Eastern-European film melts into the world of general European
co-production, the Church is becoming a particularly awkward subject.
Catholic institutions have had a long tradition of sheltering liberal
intellectuals in Poland, so that the socially conservative policies of the
Church on abortion, women, the priesthood, and the family are advanced
alongside this liberalism, producing a kind of cognitive dissonance for the
Western audience.
The result is work like Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, which presents a
challenging examination of the role of women in the arts in conjunction
with an incongruous anti-abortion message. Does the result reveal
complexity or just inconsistency? If inconsistency, then are these new films
representing the reality of life, in which people hold inconsistent views, or
are they advocating an inconsistent view na"ively? My guess, from the
general moralistic tone that I find in Kieslowski's films, is that the latter is
the case, and that works like Kieslowski's and Kutz's might be better seen
as symptoms of current ideological uncertainty than as positive solutions in
themselves. While socialist realism may not have convinced many artists of
the promises of the Communist state, it may have had the more profound
effect of fixing a certain aesthetic of political engagement, no matter what
the politics. Is socialist realism being replaced by a new Catholic Realism?
Young Polish filmmaker Maria Lazarkiewicz has expressed a desire
to move toward a more Hollywood aesthetic, observing that American
cinema "is everywhere," but "our cinema is in the head" (SEEP 13:2, 51-54).
Instead of magnifying an impenetrable Polish soul, she imagines a kind of
film that enables people throughout the world to feel that their fantasies of
American life are true, that if they could just get a ticket to Kennedy airport
they could put two fingers in their mouths and whistle, raising their right
hands in the air, and a gleaming Checker cab driven by a tweed-capped
overweight man with a Bronx accent will whisk them away to Fifth Avenue
for breakfast at Tiffany's. One wonders if Costa-Gavras's adaptation of
Konwicki's novel is not an example of what might happen-minus the
optimism-if Lazarkiewicz's desire were realized.
Konwicki's narrative succeeds precisely by virtue of its unrealistic
impossibility. How could a narrator give a first-person account of
61
everything that happened to him on the day of his public immolation, up
to the moment of death? When would he have time to write it down?
Suspending the conventions of realism, Konwicki forces the reader directly
inside the narrator's thoughts in an attempt to reveal the consciousness of
the totalitarian state, the "Polish Complex," as he has called it in his earlier
novel of that title.
Film, however, is a more insistently realist medium than even the
novel, and Costa-Gavras a more insistently realist artist than Konwicki. He
literally takes the story out of the protagonist's head by bringing in a
television crew to follow him around from a third-person perspective. We
should realize that the director is making an artistic choice here. He might
have filmed more experimentally, say, from Stan's point-of-view and kept
the story inside his head. Instead, we learn almost nothing about this
character's inner life, only the politics of Western media circus and the
outward signs of the desperate malaise of the ex-radicals. Konwicki's novel
gives us an impossible-but-convincing, direct line to the narrator's
consciousness. Costa-Gavras makes us infer it from behavior, witnessed by
the omnipresent TV camera. Costa-Gavras examines the politics of
representation in an age of advanced mechanical reproduction by looking at
the means of production. Konwicki shows us how highly synthetic systems
of representation have changed the structure of knowledge itself, because the
real action and adventure is inside the head.
62
MAYAKOVSKY'S THE BEDBUG
ADAPTED BY SNOO WILSON
By Elizabeth Swain
Upon arrival in London, after more than thirty hours of traveling
from the Antipodes, I received an unexpected invitation to the National
Theatre to see Snoo Wilson's adaptation of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug
(1927). The ticket was for that same day, curtain time in two hours. The
combination of Britain's master surreal playwright and a play I had long
wanted to see in production won out over tiredness. I was well rewarded.
What I was in fact attending was the presentation of the winning
productions of BT National Connections, a national youth theatre festival,
supported by British Telecom and sponsored by the Royal National
Theatre. At a time of dreadful cutbacks in government funding for the arts
in Britain, it was heartening to see corporate sponsorship stepping into
support the National's Education Project in this way. It was also heartening
to see the National's huge Olivier Theatre crammed with young people.
Perhaps most exciting of all was seeing the Olivier stage people with
seventy young actors and musicians from the Cheltenham Everyman Youth
Theatre giving a vital, energetic, and absolutely effective performance of
Wilson's witty, bawdy, and very funny adaptation. Twelve established
playwrights were commissioned to write a new play for the festival or to
translate or adapt an existing one. Wilson worked from a straight
translation to create his version of The Bedbug. The play was selected by the
National for its obvious timeliness after the breakdown of the Soviet system,
but also because it speaks to other issues of contemporary relevance. In an
interview accompanying the published version, Wilson notes:
I don't see why young people should not relate this play to our
contemporary situation. After all, the things Mayakovsky is
laughing at are greed, vanity, and believing that you are better than
you are because you have money and social position. These things
have moral dimensions that transcend any particular society.
There are more than enough examples of that corruption of the
spirit in our own society for young people to ponder on.
1
Wilson's adaptation is modern, colloquial, youthful, yet true to the
spirit of the original. It omits the abundant references to contemporary
artists and political figures, but keeps the settings as Mayakovsky wrote
63
64
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. IS, No. 3
Scene from Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, adaptation by Snoo Wilson
at the National Theatre, London
U"'l
'>D
them. Wilson has added lyrics for several songs, particularly for guitar-
playing Ivan Varlet, as he calls the protagonist. Shostakovich had written
incidental music for the original production, but Wilson makes music an
integral feature of his version, leaving it to the producers to commission or
assemble their own score.
The Cheltenham group put together some pointedly familiar music
along with some original pieces, all played well by an onstage band. The
director, Sheila Mander, deserves accolades for using a huge cast, and for
creating a superb sense of ensemble. The play demands an energetic,
physical, comedic approach and she worked wonders with her young actors.
The 1929 sections had a different physical style from the futuristic 1979
scenes where conformity and robotism had set in. Similarly, a different
physicality distinguished the characters played by the chorus: journalists,
firemen, wedding guests, corpses, old people, children, doctors, animals and
so on. The firemen drew from Keystone Cops routines, the journalists from
Network, the animals in the zoo were deliciously silly, t he Soviet doctors
terrifying. The witty and colorful costumes, the different scenes, locations
and characters supported the strong physical work establishing comic book
style. Outsize props added further visual support. For example, the beauty
parlor workers were equipped with huge, colorful, combs and scissors. The
fire, erupting in the middle of a gloriously decadent wedding-scene, was
grotesquely funny until we were suddenly faced with the charred bodies.
Then the sterile, colorless world of 1979 took over, with its machine-like
bureaucrats in charge.
The meeting of Mayakovsky and Wilson is clearly a success. In the past
Wilson has been described as the "enfant terrible" of Britain's post 1970s
political writers, a reputation not unlike that of Mayakovsky in his time.
Wilson's adaptation of The Bedbug, while served wonderfully by a Soviet-
style huge cast, may be done with about twenty actors, making it an ideal
undertaking for college production. In the meantime, perhaps Wilson will
look at the other plays. The wedding of Wilson and Mayakovsky is too
good to rest here.
Notes
1
Wilson, Snoo, Making Scenes: Four Short Plays for Young Actors (London:
Methuen, 1995), 188.
SIL VIU PURCARETE'S THE TEMPEST
Marvin Carlson
During the past four years, Romanian Silviu Purcarete has emerged as one
of Europe's leading directors. Born in Bucharest in 1950, Purcarete studied
theatre directing at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Bucharest,
becoming Professor of Theatre Directing there in 1978. He developed his
skills in Piatra Neamt, Constanta and Bucharest, where he spent twelve
years at Theatre Mic before undertaking the work at the National theatre
of Craiova and the Theatre Anton Pann in Rimnicu Vilcea which has given
him an international reputation. His Ubu Rex with Scene from Macbeth was
one of the outstanding offerings at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival. Since then
the Purcarete productions of Titus Andronicus (1992) and Phaedre (1994)
have toured widely in Europe and to South America, Japan, Israel, and
Canada with great success. The latter was most recently presented in
Copenhagen in October of 1995.
The Tempest, Purcarete's first production with British actors, was
jointly sponsored by the Nottingham Playhouse, the Theatr Clwyd in
Wales, and the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, which has hosted several earlier
Purcarete productions and which is producing Purcarete's projected epic, Les
Danaides, an Aeschylian tetralogy with a cast of 120, for five major
European festivals in 1996. The Tempest was first offered in Nottingham in
September of 1995. The unconventionality of Purcarete's vision was clear
from the opening shipwreck scene, which began amid the patrons in the
theatre lobby. Since this reporter was in a far corner of the lobby at the
time, I was aware at first only of a great uproar in the center of the large
lobby. I pressed forward, but so did everyone else, and so I was aware only
of a general turbulence, of cries, smoke, and discordant music. The turmoil
burst through the main doors into the auditorium which then slammed shut
as an anticipatory silence spread through the assembled spectators. The
doors then opened and we entered the already darkened house, Prospera's
enchanted realm. Not an actor was now to be seen but the air was full of
sounds-whispered, half-understood miked lines from the play, bursts of
music, rumblings of thunder. A strange figure, later revealed to be
Prospero, appeared and disappeared behind a scrim, projections on the stage
floor suggested rolling waves, two bright projection lights aimed directly at
the audience f<1.ded in and out, so that we were sometimes in almost blinding
light, other times in almost complete darkness.
Purcarete, like Kantor, is fascinated by mixing live actors with
67
puppets and dummies, as we see in the opening scene between Miranda
(Saira Todd) and Prospero (Michael Fitzgerald). Miranda begins speaking to
a grotesque clothing dummy downstage, then gradually turns to an
unmoving figure (real or dummy?) lying on a couch stage center with his
back to us who at last reveals himself as her father. Upstage right in
semidarkness is a strange, somewhat menacing group of figures, apparently
all dummies in white eighteenth century frock coats, masks, and exaggerated
wigs. Later when Prospero summons Ariel the turntable will bring these
strange figures downstage and they will be revealed as "Ariel and all his
Quality," one of Purcarete's most original and striking conceits, making
Ariel a small crowd of spirits, the "demi-puppets" of the island, some
human, some dummies, their single voice always miked, moving like a small
Greek chorus, all in these strange and highly theatrical period costumes and
wigs, and several of them playing period instruments as well (two violins,
two cellos, one mouthbow). The costuming mixes periods. When the
usurpers are first mentioned in Prospero's narrative they appear in a grim
line behind the scrim in dark military suits, which they will wear again in
the closing scenes. On the island they wear identical "shipwrecked"
costumes, consisting of black suspenders over naked torsos, short white
trousers, and black gaiters, shoes, and stockings. All have their hair teased
out to suggest fright wigs. Antonio (Stephen Tindall) is normally pushed in
a wheelchair as a seat of ambiguous authority, though he is perfectly capable
of walking if he wishes.
Purcarete has directed The Tempest with a cast entirely composed
of British actors except for his Caliban, played by the leading Romanian
actor Gheorghe Ilie, who has been associated with Purcarete in all of his
best-known stagings. Ilie's Romanian accent is not cloaked but
foregrounded, to emphasize his outsider quality, but equally important, he
clearly represents the physical, the id, in contrast to the grotesquely
"Enlightment" Ariel-chorus. Caliban is heavy set, clothed only in a large
diaper, greedy, and given to such masochistic entertainments as dotting his
body with clothespins. Whenever he appears, an island volcano smokes and
smolder ominously, a small accent of light in the darkness behind the scrim.
Instead of wood, Caliban and Ferdinand carry huge and strange symbolic
burdens, Ferdinand the frame of an enormous cello, Caliban the torso of a
giant skeleton.
Of course the masque and magic scenes are carried out with great
visual imagination, but other scenes, normally played as simple narration or
dialogue, are often even more surprising in their unconventionality. When
Antonio and Sebastian are plotting over their sleeping companions Purcarete
places them on opposite sides of the stage behind music stands with scripts
or scores, precisely in the manner Strehler staged several key Faust and
Mephistopheles scenes in his famous Faust I and II. Purcarete, unlike
Strehler, converts this reading metaphor immediately back into theatre. As
the villains agree upon their plot, each sets fire to the papers on their stand,
and at Sebastian's "Draw thy sword," pull out the tops of the stands to
become the swords. These music stands, like other props, will reappear near
the end to become part of the theatre trappings that Prospero will throw
about the stage as he renounces his magic and his illusion.
This renunciation is one of the most complete I have seen. The
final confrontation with his old adversaries is presented as Prospero's last
great theatrical presentation. The Ariel chorus gathers around Prospera on
his bed, holding a large baroque mirror and candles as he slowly dresses in
an elaborate red costume, with makeup and wig. In this stunning costume
and in brilliant white light (colored light is often used in the production to
stress certain moods) he appears before Alonso and the rest. As the scene
progresses, however, Prospero becomes quieter, more unsteady, and his
acknowledgement of Caliban "this thing of darkness" as his own, clearly
costs him a great deal. The slow, and apparently somewhat reluctant
withdrawal of the Ariel figures leave Prospera almost totally powerless, and
alone on stage. With his last strength he knocks over the few staging
elements left, some music stands, and collapses, scarcely able to whisper out
his final lines as the stage turntable slowly carries him out of sight under the
dark blue curtain used earlier for the masque. As the table continues to
turn, Prospero's couch in brought into view and ends downstage center. On
it is Caliban, plucking quietly at an antique stringed instrument, the final
music of Prospero's island.
Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Silviu Purcarete, Nottingham, Sept.
30, 1995. Cast: Alonso King of Naples, David Hobbs; Ferdinand, Stephen
Mangan; Triculo, Sean McKenzie; Sebastian, Toby Whithouse; Gonzalo,
James Woolley; Stephano, Matthew Devitt; Prospero, Michael Fitzgerald;
A Lord, James Tucker; Miranda, Saira Todd; Antonio, the ursurping duke,
Stephen Tinall, Caliban, Gheorghe Ilie; voice of Ariel, Michael Fitzgerald.
69
ANTIQUE PUPPETS AND AGELESS TALES: THE
CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETTE THEATRE'S
PRODUCTION OF THE WHITE DOE AND OTHER STORIES
By Eszter Szalczer
The productions of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette
Theatre carry on a four-centuries old tradition of Czech folk puppetry.
In the seventeenth century itinerant puppeteering families performed
at village fairs and market places for adult and mainly peasant audiences.
A hundred years later an additional type of puppetry developed, which
drew on fairy tales and was addressed to children.
The puppet plays were handed down by oral tradition, and
feature a mixture of "high"-noble and heroic-characters, "low"
comical types, and fantastic creatures. Accordingly, the marvelous,
hand-carved, painted wooden puppets represent kings and queens,
peasants, soldiers, spirits, devils, witches, skeletons, and animals, all of
which can be used in a variety of roles. Behind the captivatingly naive
expression of the figures a complex universe of folk-imagination and
an enchanting world of fairy-tales come to life. Vlt Hotejs, director of
CAMT discovered a whole set of century-old marionettes in the attic
of the Jan Hus Church in Manhattan. In addition to this find the
company is supplied with puppets by traditional carvers living in the
Czech Republic.
The latest undertaking of CAMT offers treats for both children
and adults. The matinee production for children is performed by Vlt
Hofejs in the company of a dozen or so puppets. As one enters the
auditorium at the Bohemian National Hall, the imagination is
activated by a fantastic atmosphere made quite ordinary.
Puppets-animals and other fictional characters-are sitting among the
audience in the rows of red-and-blue seats, and from the stage other
puppets, ready to act, watch the spectators gather. Thus even before
the start of the actual performance, the lines separating stage and
audience are blurred, and we enter the world of puppets, as though we
were entering the magic castle in the amusement park of a remote East
European town.
Vlt Hofejs not only creates a world appealing to children's
imagination, but he effortlessly makes his audience an active part of
this world. In this performance he is both a puppeteer and a
70
71
storyteller. The narrative of the performance, a series of stories he
heard from his grandmother as a child, includes 1he Wandering Egg, 1he
Stingy Tailor, and Salt Over Gold. While telling the stories and
animating the puppets featured in them, he is in continual interaction
with the children, addressing them directly, moving deliberately in and
out of character. Part of the fun are his constant "mistakes" of mixing
up puppets and picking the wrong ones (for example, a dog puppet has
to serve as a cat, or a goat as an ox). However, these "blunders" do not
break the illusion, but they rather make it even more complete by
letting the children's imagination bridge the gaps and "correct" visible
reality.
Moreover, Vit Horejs educates his audience on puppetry,
telling them the stories of certain characters and explaining the
difference between puppets and marionettes (string-puppets). The
dialogue between stage and audience is accentuated by the lighted
house, with the performer constantly in full view. In this way he is
able to disclose the play aspect as well as the techniques of puppetry,
showing for instance, how he can operate a whole orchestra of puppets
from a single frame.
The evening performance features 1he W'hite Doe ,Or the
Piteous Trybultaions of the Sufleryng of Countess Jenovifa, a play which
was one of the top "hits" of the Czech puppet stage in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It was created by folk puppeteer Prokop
Dubsky, first recorded in writing by Frantisek Zatka, and translated
into somewhat modernized English version by Vit Horejs. The
intricate story tells the sad separation, adventures, and eventual
reunion of Count Sylkfr1d and his beloved wife Jenovefa, who is
unjustly accused of faithlessness and almost executed while her
husband is away fighting a war. A wide variety of characters are
impersonated by the antique marionettes, . as well as by new ones
designed and carved by Jakub Krejci. They are masterfully operated
by the whole company of puppeteers: Jack Altwarg, Rolande Duprey,
Chris Maresca, and V1t Hoiejs. The acts of the play are divided by
songs composed and performed by Elise Morris; these songs stress the
chief emotions of the individual acts.
The play takes on epic proportions, covering almost a decade,
and including numerous sensational scenes in a wide variety of
locations: love and intrigue, battles, imprisonment, exile, ghosts, and
childbirth in a dungeon.
The White Doe, or the Piteous Tribulations
of Unfortunate Countess fenovefa
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The story is reminiscent of a Jacobean revenge tragedy mixing
elements of low comedy, mystery, and melodrama. The play offers a
tragicomic double ending. After long suffering the count and countess
are finally reunited in the Desolate Wasteland. This happy ending,
however, is followed by a tragic, or rather, melodramatic one. In the
final scene, which the good-hearted puppeteers are compelled to
perform against their will, the countess suddenly dies, and her son,
who has just found his father, now loses his mother.
Vit Hoiejs' multiple staging of the play, which suits the epic
scope and diverse locations, recalls the portable stages of folk puppetry
and the communal theatre experience of the Middle Ages. The fi rst
half of the play is performed on the main stage; then the audience is
asked to follow t he count Sylkfrid on his wanderings in search of his
wife. We climb endless dark stairs arriving finally at a dimly lit yet
magnificent hall on the top floor. We seem to have emerged from a
dungeon and reached the mysterious wi lderness of imagination. This
curious spatial experience fits perfectly with t he emotional ambiguities
of the play: magnificence and shabbiness, liberation from the
underground, and ascent to a heaven which is in danger of collapsing.
In this vast space with its high ceiling, overhead galleries, and
peeling plaster, two additional temporary stages are erected for the last
scenes (stage constructor: Jifl Pospisil, backdrop painters: Beatrix Pies
and Julius Kozlowski). There are no "high-tech" special effects, and,
despite the disparate elements, a coherent experience results from the
physicality and intimate closeness of the puppets, the puppeteers, and
the audience, all of them brought together on the common ground of
fiction, drawn into the same magic circle.
75
HAVEL'S THE MEMORANDUM
AT THE INDEPENDENT THEATRE COMPANY
Julie Gochman and David Crespy
Although Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum was written for a
specific historical moment, it has resurfaced on both sides of the Atlantic
pertinent now as it was then. Through the end of November, New
York's Independent Theatre Company (IT C) presented their version of
this early Havel play, which, as stated in the lTC press release, "is as
relevant to Czechoslovakia in the 60's as it is to America in the 90's." In
1965, when the play was first presented in Prague's Theatre on the
Balustrade, the Czech people were living through what would later be
called "the thaw," a brief window of freedom during which the Russian
totalitarianism relaxed and theatre blossomed. During the ensuing years
from 1968 to 1989 none of Havel's plays were permitted to be produced.
Interestingly, The Memorandum has resurfaced in New York in the
1990's when the forces of political conservatism have had a chilling effect
on American culture and on arts funding in particular.
The Memorandum focuses on the predicament of Joseph Gross,
Managing Director of the company, who discovers on his desk a
memorandum written in a strange, synthetic language, Ptydepe. In his
attempts to have the memorandum translated, Gross discovers that
Ballas, his deputy director, has secretly introduced Ptydepe into the
office with the stated intention of promoting efficiency. More sinister
motives are at hand.
In the process of translation something is always lost. In a case
like Havel's, where meaning, structure, language, rhythm and characters
are specifically Czech, the loss is substantial. Despite that, ITC's
selection of this play seems oddly resonant in capitalist America of the
1990's with its bureaucratic scrambling and corporate downsizing. It
seems particularly apropos when compared to 1980s office plays like
David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Caryl Churchill's Serious Money,
and Jerry Sterner's Other People's Money which dramatize the terrifying
frenzy of capitalism at its most venal. The production at ITC often
touches on the same corporate terrors magnified by Havel's ironic and
often hilarious twists of language.
Havel's genius in satirizing bureaucratic inanity is derived from
his essential "Czechness" as heir to the trajectory of three central cultural
icons: Kafka, Capek and Hasek's Schweik. Kafka, whose characters
76
Independent Theatre Company's Production of
Yaclav Havel's The Memorandum
Picture: Barry Gilbert, Kathleen Kearney, Colleen Quinlan, Peter Brown, Mary Coburn,
Seth Rosmarin, Kelly Dwyer & A viva Stei
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believe that the system can be fought and do fight with dogged
persistence; Schweik, whose balmy optimism in the face of absurd odds
epitomizes the Czech aptitude to survive oppression; and Capek, whose
musings on the mechanization of society are clearly reflected in The
Memorandum. Havel captures the irony inherent in a totalitarian state
which refuses to recognize the dangers of political double-talk.
Havel's is a theatre of words. He toys with mechanical use of
language. While the Independent Theatre production was less successful
in establishing the political significance of the Ptydepe, it did manage to
capture the circularity of the text. The most enjoyable scenes were those
in which Lear, the instructor, teaches this strange circuitous language.
The students mindlessly echoed his words in an absurd mechanization
of language.
Staged as an Open Theatre-style production, the actors
performed on a small, multi-level set flooded with white cubes. The
upstage area was the classroom setting and a space for group effects. The
downstage area served as the focus for the play's central action. The
music for the performance was suitably cacophonous, the lighting
illuminated both the ensemble nature of the production and Gross's
singular predicament.
Ensemble techniques took the form of choral interjections
during the main scenes between Gross and his tormentors. In the early
part of the play, whenever the word "Ptydepe" was mentioned, the
actors would echo it in a whisper. Intermittently, they would burst into
hysterical laughter or punctuate the dialogue with a shower of paper
airplanes. Other times the actors performed listless bureaucratic motions
in half-light, while Gross negotiated the translation of his cryptic
memorandum.
This production turns Havel's rather grim farce into an
Americanized "zany" comedy. However, it comes at the expense of the
darker resonance of the play. While the cast was certainly energetic and
performed with frenetic abandon, the same energy should have been put
into more directorial focus, less obvious ensemble devices, and a much
less cluttered set. There was a lack of differentiation between Gross, the
Vanek character, and the other characters. If he is to be Havel's alter-
ego, the humanist intellectual, and direct heir to the trinity of Czech
cultural icons, he must be unique. The actor playing Gross was pulled
into the same arbitrary ensemble speech patterns. Even in terms of
costume choices, he blended in with the others. The only exception was
that everyone but Gross wore the stereotypical horn-rimmed glasses that
many Eastern-European bureaucrats wear.
Several individual performances stood out in the lTC
production. Peter Brown's neatly-crafted Lear offered maniacal lectures
in Ptydepe. Colleen Quinlan's mercurial portrayal of Helena/Max was
performed with a strange, witless good humor. Barry Gilbert interpreted
the central role of Joseph Gross with a certain nerdy elegance, and Mary
Coburn's Ballas oozed a chilling bureaucratic malevolence from every
pore. To her credit Director Michelle Gigante has rigorously crafted a
high energy, stylized production which, despite limitations, manages to
capture much of Havel's view of a mechanized and dehumanized world.
ITC's production was a bit simplistic, yet the entire audience, a full
house on a Saturday night, was engaged and responsive. While there was
much lost in the time/ distance transposition of the play, it did speak to
this mixed age-group U.S. audience in a way Schweik may have
appreciated.
79
CONTRIBUTORS
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City
University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on
theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He
has recently published an expanded version of his Theories of the Theatre and
a new book, Deathtraps. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan
award for dramatic criticism.
DAVID CRESPY is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre
at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
DAVID A. GOLDFARB is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in
Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate
School.
JOHN FREEDMAN is the co-editor of Gordon and Breach Publishers'
Russian Archive, and is a columnist for Plays International (London) . He
lives in Moscow where he is the theater critic for the Moscow Times.
JULIE GOCHMAN is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
JEFF LAWSON is a theatre researcher and adjunct professor at Manhattan
Marymount College. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University. His
dissertation was on Tadeusz Kantor and Teatre Cricot 2.
LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts
University. He has just completed a history of Chekhovian production for
Cambridge University Press and is currently working on a documentary
history of Soviet Theatre.
ELIZABETH SWAIN is a teacher, scholar (David Edgar: Playwright and
Politician), and actress. In early 1996 she will be appearing in the Potomac
Theatre Project's production of Howard Barker's Scenes From an Execution,
first at the Olney Theatre, Maryland, and then at the Atlantic Theatre space in
New York.
80 Slavic and East Ettropean Performance Vol. I S, No. 3
ESZTER SZALCZER, a native of Hungary, is a doctoral candidate in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate
School.
KEVIN WINDLE is a translator of Slavic languages and a professor of
theatre at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
LISA WOLFORD was a participant in Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama
Program from 1989 through the conclusion of the project in 1992. She has
written a book on Objective Drama Research, The Tntersection of the Timeless
Moment, which is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi, and is
co-editor (with Richard Schechner) of The Grotowski Sourcebook, to be
published by Routledge. Her writings have appeared in TDR, New Theat re
Quarterly, and the Journal of Dramatic and Theatre Criticism. Wolford is also
working with Grotowski as translator of his forthcoming book. She is a
Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, and is
currently completing her dissertation on dynamics of apprenticeship in
Grotowski's recent work.
Photo Credits
Jerzy Grotowski, Chicago IL
Pancho Colladetti
Kantor' s sculpture for Juliusz Slowacki's Balladyna
Jeff Lawson
Scenes from Mayakowsky's The Bedbug, adapted by Snoo Wilson
for the National Theatre, London
Dominic Sweeney
The Magnificent Cuckold at the Satirikon Theatre
Dmitry Borko
The Death-Defying Act, Tabakov Theatre
Mikhail Guterman
My Poor Marat, Mossoviet Theatre
Mikhail Guterman
81
Photo Credits (cont)
Ivanov's Family, Pushkin Theatre
Mikhail Guterman
School For Wives, Taganka Theatre
Mikhail Guterman
The Metamorphosis, Satirikon Theatre
Mikhail Guterman
Puppeteer Vft Hofejs
Charlie Steiner
The Wbite Doe, Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre
(Grouping of Puppets)
Jan Frank
The Wbite Doe, Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre
(Puppet on Horse)
Helena Krejcf
PLAYSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):
No.1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.2 !, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredyriski. Translated by Michal
Kobialka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski. Stage
Adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English verstion by Earl Ostroff
and Daniel C. Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 5 The Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.6 The Ambassador, by Slawomir Mrozek. Translated by Slawomir
Mrozek and Ralph Mannheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets
and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00
($6.00 foreign).
No.8 The Trap, by Tadeusz R6zewicz. Translated by Adam
Czerniawski. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw T oborski, Michal Kobialka,
and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C.
Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
83
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and Catalog
by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
84
CASTA-THEATRE PROGRAM
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
33 WEST 42nd STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10036
Slavic arui East European Performance Vol. 15, No. J
PhD Program in Theatre
at the Graduate School and University Center
ofthe City University of New York
Offers graduate training in Theatre Studies
Certificate program in Film Studies
Recent Seminars include
Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
The Current New York Season Feminist Theory and Performance Melodrama
The History Play Dramaturgy Simulations Film Aesthetics
African-American Theatre of the 60s and 70s
Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance
Theatre History Dramatic Structure Theatre Criticism
Strindberg and Modernism American Film Comedy Kabuki
Films and Theatre of Ingmar Bergman Minstrelsy 1865-Present
Italian Theatre Latino Theatre in the U.S. Women and the Avant-Garde
Interdt>ciplinar y Options
with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields
and through a consortia! arrangement with
New York University and Columbia University
Affiliated with Center for Advanced Study in Theatre and
Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Western European Stages
Slavic and Eastern European Performance
Theatre faculty include:
Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Dan Gerould, Judith Milhous
and James Hatch, Jonathan Kalb, Miriam D'Aponte, Harry Carlson, Jane Bowers
Rosette Lamont, Samuel Leiter, Gloria Waldman, Ralph Allen, Albert Bermel,
Mira Feiner, Morris Dickstein, Stephen Langley, Benito Ortolani, David Willinger
Film faculty include:
Stuart Liebman, William Boddy, George Custen, Tony Pipolo,
Leonard Quart, Joyce Rheuban, and Ella Shohat
Theatre Program
CUNY Graduate Center
33 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-8099
(212) 642-2231
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An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre
developments in Western Europe. Issued twice a year - Spring and Fall -
and edited by Marvin Carlson. each issue contains a wealth of information
about recent European festivals and productions, = ": iuding reviews.
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Now in its 15th year, this journal, edited by Daniel Gerould and
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