Artykuły

A Season of Successes and Anxiety

At the end of every year, in December, Warsaw plays host to Theatre Meetings, whose purpose it is to show the best theatrical productions of the season given outside the capital. Such is at least the intention of the organizers. To show what is most interesting in the theatrical life of the so-called provinces. By the way, this is not a happy definition: provinces. For regional theatres are neither worse nor less ambitious, and by no means secondary in comparison to those in Warsaw. Their artistic activities are not less important than the achievements of Warsaw theatres, merely on account of the fact that the former work far from the Polish capital. For that matter, quite the contrary happens. Though leading artists, especially actors, have gathered in Warsaw, though theatres here (or at least a part of them) enjoy far better working conditions and have practically no trouble with attracting the audiences, it is outside Warsaw that the best, most creative performances are produced as a rule. This has been so for several years already. Most probably because one can work more quietly there, far from the metropolitan vanity fair, far from the main television studio, the main radio station, far from film ateliers and lighter entertainments, which divert prominent actors from their main job and make the work of Warsaw theatres quite difficult. And it is probably for that reason that nearly all leading Polish theatre producers of the middle and younger generation work outside Warsaw: Swinarski, Jarocki, Skuszanka, Krasowski, Okopiński and Hebanowski, Prus, Grzegorzewski, Kordziński, Maciejowski, Gruda, until recently Szajna, Pampiglione, Goliński, Tomaszewski, Grotowski... In Warsaw with its dozen or so theatres there remained only Hanuszkiewicz, Axer, Jerzy Kreczmar, Warmiński. The result is simple. Since Craig's time there was no theatre without a producer. Even most prominent actors when left to themselves or doomed to work with skilful craftsmen only, will not produce a live and creative theatre. But this was just a digression. In connection with the annual Warsaw Theatre Meetings the editorial board of "Teatr" sent questionnaires to theatrical critics who were to indicate the best performances of the season. In 1971, for the first time, their answers were almost unanimous. Nearly all of them have selected the same performances: "Termopile polskie" (Polish Thermopylae) by Tadeusz Miciński, adapted for the stage by Stanisław Hebanowski and directed by Marek Okopiński, from the Teatr Wybrzeże in Gdańsk, three plays produced by the Teatr Stary in Cracow; "Biesy" (The Possessed) by Dostoevsky-Camus, directed by Andrzej Wajda, who was also the author of the stage design, "Żegnaj Judaszu" (Farewell Judas) by Ireneusz Iredyński, directed and stage-designed by Konrad Swinarski, and "Szewcy" (The Shoemakers) by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, directed by Jerzy Jarocki; next, "Thermidor" by Stanisława Przybyszewska, directed by Jerzy Krasowski of the Wrocław Teatr Polski, "Paternoster" by Helmut Kajzar, directed by Jerzy Jarocki of the Wrocław Teatr Współczesny; two productions from Szczecin: "Hamlet" directed by Józef Gruda and "Dialogus de passion", adapted by Kazimierz Dejmek and directed by Jitka Stokalska; from the Wrocław Pantomime Theatre - "Sen nocy listopadowej" (A November Night's Dream) by Henryk Tomaszewski, and from Kalisz - Witkiewicz's "Szewcy" and "Wyzwolenie" (Liberation) by Staniław Wyspiański, both directed by Maciej Prus, and finally Jerzy Grotowski's "Apocalypsis cum figures", a world-renowned performance, which has been already running for two years. I give so pedantically all the titles (most of which are probably unknown to foreign readers), and the names of their authors and producers, because the list really embraces prominent performances which were not merely local events but excellent theatrical productions of which no European theatre would be ashamed. There were no definitely "better" or "worse" items among them. And those performances together with two (some say three, including in their number Józef Szajna's artistic happening in the Teatr Polski, based on Goethe's "Faust") staged in Warsaw: "Biesy" directed by Janusz Warmiński in the Teatr Ateneum and Słowacki's "Beniowski" directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz in the Teatr Narodowy, defined the rank of the past season.

This is something, indeed: fifteen prominent first-night performances in one theatrical season, and what is more imposing, their number may be doubled if we add some other titles and names ("Doctor Faustus" by Marlowe directed by Bohdan Korzeniewski in Cracow, "Rzecz ludzka" - Human Affair, produced by Krystyna Skuszanka in Wrocław, "Zegary" - Clocks, by Tadeusz Lubieriski directed by Jerzy Kreczmar in Cracow, "Chalka" - The Seagull, by Chekhov directed by Jerzy Grzegorzewski and "Ksiądz Marek" - Father Mark, by Słowacki directed by Maciej Z. Bordowicz in Łódź, Słowacki's "Kordian" directed by Roman Kordziński in Poznań, etc.) - all that is an achievement which we may be proud of. There are not many countries in the world, with Britain, France, the Soviet Union or both German states among them, whose theatres could claim such an achievement in eleven months. A rich, fruitful and successfull season we might say. An evidence of the tremendous vitality of the Polish theatre, a credit to the Polish producers...

And yet, this is a show window only. To see all those thirty or so productions one would have to be constantly on the move, visiting fifty odd theatres in various parts of Poland to pick up the best performances from some five hundred first nights given annually in this country, watching on the occasion plays which are not quite so good, listening to the confidences of men of the theatre who feel deep concern and anxiety when they think about the everyday work of the theatre in Poland, about its prospects in the coming years, artistic possibilities and the obtaining model of organization. For things do not look bright and cheerful in this respect. Although we have excellent performances, although artists grapple ambitiously and often successfully with problems and topics of contemporary life, though theatrical repertoires are rich and searches for new forms intensive, though the balance-sheet successes is now better than at any time in the past fifteen years, there are problems and things which cannot but arouse concern. There is no place here to complain about minor troubles and an-ncyances which always occur in the life of any theatre. We shall only give vent here to our most serious grief of which the last year reminded us rather painfully. Just because it was the year of successes of individual performances. For even the most brilliant productions do not form theatre yet. When we take a closer look at the things we are bound to admit that the theatre in Poland has no drama of its own. All important events in the past season were created without the participation of modern literature written here and now. Successes were scored by classic plays. And what about contemporary output? "Thermidor", a great political drama by Stanisława Przybyszewska dates back to the twenties of this century. Miciński's "Termopile polskie" is a text from the beginning of the 20th century. "Szewcy" was written by Witkiewicz five years before the outbreak of World War Two. Even "Żegnaj Judaszu" by Iredynski, a young writer, was written six years ago. "Paternoster" by Kajzar is the sole really new play but perhaps for that reason precisely it needed Jarocki's production to make of that amorphic and youthfully untamed drama a perfect performance. It can be argued that a theatre which can be live, thoroughly modern and exciting without interesting, modern and valuable plays, bears an excellent testimony to theatrical art. But this also sounds a note of alarm, it is a warning that the theatre feeds on the capital accumulated years ago, that it tries to speak about modern times by reinterpreting classic works, that it only shapes forms of expression, but contributes very little to the concept of modern man about the present world.

Furthermore, it is a theatre in which nearly everything is done by the producer who has no equal or fully valuable partner in the actor. The actor - even when he gives a great performance - is merely an executor, never a contributor to the creation. This is true both of individual actors and of the acting team, which at present hardly at all exists in dramatic theatres. Our theatre has not found yet an organizational form that would solve its troubles, difficulties and conflicts so abundant today. To mention only a part of them: there is television which takes a great deal of actors' time and audiences' attention. There are mass media which pour floods of information about the world upon contemporary man, and demand from the theatre to put this incoherent picture of the world into some order (without the participation of modern writers?). There is the audience which is no more composed of well-known people with definite tastes and likings, whom the former theatre knew how to address and how to make interested. At present this is a democratically unifed audience where a modern intellectual sits side by side with a young worker, and a pensioner who lived all his life in a big town sits next to a young student, who most of his time spent in the countryside. We meet here both sports fans and people politically active. How much the theatre must have to say in order to convey something essential to every spectator in particular! The question - what the theatre should be like in this situation - is not merely a formal one. Some attempts to give it an answer are only being made. The period of reval uation of the old and traditionally respected models of activity turns as a rule into a period of intense investigations. Such periods often give rise to outstanding works which, however, more often spring from intuition than reasoning. But what should be done to make those rare flashes a permanent and steady flame, to build a theatre useful to its audience and its time? - an answer to this question has not been found yet. Theatres and men of the theatre throughout the world are concerned with the same problem. We would like to have a very simple recipe for such a theatre: to stage well good plays, with the applause of the audience. Well, but almost every word of that short sentence carries more than one meaning. In the past season, the season of thirty good performances, we have not yet succeeded in finding univo-cality in this respect. Moreover, we have noticed that we are running short of the means - literature, teams of actors, a language common for the whole audience -through which this univocality could be attained. This is bound to arouse certain misgivings about the future of the theatre in the next few years, even though the season measured by the number of good performances was more than successful.