SEEP Vol. 25 No.2 Spring 2005

volume 25, no.
2
Spring 2005
SEEP(ISSN * 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and
East European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Melissa Johnson (on leave)
Margaret Araneo (acting)
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Carly Smith
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Elisa Legon
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Juan R. Recondo
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen ]. Kuharski
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
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;
Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must
be furnished to the editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Daniel Gerould
DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS
Frank Hentschker
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION
Jan Stenzel
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants from
the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre of the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 2005 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
2
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No.2
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
IN MEMORIAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Karol Wojtyla, 1920-2005"
"Edward Czerwinski, 1929-2005"
ARTICLES
"To Be or To Perform:
Andrzej T. Wirth and Trans-Continental Gardening"
Krystyna Lipinska Illakowicz
"A Theatre for Young Russian Playwrights and Directors:
Aleksei Kazantsev on the Creation of the
Dramaturgy and Directing Center"
Elisabeth Ri ch
"Belonging to Those Who Create It:
Organization and Financing in Czech Theatre
Before and After the Velvet Revolution"
Stepan Simek
"The Other Comes to Holland:
Paradise Regained? Festival in the Netherlands"
Dasha Krijanskaia
5
6
7
12
14
17
18
34
44
56
3
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Fortune's Favorite: Vassily Kachalov"
Maria Ignatieva
REVIEWS
70
"Inspector General from Kyiv on Stage in Philadelphia" 80
Larissa M. L. Z. Onyshkevych
"The Ressurrection of the Czech Black Comedy
in Jan Hrebejk's Up and Down" 85
Leonard Q!lart
Contributors 89
4 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 25, No.2
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 with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and
film; with new approaches to older materials in recently published works;
or with new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo!, but we cannot
use original articles discussing Gogo! 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 that
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. Transliterations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as Word 97 Documents for Windows and a hard copy
of the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all
reviews. All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East
European Peiformance, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified
after approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Performance by visiting our website at http/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProOuest Information and Learning as
abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the
International Index to the Performing Arts.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are
members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
Volume 25, No. 2 of SEEP opens with two obituaries. We pay
tribute to Karol Wojty!a as a playwright and man of the theatre and to
Edward Czerwinski as an editor, translator, scholar, critic, producer, and
patron of artistic and cultural exchange. The issue itself is a full one,
consisting of articles and features on a wide range of topics. In BOOKS
RECEIVED, we call attention to several new publications dealing with
Visegrad theatre-that of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and
Slovakia. The next section of the issue is devoted to two articles on colorful
theatrical personalities. Krystyna Illakowicz presents a vivid portrait of
Andrzej Wirth, a contemporary international cultural critic, director, and
artist, mediating between Poland and the West. Elisabeth Rich next discusses
the work of Alexei Kazantsev, a teacher whose workshop on dramaturgy is
helping to form Russian playwrights and directors of the future. In the first
of two articles, Stepan Simek explores the changes in theatrical organization
and financing in the Czech Republic during the transition from communism
to capitalism. Dasha Krijanskaia discusses Paradise Regained?-the Second
Eastern European Theatre Festival in Holland. In PAGES FROM THE
PAST, on the occasion of the one-hundred-and-thirtieth anniversary of the
birth of Vassily Kachalov, Maria Ignatieva celebrates the career of the great
Russian actor with the Moscow Art Theatre who appeared in many
outstanding productions of the last century. Two reviews complete the issue.
Larissa Onyshkevych explores the topicality of a new Ukrainian
interpretation of Gogol's Inspector General while Leonard Q.lart considers the
new Czech film Up and Down.
6 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No. 2
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
Gardzienice's performance piece Elektra was presented at La Mama,
April 7 to 24.
Excerpts from. plays by Saviana Stanescu were presented in a
reading entitled Angry Young (Wo)Men at the Romanian Cultural Institute,
May 9.
Palissimo Dance Theatre presented Blind Spot, choreographed and
directed by Palo Zustiak, at the Czech Center New York, May 19. The piece
will also be performed at the 2005 International Theatre Festival Apostrof
in Prague, Czech Republic, in July.
The following plays were presented at the Public Theatre as part of
the Czech Center New York's fourth season of Czech Plays in Translation:
Three Sisters by Iva Volankova, directed by Daniela Varon,
translated by Stepan Simek, May 2
Miriam, by Lenka Lagronova, directed by Marcy Arlin, translated
by Petr Onufer and Maike Baugh, May 9
Aquabelles by David Drabek, directed by Terrell Robinson,
translated by Don Nixon, May 16
je Suis by Egon Tobias, directed by Gwynn MacDonald, translated
by Sodja Zupanc and Howie Lotker, May 23
The New Group and The Play Company will present the US
premiere of Terrorism by Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov, directed by Will
Frears, in English translation by Sasha Dugdale, at the Clurman
Theatre/Theatre Row, May 9 to June 26.
7
The National Asian American Theatre Company will present
Chekhov's Ivanov, directed by Jonathan Bank, translated by Paul Schmidt,
at Bernie West Theater, May 23 to June 8.
Chekhov's Cherry Orchard will be presented in a new translation by
Tom Donaghy, directed by Scott Zigler, at the Atlantic Theatre Company,
May 25 to July 3.
The Atlantic Theatre Company's play development group, Atlantic
453, will present OTMA, a new play by Kate Moira Ryan, set in 1918
Ekaterinburg, directed by Karen Kohlhaas, June 14 to July 3.
Outside/ Input, in collaboration with the Ontological-Hysteric
Theater and chashama, will present the performance piece Body Maps, text
by Saviana Stanescu, research by Kara Dean, and choreography by Natasa
Trifan, at The Culture Project-45 Below, August 17, 19, and 22.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
United States
Sacred Fools Theatre presented Witold Gombrowicz's Ivana,
Princess ofBurgundia, directed by Phillip Wofford, in Los Angeles, California,
May 19 and 26.
Bright Mount Theatre presented Roman Brandstaetter's Dzien
gniwu (The Day ofWrath), directed by Adam Golunski, in Houston, Texas,
May 21 and 22.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International
The Hungarian Cultural Centre of London staged Laurence
Roman's English version of The Attic, music by Gabor Presser, book by Peter
Horvath, and directed by George Roman, in London, UK, May 18 and 19.
The Svandovo Theatre presented Gogol's Marriage in Czech
translation by Leos Suchaifpa with English subtitles, directed by Janusz
Klimsza, in Prague, Czech Republic, May 23.
8 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No.2
FILM
New York City
La Mama presented the Territories of Gardzienice Film Series,
documenting twenty-seven years of performance, research, and training of
Gardzienice, April11 and 18.
EuroFilm Distributions presented The Third, directed by Jan Hryniak
at the Directors Guild of America, April 30.
FilmArt and Film Polski presented the New York Polish Film
Festival, May 5 to 11, at Anthology Film Archive, which included the
following:
julie Walking Home, directed by Agnieszka Holland, May 5
Children of Leningradsky, directed by Hanna Polak and Andrzej
Celinski, May 5 and 7
Zhoorek, directed by Ryszard Brylski, May 6
Nose Bleed, directed by Dominik Matwiejczyk, May 7
Ubu the King, directed by Piotr Szulkin, May 8
Warsaw, directed by Dariusz Gajewski, May 11
An Elzbieta Czyzewska Retrospective, including:
Unloved, directed by Janusz Nasfeter, May 6
Where Is the General?, directed by T adeusz Chmielewski,
May 9
Everything For Sale, directed by Andrzej Wajda, May 11
Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, May
10
9
The Jewish Educational Multimedia/Global Learning Outreach's
documentary Klezmer Musicians Travel "Home" to Krakow, directed by
Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel, aired on Channel 13/WNET New York,
May 22.
FILM
United States.
The Russian film The Rider Named Death, directed by Karen
Shakhnazarov, was screened at the following venues:
Tampa Florida International Film Festival, Tampa, Florida, April 8
and 9.
Rivertown International Film Festival, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
April 1 to 16.
FILM
International
The Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival took place from
April 20 to 24 in Belgrade, Serbia, and included the following:
Chicken Elections, directed by Goran Radovanovic
Army and Me, directed by Filip Markovinovic
Drita, directed by Dragan Elcic
The Country ofVajaja, directed by Petar Jovanovic
I Give You My Peace, directed by Ivica Vidanovic
The Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes, France, included
the following Hungarian shorts, May 11 to 22:
Before Dawn, directed by Balint Kenyeres
johannah, directed by Kornel Mundrucz6
The Khamoro World Roma Festival in Prague, Czech Republic,
celebrating Roma culture, included the following films, May 23 to 28:
W'ho's Afraid Runs Away, directed by Dusan Klein
Brats, directed by Zdenek Tyc
Damnation and Love, directed by Sandor Mihatyff)r
OTHER EVENTS
Aspects of Russian Art, 1918-1935: Selections from the Merrill C.
Berman Collection will be shown at the Ubu Gallery, New York, New York,
May 3 to July 22. The exhibit includes work relating to theatre and film by
Lyubov' Popova and others.
Compiled by Carly Smith
11
BOOKS RECEIVED
Musilova, Martina, ed. Let's Play Czechs (Contemporary Czech Drama 1989-
2004). Prague: Theatre Institute Prague, 2004. 55 pages. Contains a short
essay by Marie Reslova, "Contemporary Czech Drama, Its Generations
and Soloists"; short one- or two-page entries, alphabetically arranged, on
29 contemporary playwrights; a list of Czech titles of plays and a list of
English titles of plays. Each entry includes a short biographical sketch of
the playwright, a contact address, a list of plays with information about
first performance, a list of translated plays, a short summary of one or
more of the author's plays. Available from Theatre Institute Prague,
Celetna 17, Prague 1, Czech Republic, Phone: 00 42 224 809 111; Fax:
00 42 224 811 452; E-mail: info@theatre. cz; http://institute.theatre.cz;
http://www. theatre.cz.
Tompa, Andrea, ed. Visegrad DRAMA Il Escape. Budapest: Hungarian
Theatre Museum and Institute, 2004. In co-operation with Theatre Institute
Prague, Theatre Institute Bratislava, and Theatre Museum Warsaw. 334
pages. Contains an introductory essay by Andras Nagy, "Art and Escape" and
four plays from the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and the Slovak
Republic: r n o ~ t Dvorak and Ladislav KHma's Matthew Honest, tr. by Robert
Russell; Jerzy Szaniawski's The Seafarer, tr. by Artur Zapalowski; Aron
Tamasi's Songbird, tr. by Bernard Adams; and Julius Bare-Ivan's Two, tr. by
Katadna Slugeoova Cockrell. An extensive essay accompanies each play:
Zdenek Hofinek, "Arnost Dvorak and Ladislav Klima's Matthew Honest";
Jadwiga Jakubowska-Opaliriska, "Between Words and Silence: The Theatre
of Jerzy Szaniawski"; Andrea Tompa, "Saints, Birds, People"; and Jan
Sladecek, "Lone Slovak Drama: Philosopher's Journey through the Slovak
Theatre." There is also a fully documented list of productions for each of the
plays, as well as a photograph of each playwright and many production
pictures. Available from the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute,
Krisztina krt. 57, Budapest 1013, Hungary; Tellfax:+36 1 375 1184;
oszmi@ella.hu; www.oszmi.hu.
Teatr, (Warsaw) 2004. Special Gombrowicz issue. 96 pages. Contains six
articles, plus seven reviews, devoted to Gombrowicz, including many
photographs and a CD with 36 selections of radio interviews and readings by
Gombrowicz and others as well as dramatizations of his works.
Didaskalia, Gazeta teatralna, Nos. 61162 (August/September 2004). 132 pages.
Contains special features on Gardzienice's Electra, on Gombrowicz, and on
Grotowski. Includes many photographs.
World/Visegrad and Theatre (W A7) 2004. Ed. Karel Knil. Prague: Svet a
divadlo, 2004. 155 pages. An anthology of essays originally published in
Czech or Slovak in the journal Svlt a Divadlo, mainly from 2003-4, reflecting
theatre activity in the countries of the Visegrad 4 (Czech Republic, Hungary,
Poland, and Slovakia). Contains twelve articles, a short play, and many
photographs. Available from Theatre Institute Prague, as above.
13
IN MEMORIAM
KAROL WOJTYLA, 1920-2005
During the twenty-five years that he was actively involved with the
theatre, between 1939 and 1964, Karol Wojtyla Oohn Paul II) was an actor,
director, dramatist, and theorist, and at one point early in his career,
apparently considered pursuing the theatre as his calling. His principal
theatrical works are his six plays, here listed with the date of composition.
job (1940)
jeremiah (1940)
Our God's Brother (1949)
The jeweler's Shop (1949)
Radiation of Fatherhood (1964)
Riflections on Fatherhood (1964)
From the age of eight in his native town of Wadowice, Karol
Wojtyla participated in amateur theatre, performing scenes for patients in the
hospital where his elder brother was a doctor, and serving as an actor and
director in school plays. He played title roles from the Polish romantic
repertory dealing with national issues and also appeared in comedies by
Fredro.
After his move to Cracow in 1938 to begin his studies of Polish
philology at the Jagellonian University, Wojtyla, an avid theatergoer, joined
the semi-professional Drama Studio 39, which ran its own theatre school. He
also worked in an informal drama group with outstanding actor and director,
Juliusz Osterwa, founder of the Reduta.
During the Nazi occupation, in August 1941, Wojtyla co-founded
with Dr. Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk the Rhapsodic Theatre, which along with
Tadeusz Kantor's Independent Theatre was one of the eight clandestine
theatres operating in Cracow, performing in private homes before small
audiences without scenery or costumes. The Rhapsodic Theatre was an inner
theatre of the spoken word, relying little on external movement or visual
spectacle. Its goal was to foster the romantic repertory and preserve Polish
national culture. "Let the theatre be a Church where the national spirit will
flourish," Wojtyla wrote.
From 1941 to 1944 he took part in the seven wartime productions
of the Rhapsodic Theatre with a total of twenty-two performances. After his
14 SILlvic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No. 2
Karol Wojtyla featured in far-right column, third
from bottom on the Drama Studio 39
ensemble poster
15
Karol Wojtyla performing while atJagellonian University
ordination as a priest in 1946, he continued his ties with Kotlarczyk. At
Niegowice he established a parish theatre and took young villagers to the
theatre in Cracow, mainly to see Rhapsodic Theatre productions. In the
1950s and 1960s he wrote a number of essays about the Rhapsodic Theatre
and rhapsodic acting, based on the ideas of Roman lngarden and his own
experiences. The Rhapsodic Theatre was suppressed in 1953, reconstituted in
1956, and closed again in 1967 by the Communist regime because of
Wojtyla's association with it.
All ofWojtyla's plays and theatre essays are included in The Collected
Plays and Writings on Theatre by Karol Wojtyla, translated and with
introductions by Boleslaw Taborski (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987). The above sketch of Wojtyla's work in the theatre, including tl1e
quotation, is taken from Taborski's introduction.
16 Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 25, No. 2
IN MEMORIAM
EDWARD CZERWINSKI, 1929-2005
Edward Czerwinski was a teacher, scholar, writer, translator, editor,
and impresario who devoted his career to introducing and popularizing
Polish and Eastern European performing arts, literature, and culture. From
1970 to his retirement in 1993, he was professor and twice chair of the
Department of Slavic Languages, Russian, and Comparative Literature at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island. There he
founded and edited the journal of Slavic and East European Arts. He was
founder and director of the Slavic Cultural Center in nearby Port Jefferson,
where he staged many Eastern European English-language premieres and
brought as guest artists distinguished directors and writers. As impresario, he
brought to the Brooklyn Academy the Polish designer and director J6zef
Szajna and his productions of Dante and Requiem.
Czerwinski's publications include:
Editor (with Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz). The Soviet Invasion of
Czechoslovakia: Its Effects on Eastern Europe. NY: Praeger, 1972.
Translator. America Through Polish Eyes: An Anthology, selected and
with commentaries by Bogdz.n Grzelonski. Warsaw: Interpress,
1988.
Contemporary Polish Theater and Drama: 19 5 6-198 4. CT: Greenwood,
1988.
Editor. Dictionary of Polish Literature. CT: Greenwood, 1994.
In the journal of Slavic and East European Arts, Czerwinski published
in 1983 a special issue, Pieces of Poland: Four Polish Dramatists, which he edited
and introduced and which included his translations of Stanislaw
Grochowiak's Dulle Griet, Eugeniusz Priwieziencew's W7.1ores, and Tadeusz
R6iewicz's short plays. In 1991 he selected, translated, and introduced
Tadeusz R6zewicz's Bas-relief and Other Poems.
He also translated and introduced twentieth-century Yugoslav
playwrights, notably Jovan Hristic and Aleksandar PopoviC.
17
TO BE OR TO PERFORM
ANDRZEJ T. WIRTH AND TRANS-CONTINENTAL GARDENING
Krystyna Lipinska Illakowicz
How to draw a portrait of someone constantly in motion, in
transition between Europe and the United States, inhabiting the space
between three languages (German, Polish, and English), whose thought
traverses vast areas of culture, including literature, philosophy, theatre,
performance, and film? This figure in round, black rimmed glasses
(formerly white); a red hat; and white linen jacket (a bit crinkled) is
nonchalant, laughing, sociable, warm, playful, sometimes cynical,
directorial, conversational, always engaging, always attracting people to
him, and always involved in a new project. He is familiar to many theatre
people. They know him as a theatre critic, a theoretician, a teacher, a
professor, one who keeps in touch with a large international community of
his former students and collaborators. This community forms a special
"world garden," which he visits and revisits in his incessant travels.
Andrzej T. Wirth, often hidden by the acronym ATW, which he
likes using playfully as his signature (ATW also indicates Angewandte
Theaterwissenschaft, the Institute of Applied Theater Studies, which he
started in Giessen in 1982) emphasizes the ephemeral nature of theatre art,
and he reenacts this ephemerality in his own life. He is everywhere as an
inquisitive observer of the surrounding reality, reflecting and interacting
with it: performativity is a stamp of his presence. In the preface to his book
Teatr jaki m6glby bye (Theatre: As It Could Be) published in Poland in 2002,
Jan Kott wrote that "Andrzej Wirth has achieved one of the most difficult
things: he created Andrzej Wirth."
ATW perceives himself as a ceaseless traveler who somehow
managed always to be at the right place at the right time.! In the 1950s,
when Bertolt Brecht was in hi s final creative phase of life, Wirth was in
Berlin and took part in Brecht's rehearsals at the Berliner Ensemble. In the
1960s, when Grotowski was conducting his memorable experiments and
performances in Opole and Wroclaw, Wirth worked as a theatre cri tic in
Poland. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when US theatre was bursting with
novel forms of expression, he managed to be in San Francisco and later in
New York.
Andrzej T. Wirth
19
Observer of History
The essays collected in Teatr jaki m6glby bye capture the multiplicity
of planes on which A1W operates. A captivating autobiographical sketch,
which opens the book, presents him as a very perceptive reader of Eastern
European history through the lens of numerous inflections of migration
(territorial, political, and mental). A1W reminisces about World War II
when Poland was doubly occupied-by the Germans and the Russians-and
he was attending an underground high school and later studied under two
eminent philosophers, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbinski,
whose ideas were formative for h1s later aesthetic and theoretical views. This
first introductory chapter familiarizes the reader with the motif of migration
as a basic biographical factor influencing identity formation and operating as
a broader cultural, aesthetic, and cognitive category. A1W approaches the
question of territorial movements in the context of tangled Polish historical
trajectories of expatriation, exile, and repatriation caused by long-term
Russian colonization and both Nazi and Russian occupation during World
War II.
The histories of his parents' lives represent a traditional Polish ethos
marked by exile, separation, loss, emigration, and the ongoing struggle
against political oppression.2 A1W rejects the necessity to take sides and to
anchor himself in one (Polish) culture, which was the traditional choice
dictated by the demands of Polish patriotism. He perceives himself as a
cultural migrant, or expatriate-that is, someone who chooses to live between
two or more cultures because of cultural rather than political reasons. Calling
himself an expatriate, A1W, as a true Brechtian, distances himself not only
from the Polish heroic tradition espoused by his father, demanding an
unconditional service and sacrifice to his fatherland (patria),3 which,
although differently gendered in different languages (feminine in Latin,
Polish, or French and neuter in German), has strong patriarchal
connotations. The decision to intermingle with more traditions, languages,
and landscapes allows him to move beyond the territory-and-state
constricted notion of identity, reposition himself in t he world, and
restructure his image in the flickering, changing light of the self-directed
performance of multiculturalism: a truly Brechtian move.
Enter Theatre
A1W's first fascination with the theatre and the work of Bertolt
Brecht came through his contacts with the Kameralny Theatre in I:.6dz and
the director Erwin Axer. After experiencing the atrocious reality of World
War II, the artificiality of the theatre milieu had a therapeutic effect on him.
His early interest in Brecht has to be seen in the perspective of the Polish
cul tural situation. The perception of Brecht in Poland in the 1950s, a time of
rampant socialist-realist propaganda, was a bit paradoxical and perplexing.
Brecht, as an East German Communist, who moreover had a good
relationship with Moscow, was fully accepted and even propagated by the
Communist authorities in Poland, yet his theatre had nothing in common
with the ideas of socialist realism that was the offi cially accepted form of
artistic expression. Young people like ATW were attracted to Brecht's theatre
by the power of its revolutionary program and ideas, which were
paradoxically perceived as a "Western" openness and "freshness," absent
from rigid and formalistic socialist realism.4 Andrzej Wirth experienced
Brecht's theatre first in Poland, during the visits of the Berliner Ensemble in
1952 and 1954, and in 1956/1957 as an assistant at the Berliner Ensemble.
These were the most artistically fruitful years when the pronounced
Brechtian style of acting established itself in its canonical form. s
These visits to Berlin left a deep imprint on ATW's own view of
theatre and his future work with his students. He studied Brecht's work on
voice production: pronunciation of long German words with characteristic
pauses, screaming outbursts (in German, briillen, known as "bellowing" or
vocalization), and artifici al voice-overs. Spontaneous interjections (so-called
Zwischenrufe), characteristic for German audiences, inspired ATW to speak of
the dramaturgy of interjections and to develop its theory. A forceful even
violent manner of speaking, interwoven with speedy, flat articulation, were
elements of the Berliner Ensemble stage language, which Andrzej Wirth
transferred to his prominent students, such as Rene Pollesch, Tim Staffel, Till
Miiller-Klug, Hans Werner Kroesinger, andJorg Laue, now household names
of the new theatre in Germany.
Teatr jaki m6glby bye familiarizes the reader with various aspects of
ATW's work with Brecht's texts. He was especially fascinated by Brecht's
Lehrstiicke (learning-plays) because of their revolutionary concept of
performative space and the actor's agency. ATW conceives of Lehrstiicke as a
theatre model that replaced both an audience in the traditional sense, or an
audience as an encounter group, with the concept of"intelligent interaction
matrix," thus equally engaging all participants.6 One of his most spectacular
endeavors was a production in Stanford of the so-called Patzer-Material, the
learning-play script of the unfinished play about a dissident Communist by
21
the name of Patzer. ATW found the microfilm version of the Patzer-Material
deposited in the Houghton Libraty at Harvard, got permission from Stefan
Brecht to study the material, then translated the text with Leslie Wilson and
David Ward. Finally he staged this version of Patzer with his students at
Stanford in 1977, which was also the world premiere of the learning-play
version of Patzer-Material.
In Brecht's learning-plays the boundaty between the actor and the
audience, and between the performance and audience space, disappears. The
actor becomes also a spectator, and the spectator becomes an actor; all
parties actively participate in the enactment of the play's "events." The main
event, however, and the core of the performance, as ATW points out,
foregrounds the confrontation of the players with the text's thesis: the
tension created by this confrontation and the performance itself come to be
the main "event" of the Lehrstuck.
Thus the contacts with the Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s
grounded ATW's orientation toward theatre, which he continued in Poland
in the 1960s. He was actively participating in Polish theatre life and wrote as
a theatre critic for the Warsaw-based cultural weekly magazine Nowa Kultura
(New Culture) and Polityka. Again he was at the right place at the right time.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Polish theatre started recuperating and
brought to life a world caliber theatre phenomenon, Jerzy Grotowski, who
was beginning his great theatre adventure in the provincial13 Rows Theatre
(Teatr 13 in the town of Opole. ATW's reaction to Grotowski's
early repertoty theatre productions of Orpheus by Jean Cocteau and Byron's
Cain was mixed and in general not vety enthusiastic. He found the early
productions of Grotowski's small, unknown, provincial theatre pretentious
and doctrinaire.7 But he was also "the first critic who signaled in Western
Europe the birth of an innovative aesthetics in Opole (Svenska Dagbladed,
Stockholm, 1962)."8 He called Grotowski's early experiments a kind of
theatrical "detox therapy ... when the actors already stopped being 'good'
actors in the conventional sense but had not become Grotowski's actors
yet."9 It is in the full-fledged productions of Dr. Faustus, Acropolis, The
Constant Prince, and Apocalypsis cum figuris that he discovered Grotowski as
one of the greatest theatre innovators, and a continuator of Brecht,
Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Artaud. In the eulogy written after Grotowski's
death in 1999, ATW admitted his equivocal relationship with Grotowski's
work, especially at the beginning, but he also pointed out that this "utopian
mystic"JO remained one of the most influential figures shaping his own
22 Slavic and East European Vol. 25, No.2
thinking about theatre (Brecht and Robert Wilson, in a different manner, are
the other two).! I
Grotowski attracted Andrzej Wirth by foregrounding the liminality
of theatrical practice and experience; at the core of his theatre aesthetic was
the minimizing of stage scenery (embedded in the idea of a "poor theatre")
and the maximizing of the actor's engagement, focusing on the actor's body.
Grotowski's work integrated rehearsals and rigorous training-engaging the
actor's physical body, voice resonators, and mental energy-into the
performance process. He also reinvented the dynamics between the actor and
the audience and changed the concept of theatricallperformative space,
engaging the audience's emotional potential and thus expanding the physical
and mental boundaries of a theatrical event. ATW points to a characteristic
architectonic emanating from Grotowski's work with actors, which he
admired and compared to the creation of gothic cathedrals solely by the use
of the actor's voice and body: "the vocal potentials of the actors, amplified
by the training, create in the spectator's imagination an architectural
construction and become the elements of the decor."l2 As long as Grotowski
remained within the boundaries of the theatre and the performative, his work
was close to ATW's own preoccupations, but when he left that space for the
Andrzej T. Wirth
23
sake of para-theatrical experiments (the Theatre of Sources, Objective
Drama, and Art as Vehicle), their roads parted.!3
Whereas Grotowski left the theatre in search of a deeper interhuman
bond, and a lost non-verbal and non-representational essence of all
humanity, ATW remained connected to theatre practice or praxeology,14 as he
called it, and engaged in exploration of the performative operating within
theatrical space. His interests focus on the dynamics between the outer and
the inner space, the intersections between language and action, reality and
illusion, communication and mediation, and the disintegration of the
dialogic mode within the performative space. All these preoccupations
resurfaced in his work as a teacher and theatre theoretician at the Institut Fur
Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft, which he founded in 1982 at the Justus-
Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany.
United States
But before he started his teaching career in Giessen in 1982,
preceded by his visiting professorships at the Technische and the Freie
Universitat in Berlin, ATW had already gone through another formative
period, namely the late 1960s and 1970s, in the United States. He arrived in
the United States in 1966, and after the 1968 Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia and the growing repression of freedom by the political
regimes in all Eastern Bl ock countries, he decided to stay in the United
States. He taught for a few years at Stanford and from 1970 until 1982 at
Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. Contact with the United States added one very important component
to ATW's biography: theatre practice. He came to the United States as a
Brecht scholar (his Ph.D. dissertation introduced the concept of stereometric
structure to Brecht studies in 1957) and theatre critic, but he had never tried
directing. As soon as he put his foot on a US campus, he noticed a certain
performative energy: all campuses had theatres and undergraduates, as well
as graduates, who were interested in performing outside of their classwork.
They were all open and unconstricted by any sense of professional
exclusiveness that would make acting available only to professional actors.
This atmosphere of freedom and openness made him see a chance for
himself in directing. IS Thus the United States opened a chapter in ATW's life
in which he began to perform as a director and a teacher. In 1968, still at
Stanford, he created a memorable US premiere of Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz's Crazy Locomotive. Donald Fanger, one of his colleagues, and
later a professor at Harvard, called it "an astonishing spectacle, which became
history," and Daniel Gerould mentioned that "no professional production of
Witkiewicz had as much verve and energy as that one."l6
I have to note at this point that ATW's choice ofWitkiewicz not
only reveals his aesthetic position and theatrical conceptions, but it in
many ways highlights his relation to Polish tradition and the political
situation at that time. It clearly expresses his passion for novelty and
inventiveness manifest in the work of the Polish playwright who
anticipated the concept of the theatre of the absurd by at least thirty
years.I7 But the choice ofWitkiewicz also reveals ATW's own intellectual
and artistic heritage, and very importantly, his own attitude to the
cultural politics of the time. In 1968, as paradoxical as it may sound,
Witkiewicz was not revered as an outstanding, avant-garde artist in his
native Poland. Labeled as anti-communist, he had been erased from the
literary canon: his texts were not taught at the universities, his plays had
trouble with the censor, and his books were hard to get. In this context,
staging Witkiewicz was a bold cultural and political statement against
censorship and the restraining of the human right of free expression. ATW
also brought to Western attention two other important names in Polish
culture equally downplayed by the Communist authorities: Bruno Schulz
and Witold Gombrowicz. He wrote the introduction to the translation of
Schulz into German, and recommended Gombrowicz to the editors of
Neske Verlag.JS His two volume anthology Modernes Polnisches Theater
(Luchterhand, 196 7) introduced to the repertory of German speaking
theatres-besides Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz-Tadeusz R6zewicz,
Slawomir Mrozek, and Jerzy Szaniawski. His edition and introduction to
Tadeusz Borowski Die Steinerne Welt (Hanser Verlag, 19 59) had many reprints
in Germany, and in consequence established this author in Western Europe
and the United States.19
Using Leszek Kolakowski's playful metaphor of philosophical
gardening,zo I see Andrzej Wirth as a highly unusual gardener. He plants,
replants, and transplants across nations, continents, and cultures, creating his
own hybrids. He planted in his US garden a variety of theatrical seeds/grafts
he brought from Europe: the Brechtian model, Grotowski's theatre training,
Polish tradition including Witkiewicz's crazy experiments, and numerous
European avant-garde theatre ideas and personal contacts. His practice
appears as a perfect example of vibrant interculturalism which promotes
cross-polinating exchanges and a re-examination of cultural practices and
25
traditions. Such was, for instance, his work on Philip Oxman's Intermission,
which contrary to the prevailing opinion about US devotion to realism,
demonstrated that the United States, too, had its "theatre of the absurd"
represented by a US expatriate from England whom ATW had known for
many years. The 1972 world premiere of Oxman's Intermission in Stanford
made this refreshingly original text available to US theatre audiences.21
The US climate (climate is always an indispensable element in
gardening) was conducive to ATW's experiments. At the end of the 1960s
and throughout the 1970s, the United States produced very innovative
theatrical vibrations and attracted artists from all over the world. This climate
was probably an important factor in ATW's own decision to stay in the
United States. He was drawn to the creative, free, all-inclusive cultural
crosscurrents in California and New York where, as he comments, one could
meet and have a meaningful conversation on the street with people like John
Cage, Meredith Monk, Twyla Tharp, Lee Breuer, Stefan Brecht, or Richard
Foreman. It was the time of the Living Theatre and the golden age of US
political theatre, such as the Bread and Puppet. It is interesting that
Grotowski too, who arrived in the United States in 1967 at Richard
Schechner's invitation, owed a lot to the lush US cultural climate of that
time.22 The US soil, in turn, accepted the seeds and grafts that Andrzej Wirth
brought from Europe, which bore fruit and, it seems, in a very substantial
way enabled him to consolidate his own theatrical vision. Apart from
Witkiewicz's The Crazy Locomotive and Oxman's Intermission, he started his
very important work on Brecht's Lehrstucke: The Measures Taken (Die
Massnahme), and Patzer Experiment.23
Giessen
ATW's work in Giessen was informed by his v1s1on of a post-
Brechtian theatre which explores the performative potential of the speech act
and de-dramatization of the dialogue. In this type of theatre, the dialogue
ceases to function as a structural element of the performance, which in the
"dramatic" type of performance prompts the interaction between the actors
and produces the action. In the post-Brechtian theatre, the dialogic
exchanges (if they survive at all) exist in their phatic function, in the
J acobsonian sense, enabling contact but not participating in the
development of the cause--and-effect, logical sequence of events, as is the
case in the traditional theatre. The programatic statement for the Giessen
Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft (an oxymoron as ATW comments) is
26 SU!.vic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No.2
contained in his essay "Vom Dialog zum Diskurs: Theaterkonzeptionen
nach Brecht"24 (From Dialogue to Discourse: Post-Brechtian Theatre), which
highlights the idea of the theatre as a primarily epic form in which speech
becomes integrated into the performative including also movement, light,
and setting. In other words, speech becomes only one of the many, but not
the primary, elements of the theatrical performance.25 This conception of the
theatre continues the Brechtian Lehrstiick model in which meaning is
constructed through the speech act stripped of the dramatic component. In
this type of performance, the boundary between the actor and the spectator
collapses into one shared semantic space in which the roles are
interchangeable.
Hans-Thies Lehman, who conducted seminars with ATW in
Giessen, describes him as a charismatic teacher who in 1982 transplanted
back to Germany his experience of an innovative, "living" theatre stemming
from the work of Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Foreman, Robert
Wilson, Philip Oxman, and George T abori. His return to Europe makes me
think of him again in terms of his transcontinental, glo&al gardening and
hybridization of theatre discourse and practice by transplanting, implanting,
cross-breeding, and cross-fertilizing his nursery- always ahead of his time
and ready to plant a different variation and try it with his students. His
theatrical gardening put Giessen, a small, old, university town, on the theatre
map of Germany as the home of the Giessen School, and made it known in
US theatre departments and theatre circles. Prominent teachers of theatre
and artists such as Richard Schechner, Michael Kirby, Leon Katz, Karl
Weber, Emma Lew Thomas, John Jesurun, Molly Davies, Henryk
Baranowski, and others were visiting professors at Giessen.26
When the work on Lehrstiicke was just beginning in Germany, he
had already produced them a few times in the United States, Patzer
Experiment in 1976 and The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme) in 1973, as well
as in England and BerlinP All his experiments with the Giessen students, as
Lehman notes, "were changing the very concept of the theatre"28 and remain
unforgettable experiences for his former students. Such was the post-
dramatic staging of the passages from the philosophical work of Odo
Marquard titled Sommernachtsklage iiber Sinnverlust nach dem Rezept des
Hausphilosophen Marquard (Midsummer Night's Complaint Upon the Loss of
Sense According to a Local Philosopher Marquard). The performance-
grounded in the collage technique, including different media, the
multiplicity of acting places, voice-overs, changing rhythms of readings and
27
movement-was for Frank Hentschker, one of ATW's former students and a
participant in that event, one of the formative performances that created the
Giessen style.
ATW's students and collaborators, like Hentschker and Lehman,
stress his devotion to individualism, his sense of performativity, and aesthetic
radical ism. At the same time they perceive him as a charismatic, fatherly
teacher, equipped with an unusual sense of structural novelty and freshness
contained in all possible manifestations of art, always willing to share his
discoveries with his students.29 This dedication to tracing novel forms of
expression clearly stems from his philosophical and theoretical grounding in
theatre praxeology-his own term-which perceives theatre as a space for
testing theory and practice.JO ATW describes his work with students as a
programatic experiment driven by the students' diverse interests and their
creativity, and framed by their reflection on the craft of theatre. Such a
philosophy of teaching implies a sensitivity to formal elements of the
spectacle and openness to the performers' input, which in ATW's own words
can be rendered as "providing a structure for the students' own ways of
expression. "31
Flaneur
Whenever something artistically and performatively important is
taking place, Andrzej Wirth shows up immediately to inspect, experience,
and reflect on the event, which can always be a possible new "graft" for his
nursery. No wonder that when in February 2005, Christo and Jeanne Claude
dissected Central Park with the miles of orange fabric of their Gates project,
the first person I met among the thousands of people strolling through the
saffron gates was the familiar red-hatted figure of Andrzej, who came from
Berlin to participate in this event. In a short essay inspired by the installation,
ATW approaches the Central Park installation from a truly hermeneutic
perspective noticing multiplicity of registers (ecological, architectonic,
sociological, ritualistic, religious to name only a few), which commingle into
an interpretative polyphony, "a multi-layered pageant that bears an artistic
double, even triple code."32 The historical "text" of the park, the atrium of
the city with its free-flowing movement, is inscribed into the context of the
orchestrated actions of the participants of the "magic megadance." This
"publicly choreographed discourse" delighted ATW who persistently follows
and theorizes the events disclosing the performative nature of our reality.
Such was the installation of Christo in Central Park, and such is the reality
N
'.()
Andrzej T. Wirth {upper-left corner) at Christo's Gates exhibition in New York, February 2005
that became the focus of his recent film project-an outcome of the
collaboration with his former student, the filmmaker, Thomas Martius-
about Las Vegas and Venice, Italy entitled, Las Venice.
Since the late 1990s Andrzej Wirth added Venice to his yearly
peregrinations and spends about a quarter of each year in Serenissima. The
film offers a reflection on international tourism, and in a slightly
Baudrillardian manner, muses about the nature of reality, but even more so
focuses on our perceptions and contacts with the "real," with the image,
with the simulacrum. The camera in Martius's hand zooms on the hordes
of tourists traversing the famous sites, laughing, smiling, and taking pictures.
The realities ofVenice, Italy, and Venice, Las Vegas, become reduced to an
image on a digital screen producing the "real" and desired reality of and for
the picture-takers whom ATW calls in his film commentary vactors, that is,
visitors/actors. Andrzej's playful intermingling with the objects of his
"study" (his vactors)-by positing himself in front of the camera, inside his
"model," also as an object of seeing-collapses the subject/object and
performer/observer distinction. The film captures the moments in which
the imaginary, the desired, and the performative intersect: the picture-takers
are being manipulated and at the same time transformed by the space of
Venice or Las Vegas. Their movements, body language, smiles, and looks
simulate the reality that they constitute and simultaneously de-constitute by
constantly relating to some other imaginary reality.
The film purposefully mixes both Venices, so that the viewer is
often confused whether he/she is watching the "real" Venice or its Las Vegas
imitation. What remains the same, what bridges both realities, is the
omnipresent reality of the camera clicking and the registering of poses and
smiles on the desired set, be it the real or fake Rialto or Academia Bridge.
Reality turns into a photographic set, and even the locals transform
themselves into a part of this set. For the vactors, it is quite insignificant
whether the picture is taken in Venice, Italy, or in Venice, Las Vegas, what
really matters is the very act of picture-taking that engages the imaginary and
the performative and creates the possibility of another performative
moment-the instant when we look at the photograph recreating the past
experience and expand the performative (in fact the performative and the
imaginary interact again). Thus Las Venice explores the trans-active
communication in which everybody is constantly entangled in the
performative.
On another level, the transactions captured by Martius's and
Wirth's film show the commodification of the performative agency itself
(again regardless of whether it is Venice, Italy, or Venice, Las Vegas) for
strictly economic purposes. The propensity of the tourists to freely enjoy
the interaction on the set (here Las Vegas seems more pertinent) is
manipulated-by the designers of the hotel and casinos, hotel managers,
and other entrepreneurs-into making them treat their experience as an
object of transaction: they "buy" and store the images mostly for exchange
purposes (even when they watch the photographs back at home). Sadly, the
tourists-as-performers commodifY their experience and at the same time
become commodified as the tools in the million-dollar business machine.
As a result they turn into vactors, signifYing also void and empty actors.
Is it possible to retain a distance and the aura of the Baudelairean
flaneur in this reality? The film seems to suggest that on the set of our
reality, everybody is designated to play a role, only some are more self-aware
actors than others. Andrzej Wirth ascribes to himself the role of a "super
actor," but like a true Brechtian, a meta-performer, and a practitioner of
philosophical gardening, he knows how the puppeteer's strings work, and
sometimes he pulls them, but he also allows himself, always playfully, to be
pulled into the garden.
NOTES
I Andrzej Wirth, interview by the author, December 2004.
2 Andrzej Wirth' s mother returned to Poland from Russia after 1918 where her family
had lived in exile after the 1863 rising against the Tzar. His father never accepted the
Stalinist colonization of Poland after World War II, choosing instead to live in
England and support the struggle against communism. ATW defines an emigre as
someone who leaves the country primarily for political reasons. Andrzej Wirth, Teatr
jaki m6glby bye (Krakow: Ksit;:garnia Akademicka, 2002), 16.
3 Such an attitude is not uncommon among Polish intellectuals. One of the most
famous is Witold Gombrowicz, who used to repeat that his aim is "to take the Pole
away from Poland, to expel the Pole from Poland so that he turns into a human."
("Wydobyc Polaka z Polski, zeby sta! sit;: po prostu cz!owiekiem") Gombrowicz
postulated distance to norms and values of the patriotic discourse and its overt
display (often pompous and pathetic), which he called the "national form." ("Ta sama
mysl. Zawsze to samo. Dystans do formy. W tym wypadku-do formy
narodowej"/ Always the same. Distance to form. In this case, to national form).
Witold Gombrowicz, Testament (Warszawa: Res Publica, 1990), 66 (my translation),
31
and A Kind oJTestament, trans. Alistair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973),
104.
4 See, Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 29.
5 ATW maintains that the last seven years of Brecht's theatre work were the most
artistically stimulating and mature. Wirth, interview.
6 Wirth, interview.
7 Teatrjaki m6glby bye, 124.
8 Wirth, interview.
9 Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 124.
10 Ibid., 135
I I "Grotowski's work, which throughout all my life I treated critically became-apart
from Brecht and Wilson-one of the denominators of my own thinking. But always
as a liminal experience." Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 134.
12 Ibid., 126.
13 ATW makes a very interesting comment about Grotowski's connection to the
Polish Romantic tradition, which inadvertently lead to mysticism. He sees an analogy
between the leading Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz who at the end of his
life left literature and completely devoted himself to occult practices and mysticism.
Grotowski got involved in the performative experiments, which explored ritual and
group interaction, and finally completely departed from theatre, focusing on
elements of movement and meditation leading to the exploration of some esoteric
experience connecting all humanity.
14 This term comes from Tadeusz Kotarbir\.ski's examination of the parameters
governing human agency. It combines the process of thinking and its logic (theory)
with its purposeful implementation in practice. Kotarbinski was one of the most
prominent representatives of Polish analytical philosophy. Andrzej Wirth was
Kotarbinski's student.
15 Wirth, interview.
16 Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 317 (my t ranslation). Commentaries about t he
performances.
17 Crazy Locomotive was written in 1924; the plays of Ionesco started appearing in the
early 1950s, and Martin Esslin's book The Theatre ofthe Absurd, which popularized the
term theatre of the absurd, was published in 1961.
18 Gombrowicz archive, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale
University. Correspondence with Neske Verlag.
20 See Andrzej Wirth, "The General Theory of Not-Gardening: A Major
Contribution to Social Anthropology, Ontology, Moral Philosophy, Sociology,
Political Theory, and Many Other Fields of Scientific Investigation" in Modernity on
Endless Trial(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990), 240-241.
21 Stephen Rosenfield cooperated in the Stanford production. The text was ATW's
arbitrary selection from Oxman's stage scripts, which were also analyzed during his
seminars with CUNY students.
22 Richard Schechner, "Byl m<;drcem: o Jerzym Grotowskim z Richardem
Schechnerem rozmawia Krystyna Lipinska-lllakowicz," interview by author, Nowy
Dziennik, 26 February 1999.
23 The Measures Taken was presented at Lehman College and at the Goethe Institute
in New York in 1973. Hannah Arendt was one of the guests at the Goethe Institute
performance. Patzer Experiment was produced several times: Stanford, 1976; Bedford
College, University of London, 1977; Oxford, 1978; Berlin, 1978; Sydney, 1994.
Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 320-322.
25 In some post-dramatic performances, speech can occupy a dominant position but
not in the traditional sense where the sequence of exchanges drives the action. It is
rather the aporias of signification-the incongruity between the speech act and other
signification-practices such as movement, body language, and the setting,-which are
at the core of such experiments. Richard Foreman's or Richard Schechner's work are
very good examples of such theatre.
26 The list of his former students and now prominent theatre professors and
professionals includes such names as: Peter Sellars, Bonnie Marranca, Gautam
Dasgupta, Tim Wiles, Eleanor Fisher, Jim Leverett, Rita Linz, Frank Hentschker,
Arnd Wesemann, Helena Waldmann, and many others.
27 See Teatr jaki m6glby bye, 320-321.
28 Ibid., 310.
29 Ibid., 311.
30 See footnote nb.14.
32 Andrzej Wirth, "An Urban Choreography: Christo's and Jeanne Claude Virtual
Actors in Central Park, or the Temporary Death of a Flaneur," (unpublished essay).
33
A THEATRE FOR YOUNG RUSSIAN
PLAYWRIGHTS AND DIRECTORS:
ALEKSEI KAZANTSEV ON THE CREATION OF THE
DRAMATURGY AND DIRECTING CENTER
Elisabeth Rich
"When the defolt [default or financial collapse] occurred in Russia in
1998," Aleksei Kazantsev, artistic manager of the Dramaturgy and Directing
Center in Moscow, told me in a recent interview,I "I, being a very stubborn
and obstinate individual, decided that it was necessary to create an
unprofitable theatre for members of the young generation-playwrights,
directors, and actors.2 Working with young people is always [regarded as] an
unprofitable venture, so everyone looked at me as though I were crazy.
Theatres at the time were trying to attract old Soviet 'stars,' thinking that if
a production was made with famous artists, the public would run to see it-
and everyone would then be rolling in money. I, on the other hand, recruited
artists who were completely unknown to everyone."
But time proved that Kazantsev was anything but crazy. Only six
years after its establishment in December 1998,3 the Dramaturgy and
Directing Center has made an indelible mark on Moscow's theatrical life,
nurturing and giving rise to some of the most talented young directors,
dramatists, and actors in Russia today.
According to Kazantsev, the Dramaturgy and Directing Center is an
organization with a far-reaching "global" purpose that "has no analogue in
the world." "For me," he explained, "[the Center] is an organization that not
only gives support to an entire generation [of Russian playwrights and
directors], but, God willing, will give support to several more generations of
young representatives of the Russian theatre. We support everyone-
directors, playwrights, and actors. We also do not regard the question of
monetary profit to be one of paramount importance; in fact, for us, this
question, in principle, does not exist."
It is hardly surprising, then, that even when Kazantsev is
considering producing a play that will undoubtedly be "unprofitable"-one
that is good but may not appeal to a general audience-he allows it to be
staged nonetheless. As a resul t, the Center includes among its repertory such
financially risky productions as Chetyre sorok vosem' psikhoz (4.48 Psychoses)-
which, based on a play by the controversial playwright Sarah Kane, revolves
Aleksei Kazantsev
35
around a difficult subject.4 "Such [unprofitable] plays," Kazantsev told me
without hesitation, "are not uncommon at the Center. They form a
significant part of our repertory, and people come to see them by invitation."
Yet, at the same time, the Center features a significant number of
productions that are extremely popular with the general public; in fact, says
Kazantsev, some attractions are so popular that "people literally have to force
their way into the theatre hall to see them." The Center's repertory, then, is
a healthy mix of "box-office draws" and productions that garner critical
acclaim and yet are not financially successful.
As Kazantsev describes it, the Center was conceived as an
organization of social protest against the backdrop of (and in reaction to) the
social and political turmoil raging in Russia in the 1990s. "I consider the
1990s to have been a terrible period for Russia," he said, "[because it was
then that] the regime perpetuated a crime against the Russian people. Like
most Western scholars, I do not believe that there was any reason for the
collapse of the Soviet Union. True, it made sense for Lithuania, Latvia, and
Estonia to separate themselves from the Soviet Union; historically [the Baltic
regions] have always wanted to be separate. But the other republics became
confused once they gained independence and for years did not know what
to do [to survive]. And now these republics pine for Russia and, with
nostalgia and melancholy, reminisce about the Soviet era. Like Chicago in
the 1930s, the 1990s gave rise to such a dikii kapitalizm (wild capitalism) in
all the republics [of the former Soviet Union] that there simply was no place
in them for honest people."
From Kazantsev's perspective, Russia needed a serious and
globally minded leader to govern the country at that time, but instead it
had Y eltsin at the helm-a man who, Kazantsev claims, pulled down the
Soviet Union in the interest of personal power and then surrounded
himself with people who plundered Russia. In the last decade, Kazantsev
told me, "millions of people died from poverty and from drinking bad
alcohol because Yeltsin signed a decree transferring state monopolies to
private companies-that is, into the hands of criminals. Instead of
financing doctors, teachers, and pensioners, the state financed the
criminal world. I cannot say that this was their intent; it was simply a case
of inept people who, through stupidity and thoughtlessness, called
themselves 'democrats.' Because of them, the majority of people in Russia
today cannot even stomach hearing the word 'democracy."'
Here Kazantsev digressed to express his views on the role of Russian
theatre in the 1990s, describing how theatre at the time fai led to take a social
stand and instead reflected the criminal mentality of the country as a whole.
"Theatre," he declared, "conducted itself in an extremely immoral fashion
[in the last decade]. Its position was this: 'You steal there, and we will
entertain you [here].' And theatre turned into amusement. As a result,
practically no productions in the 1990s spoke to the audience about current
times .... No one staged contemporary plays, and no one gave work to
[young] directors; the young generation of actors also received little
recognition, as though these young actors didn't exist at all."
Significantly the establishment of the Dramaturgy and Directing
Center was not Kazantsev's first initiative for remedying the situation. In the
early 1990s, he along with fellow dramatist Mikhail Roshchin organized the
first annual festival for young theatre professionals, including playwrights,
directors, and actors, at Lyubimovka, Stanislavsky's former estate outside
Moscow. "There, at Lyubimovka," Kazantsev told me, "I saw a large number
of gifted young playwrights [who] were not needed by society. No one
needed the plays [of these young writers] or the young directors; [they] were
not even allowed to cross the threshold of Moscow theatres.s Now these
directors are famous, but at that time, when they approached a theatre about
work, they were invariably turned away."
These observations, in turn, led Kazantsev and Roshchin to found
a new journal-Dramaturg (Playwright)-the first issue appearing in 1993.
Using the journal as a forum for the writings of young playwrights, they were
the first to publish plays by, and hence to discover, such rising stars as Olga
Mukhina, Ksenya Dragunskaya, Yelena Gremina, and Mikhail Ugarov. But
because the journal operated without subsidy, Kazantsev was forced to
borrow money and thus went into debt. Later, when Kazantsev and
Roshchin decided to create the Dramaturgy and Directing Center, they were
compelled to abandon Dramaturg, recognizing that they could not operate
"two unprofitable ventures" at the same time. "Although we do not publish
Dramaturg now," Kazantsev explained, "it is possible that we may be able to
resume publication sometime in the future."
As with Dramaturg, Kazantsev, with the establishment of the Center
five years later, had to borrow money, sinking further into debt; in fact, he
claims that he owed "tens of thousands of dollars" at the time-which, even
today, is a staggering sum of money for the average Russian. Still, Kazantsev
37
never went back on a loan. "At the Center," he told me, "we always uphold
'the word of the honest merchant.' Before the revolution [of 1917], when
merchants gave their word, they never reneged on it-and these are the
principles we follow. I believe in oral agreements; in fact, I think they need
to be made stronger-especially in such a thievish country as Russia, where
people do not even adhere to written agreements. It is my goal to create a
small arena in which the laws of elementary decency exist."
In addition to the loans, Kazantsev also received patronage from
some of the most revered names in Moscow's theatrical establishment
(notably the legendary actors Oleg Menshikov and Konstantin Raikon), as
well as a modest subsidy from the British Council, the Goethe Institute, and
local businessmen. The state, however, limited its initial support to small
grants.
Despite the obstacles he encountered early on, Kazantsev
persevered and ultimately achieved his goal: to provide young theatre
professionals with an opportunity for self-realization, and then to bring their
creative ideas and talent to the attention of the Moscow public. "When we
initially organized the Center," he said, "people repeatedly told us that the
Moscow public did not want to see contemporary plays, that actors did not
want to perform them, and that directors did not want to stage them.'' But
by its fourth season, Kazantsev stated, the Center already had to its credit a
string of "critically acclaimed productions that had become famous both in
Russia and abroad."
As a result of this success, in 2002 the Dramaturgy and Directing
Center became officially recognized as a Moscow theatre. In this capacity the
Center not only received "modest financing" from the state, but Kazantsev,
for the first time in years, began to earn a salary. The state also gave the
Center a building for the staging of its productions-the former Pokrovsky
Theatre at Sokol-but, because of ongoing renovations, it currently remains
unoccupied. "We will not move in there," Kazantsev explained, "until [the
renovation] is finished, which, I'm afraid, will take a couple of years.6 The
establishment of the Center simply coincided with a time when so many
state theatres were being organized in Moscow-so many, in fact, that I
doubt if anyone [today) even knows a third of their names."
But it is safe to say that the Moscow public indeed knows of the
Dramaturgy and Directing Center, and the members associated with it. In
fact, the majority of Russia's most visible and celebrated young directors and
playwrights today are not only affiliated with the Center but actually rose to
prominence because of the work they had done there in the past. The
director Olga Subbotina,7 for example, skyrocketed to fame during the 1999-
2000 theatrical season when the Center presented her production of British
playwright Mark Ravenhill's controversial play Shopping and Fucking. The
director Vladimir Ageyev became touted as a leader of Moscow's "new
directorial wave" with his experimental production at the Center of Plennye
dukhi (Captive Spirits), a play by the Presnyakov brothers, a contemporary
writing team, which subsequently received a prestigious Golden Mask Award
in the category of zritelskie simpatii (audience approval);8 and Kirill
Serebrennikov became one of the most sought after directors in Moscow
after he staged Plastilin (Plasticine) at the Center-a production, based on
Vasilii Sigarev's play about the life and death of a boy from a small provincial
town, which combines "brilliant theatricality" with "grim naturalism." The
dramatist Mikhail Ugarov also had his first taste of celebrity as a director
when the Center presented his directorial debut, Oblom OFF.9
Dramatists affiliated with the Center have also received recognition.
Subbotina's production of the play Oshchushchenie borotfy (Sense of Beard), for
instance, not only became one of the best-known productions at the
Center,IO but it also brought celebrity status to the play's author, the young
dramatist Ksenya Dragunskaya. ''The Dramaturgy and Directing Center
became famous," Kazantsev told me proudly, "because all these [young
directors and playwrights] were discovered [there]."
Significantly Kazantsev attributes much of the Center's success to
its "free atmosphere." He insists, for example, that he never imposes his own
personal preferences on directors; instead, he prefers to give them free reign
in selecting the plays they wish to stage. "When I first come to an agreement
with a director about a production," he explained, "[the play to be staged]
must be suggested by the director-and not by me. It would be wrong for me
to dictate to others."
Yet, when it comes to selecting the directors themselves, Kazantsev
admits he is "a harsh individual." "Any person can approach [me] about
staging a production," he admits, "but by no means do I select everyone." In
this he relies largely on intuition and on his vast theatrical experience.!!
"People can say just two or three words to me," he said, "and I already know
whether I want to work with them." As an example, Kazantsev cited Maksim
Kurochkin's play Transfer, whose production at the Center he agreed to in
mere seconds, despite not even having read the play at the time. "This
occurred," he recalled, laughing, "during a celebration in the courtyard of the
39
Vysotsky Museum. A drinking spree was going on, and Maksim Kurochkin,
slightly inebriated at the time, walked by me. I asked him if he had finished
writing his new play, and he said, 'Yes, it's finished.' I then asked him if it
was a good play, and he answered, 'Yes, I think so.' At that point Mikhail
Ugarov, who had just successfully staged Oblom OFF [at the Center], walked
by us. I said to Ugarov: 'Misha, Kurochkin here says that he has written a
good play. Do you want to stage it?' And when he said, 'OK, I'll stage it,'
that was it. For I knew that Kurochkin would not write a bad play and that
the combination of Ugarov and Kurochkin was an interesting one.
Sometimes that's how quickly questions get decided.''
Intuition also guides Kazantsev in his assessment of young
playwrights' dramatic writing ability. The value of contemporary drama, for
Kazantsev, lies largely in the ability of young playwrights to portray present-
day life from a new and fresh perspective. "I don't think the young dramatists
are necessarily more talented than Vampilov or Petrushevskaya," he
explained, "but they do see and describe the world in a different way. And
it's my nature to be drawn to people who know how to do something that I
am unable to do." Still he does see shortcomings in their writing, particularly
their penchant for mat (obscenity). "The young playwrights [affiliated with
the Center] use a great deal of mat when they write," he told me, shaking his
head disapprovingly, "so [before production] we usually have to remove half
of it from their plays.''
To Kazantsev, contemporary Russian playwrights are, as a whole, an
eclectic group. At one extreme is the very romantic Olga Mukhina, whom
Kazantsev considers a gifted writer, but whose plays (specifically, the web of
associations in them) he regards as ultimately "too dense" and "confusing for
the average reader"; in fact, Kazantsev himself admitted to the need to reread
them in order to fully understand them. At the other extreme are the
Presnyakov brothers, Vladimir and Oleg, whom Kazantsev extols for "their
wonderful sense of humor" and for "the exactness with which they reveal the
paradoxes of contemporary life." "Like Pushkin, who was part Ethiopian,"
Kazantsev pointed out, "the Presnyakov brothers are halflranian and look at
Russian life a little from the side."
Born in 1945, Kazantsev is the son of a prominent lawyer and the
grandson of a kulak, or rich peasant, who was exiled after the 1917
Revolutioni2 and whom Kazantsev saw only once as a child. While growing
up in Moscow, his passion was the circus; he loved it so much, in fact, that
he even seriously considered becoming a professional clown. "I am a clown
by nature," he confided. "Unfortunately, though, my dream [of becoming a
clown) never materialized." Instead Kazantsev pursued a career in the
theatre, initially working as an actor at the Central Children's Theatre in
Moscow;l 3 there he performed in Korol' Matiush Pervyi (King Matt the First)-
]anusz Korczak's fairy tale about a child who becomes king-which
happened to be Petr Fomenko's directorial debut.l4 Later Kazantsev decided
to study directing and enrolled at the State Institute ofTheatre, Music, and
Film (Georgy Tovstonogov's group) in Leningrad and then at the MKhAT
Drama School (Oieg Yefremov's group) in Moscow. In this area, too, he had
modest success, staging Viktor Rozov's Gnezdo glukharya (Nest of the Wood
Grouse); a dramatization of Ingmar Bergman's film classic, Wild Strawberries,
at the Russian Drama Theatre in Riga; and a production about Lev Tolstoy,
Esli budu zhiv (If I Live), at the Mossovet Theatre in Moscow.
In the mid-1970s Kazantsev turned to playwriting, a career move
prompted more by boredom than anything else. In 1975 he wrote his first
play, Anton i drugie (Anton and Others),lS and the following year wrote his
second play, Staryi dom (The Old House). It was at this time that he became
affiliated with Aleksei Arbuzov's famed School of Drama. To date,
Kazantsev has written ten plays, including Velikii Budda, pomogi im! (Great
Buddha, Help Them!, 1984), which deals with the building of communism
in the jungles of Campuchia; Sny Evgenii (The Dreams of Yevgeniya, 1988),
a play in which he uses phantasmagoria (the dreams of a young girl) to depict
Soviet reality; and S Vesnoi ya vernus' k tebe (I Shall Come Back to You in the
Spring, 1977), an anti-Soviet dramatization of Nikolai Ostrovsky's
propaganda novel Kak zakalyalas' stal' (How the Steel Was Tempered). 16 But it
is largely for his second play-Staryi dom-that Kazantsev earned his
reputation as a playwright.17 Premiering in 1978 at the New Drama Theatre
in Moscow, Staryi dom was subsequently staged in more than seventy theatres
throughout the Soviet Union.IS It was also published, with Antoni drugie, in
book form, with a preface by one of Kazantsev's former mentors, the late
Aleksei Arbuzov. "If your students like Arbuzov's plays," Kazantsev told me,
"then they would also like Staryi dom, which is written in a rather traditional
way, with the same kind of romanticism [found in Arbuzov] ."
Still, despite his diverse achievements, most members of the
Moscow theatre community generally regard Kazantsev's role in the
establishment-and subsequent management-of the Dramaturgy and
Directing Center as his most significant contribution to Russian theatre and
drama. And Kazantsev seems to agree. Summing up the Center's impact on
41
the development of Russian theatre, he declared at the end of our
conversation: "I have fulfilled my goal. Through its activity and
accomplishments, we [at the Dramaturgy and Directing Center] have taken
a colossal leap forward-and have turned the very fabric of Moscow's
theatrical life inside out."
NOTES
I Our conversation took place in Moscow in September 2004.
2 The well-known dramatist Mikhail Rosh chin is co-founder of the Dramaturgy and
Directing Center; however, because of poor health, his role in the Center's
subsequent management has been minimal.
3 The Center opened its first season with Elena Isayeva's judith, followed shortly
thereafter by the staging of Yekaterina Shagalova's New Life, directed by Vadim
Danziger.
4 Productions based on plays by Western playwrights do not comprise a significant
part of the Center's repertory. Instead, its focus is on contemporary Russian drama.
5 In interviews over the years, I have also heard members of Moscow's theatrical
elice bemoan the lack of opportunity for aspiring young directors and playwrights,
and advocate a need for "fresh blood."
6 Kazantsev currently operates the Dramaturgy and Directing Center from a small
office at the Central Home of Actors on the Arbat. Production rehearsals are held
at venues such as Nasledie (Heritage)-an inexpensive, Soviet-style hotel near
VDNX. It was in the restaurant of this hotel that Kazantsev and I met and
conversed.
7 Kazantsev describes Subbotina as "a fascinating woman in her early thirties, [who
represents) the young wing of leadership at the Center."
8 In this production Ageyev uses phantasmagoria and introduces fragments from
articles by Andrei Bely into stage text.
9 Oblom OFF, a contemporary version of Goncharov's novel Oblomov, was written
as well as directed by Ugarov. Ugarov's production also received a Golden Mask
Award in the audience approval category, as well as a nomination for t his award in
the category luchshii spektakl' maloi formy (best production in a small form).
10 Significantly several articles and reviews have been written about Subbotina's
production of Oshchushchenie borody; this production has also been performed at
international festivals in Vilnius and Paris.
II Now fifty-nine years old, Kazantsev started working in professional theatre when
he was eighteen.
12 Before the revolution, Kazantsev's grandfather served in the tsar's army.
13 After graduating from high school, Kazantsev studied in the philology
department at Moscow State University and then at the Drama School at the
Central Children's Theatre.
14 A would-be clown, it is not surprising t hat Kazantsev describes his most
memorable acting roles as those that involved "buffoonery and eccentricity."
15 Anton i drugie was first staged in 1981 at the Central Children's Theatre in
Moscow.
16 Several of Kazantsev's plays have also been staged. I porvyotsya serebryanyi . . .
(And the Silver Cord Will Break . . .), for example, was performed at the
Mayakovsky Theatre; S vesnoi ya vern us' k tebe, directed by Valery Fokin, premiered
at the Tabakov Theatre as the opening production; and Begushchie stranniki (The
Running Pilgrims), first staged at the Mossovet Theatre in Moscow, is currently
being performed at the Maly Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg.
17 However, at the end of the 1970s, Soviet censors prohibited Staryi dom from
being staged abroad. Consequently "(Kazantsev's] world fame [as a playwright] was
significantly curtailed" (Kazantsev's words).
18 The "Modern" theatre in Moscow is currently performing a revival of Staryi dom.
43
BELONGING TO THOSE WHO CREATE IT:
ORGANIZATION AND FINANCING OF CZECH THEATRE
BEFORE AND AFTER THE VELVET REVOLUTION
Stepan Simek
Who Owns the Theatre?
In their ongoing and frustrating fight with censorship in the
mid-1980s, a group of theatre artists associated with small studio theatres in
what was then Communist Czechoslovakia publicly argued that the "theatre
belongs to those who create it."l Behind the battle cry was the desire to
destroy the state monopoly controlling every single theatre in the country
and directly influencing every aspect of their work. It was thus only natural
for these theatre artists to demand the immediate division of state and
culture after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989.
Theatre, however, is an expensive affair, and the question of who
will pay for it arose almost simultaneously with the call for de-statization that
immediately followed the Velvet Revolution. The transition to democracy
and market economy awoke in the population both the hope for complete
freedom of creation and the fear of new capitalist economic pressures.
We will see that since the organizational and financial structures of
Czech theatre are grounded in a century and a half of history, changes have
not come easily. All changes have been accompanied by an ongoing debate
about the role of the state in formulating a cultural policy, numerous
legislative proposals, political quarrels, ever-present bickering between
cul tural officials and theatre professionals, and disputes among theatre
professionals themselves. The major point of contention during the 1990s
and the first years of the 2000s was the unequal distribution of public
financing between a few well-funded large, long-established, multi-ensemble
repertory theatres and a growing number of ill-funded independent theatre
organizations.
Three Traditions
According to Ondi'ej Cerny, the director of the Czech Theatre
Institute, there are three major traditions that shape the current organization
and fi nancing of the theatre in the Czech Republic.2 The first and most
important is the socio-cultural role of theatre in reawakening Czech culture
and language. After it was almost eradicated by the Austrian authorities in
44 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 25, No. 2
the late eighteenth century, a small group of Czech nationalists began to use
the theatre to re-introduce the language to the masses. Soon Prague and
many provincial towns in what was then Bohemia began to build lavishly
designed and generously equipped theatre buildings. The current theatre
network in Czech provincial towns is the direct result of the nationalistic
"cultural building boom" of the late nineteenth century.
At the same time, the early Czech nationalists subscribed to the
German model of theatre as a community builder. Theatre throughout the
Czech Republic today continues to be a standard bearer of national culture,
and it is generally considered an integral part of the social fabric of the
nation. Indeed, the text and music of the Czech national anthem comes
from a popular ninteenth century, sentimentally nationalistic Singspiel called
Fidlovac"ka, and it was not by chance that the open resistance to the
Communist regime in 1989 was lead by theatre artists.
Second, Czech theatre is organized along the lines of other Central
European institutions, primarily German and Austrian ones, which favor
bureaucratic involvement of the state in all things cultural. Public influence
on the local theatres expresses the Central European definition of the theatre
as a "public service," for which state and local governments not only feel
responsible but in which they also take pride. It is not unusual to find a
provincial town in the Czech Republic that allocates more than five percent
of its entire annual budget for culture, with the majority of the public
financing going to the large local municipal theatre.
Finally, the backbone of Czech theatre has always been large
repertory companies based on the co-existence of several permanent
ensembles under one roof. Many cities and municipalities take pride in their
multi-ensemble companies that produce drama, opera, operetta, and ballet
and are willing to allocate large amounts of money to them.
Forty Years of State Monopoly
The sentimental/nationalistic tradition, the strong public influence,
and the support for large multi-ensemble repertory companies were largely
perpetuated during the forty years of Communism in the Czech Republic.
In 1948, all Czech theatres were nationalized, and the newly installed
Communist government quickly realized the traditional potential of the
theatre as an ideological community builder. Theatres became "state
enterprises," and as long as they followed the ideological line of socialist
realism, they continued to be adequately supported. The existence of several
45
ensembles under one roof made censorship and party oversight easier and
more efficient. Mter the Soviet invasion in 1968, theatres could only be
operated, administered, and financed either directly by the government
through its Ministry of Culture or by the regional party committees as
representatives of the state administration.
Thus, from 1948 to 1989 the state had a virtual monopoly on the
operation of theatres, including artistic regulation and censorship, funding
and abolishing theatre companies, planning the yearly "theatrical output,"
and naming artistic and managing directors. The system of state financing
was simple. All theatre artists were state employees-their salaries were set by
the state. Theatre budgets were calculated using a straight-forward
algorithm.3 Such a paternalistic system of both financing and administering
the theatres naturally resulted in artistic amnesia, and the large repertory
theatres rarely if ever produced artistically interesting or challenging works.
However, the complaint that such a level of control with its subsequent
amnesia was a result of the Communist regime alone was not entirely
justified. The Communists had only adapted and further ideologized an
already existing system and set of cultural values, which had been in place
for more than a hundred years. The post-1989 desire of theatres to free
themselves from the ever-present state control was understandable, but it
soon became apparent that the call for a separation of state and culture, and
a consequent transformation of the existing paternalistic theatre system, were
not merely matters of shaking off the Communist yoke.
Discussions, Declarations, Proclamations, and Legislations-the 1990s
The transformation of the theatre system began in the early 1990s,
and the legislatively dictated state monopoly on the operation of the theatres
was quickly eliminated. First, the regional committees of the party were
abolished, and the administration and financing of the majority of theatres
was transferred to the cities and municipalities. Second, the right to found
and operate a theatre was given to any legal body, which led to an explosion
of private theatrical activities-at first, mostly in the form of large musical
productions but also in the growth of independent theatre activities. Third,
censorship and the direct influence of the state on artistic expression
disappeared completely, and in a nod to the societal importance of the
theatre, the first two post-Communist Ministers of Culture in the Czech
Republic were theatre artists.4 Finally, the early 1990s saw the creation of
numerous non-governmental theatre associations, such as the Actors Union,
47
the Association of Regional theatres, the Prague-based Theatre Community,
and a number of private independent talent and literary agencies.
Despite the fears of many theatre professionals, the transformation
to a market economy did not affect the financial security of the existing
theatre network. On the contrary, Prague alone saw the creation of fifteen
new theatre and dance companies between 1990 and 1995, and out of the
network of fifty-four regional repertory theatres, only one has been
abolished since 1990.5 Yet despite the ongoing stability and indeed growth
of the theatre network in the 1990s, two fundamental problems remained
to be solved: first, the relationship between the theatre and the state, and
second, the role of the "subsidiary organization theatres" that to this day
continue to receive generous state and municipal support.
The first half of t he 1990s, especially during the tenure of the
liberally minded Ministers of Culture, Milan Luke$ and Pavel Tigrid, was
dominated by the effort to privatize the existing theatre network, which
until then was fully funded and supported by the state and municipalities.
Such efforts corresponded with the overall societal trend of
decentralization and privatization. But in 1990, the Czech Republic
aspired to join the European Union, and all of the countries of the
European Union had a clearly stated state cultural policy anchored in their
constitutions, the majority having indeed specific theatre legislation. 6
Many artists and cultural officials considered a similar legislative document
a necessity, despite memories of an ideologically tainted official cultural
policy and restrictive theatre legislation during the previous regime.
7
The government, however, moved in the opposite direction. The
economically liberal policies of the center-right government of Prime
Minister Vaclav Klaus were reflected in the tone of official proclamations
prior to 1998. For example, in a government proclamation of July 1992,8
the government publicly distanced itself from the formulation of cultural
policy (the first time in more than forty years) and empowered the
individual citizen as the recipient of culture. Rather than insisting on the
government's direct influence, it stated the intention to create an
"environment" for the development of culture, privatization of cultural
institutions, and an opening of space for independent non-governmental
initiatives. At the same time, the government affirmed its limited
responsibility for the financing of culture. Such proclamations, however,
did not lead to any legislative action directly addressing the continuing
existence of direct state or municipal financing of existing theatre networks
48 Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 25, No.2
and the absence of mechanisms for the financial support of independent
theatre companies.
In 1998, the center-right government was replaced by a coalition led
by Social Democrats. It too published a number of government declarations,
commissioned studies of cultural policies of the countries of the European
Union, and publicly committed itself to the principles of multi-source
financing of culture and to the increase of the budget of the Ministry of
Culture to levels common in the EU. It repeatedly declared its intention to
transform the existing subsidiary organizations into not-for-profit
institutions competing for state funds in an open environment.
In 2001, the Social Democratic government ratified an official
declaration entitled Cultural Poliqy in the Czech Republic, the first supposedly
binding and coherent set of principles of the relationship between state and
culture. The declaration called for a fundamental rethinking of the nature of
state support for the culture and, in that spirit, replaced the word "subsidy"
with "investment." In addition, for the first time the government was
"obliged" to implement the principles stated in the official declaration.9
However, despite the "official and binding" nature of the declaration, as of
2004, no part of it has been put into effect. Nevertheless, with fifty-three state
and municipality-supported theatres, eighty to one hundred private theatres,
close to two thousand productions a year, and about six million individual
tickets sold a year, the Czech theatre remains vital and loyally attended. On
the other hand, there exists a rather bewildering array of different
organizational and financial structures, which may need to be streamlined in
the future in order to equalize the access to public and private financing for
all theatre organizations. Unlike the United States, where the lines between
for-profit and non-profit theatre is relatively clearly drawn, and where the
financial contributions of federal or state governments is almost non-
existent, the picture in the contemporary Czech Republic is blurred.
Theatre as a Subsidiary Organization
The largest recipients of direct public support are the so-called
subsidiary organizations, representing the most common model of repertory
theatre organization in the Czech Republic. In praxis, a subsidiary theatre is
a single-source organization that is run, administered, and financed by the
state or a municipality. Organizationally, the subsidiary theatres are "state
enterprises" in which the Ministry of Culture or the municipal governments
have the right to name or remove the artistic directors, increase or decrease
49
the yearly subsidies, and-theoretically-close down the theatre if the
economic or political situation changes dramatically. Actually, the subsidiary
theatres are the last vestiges of socialism in the Czech Republic. Especially in
the regional theatre network outside of Prague, this financially stable system
seems to suit the majority of artistic and managing directors. But reliance on
a single source of financing (subsidiary theatres are not allowed to apply for
additional grants, and corporate support for culture is almost non-existent in
the Czech Republic) and dependence on the political goodwill of city or
ministry officials often lead to a rigid scale of artistic and staff wages, a
pervasive conservatism of the repertory, and a general feeling of stagnation
in many of the regional repertory companies. Finally, unsubsidized Czech
theatre professionals often begrudge the financial security of the established
network of subsidiary theatres.
There are two kinds of such subsidiary organizations. First, there are
the so-called national institutions that are operated and fully financed by the
Ministry of Culture. These include the gargantuan National Theatre, the
State Opera, and the famed Laterna Magika Theatre. As an officially
designated "national institution" the flag-ship National Theatre receives
close to 380 million Czech crowns for its operational budget every year,IO
not including funds for the maintenance of its two large buildings, which are
registered national landmarks, and whose upkeep is financed through a
different budget line of the Ministry. The National Theatre is a multi-
ensemble theatre with large, permanent drama, opera, and ballet companies;
two permanent orchestras; and an army of artistic, technical, and
administrative support staff. Administratively, the National Theatre is a
subsidiary organization of the Ministry of Culture. While the theatre has had
its own board of directors since 1992, successive Ministers of Culture have
on numerous occasions ignored the board's recommendations, especially in
naming the executive directors of the National Theatre in the 1990s.
Second, fifty-three repertory theatres function as subsidi ary
organizations of cities, municipalities, and, as is the case in Prague, city
neighborhoods. These are financed from the individual budgets of the
municipalities and cities. The individual municipal governments operate
them and name the artistic and managing directors. The individual budgets
of the municipal theatres vary according to the size of their permanent
company and staff, the number of companies under one roof (fourteen of
those are multi-ensemble theatres with their own opera and ballet companies
as well as orchestras), and the financial and political circumstances in the
individual cities .I I
The regional theatres (with the exception of Prague and a few other
cities) tend to present a mixed picture: on one hand they enjoy r e l t i ~ e
financial security in terms of an automatic yearly subsidy from the
municipality, but on the other hand, they are in a sense at the mercy of the
individual city governments, who may or may not be "enlightened" enough
to provide sufficient funding and not meddle in the internal affairs of the
particular theatres. Smaller regional towns, who tend to be poorer and whose
city commissioners tend to be politically more conservative, often expect
their municipal theatres to present a more frugal and safer repertory. The
single-source financing model prevents the regi onal theatres from seeking
additional funds,I2 and they continue functioning along the old Communist
model.
Non-Profits and Private Theatres
Until 2002, the subsidiary organizations swallowed ninety-eight
percent of the entire state and municipal support for the theatre in the Czech
Republic.l3 However, besides the subsidiary theatres, almost eighty to 120
additional independent theatre and dance companies in the Czech Republic
are able to survive as professional companies in various forms. Roughly, the
non-subsidiary theatres in the Czech Republic can be divided into 1) pure
for-profit ventures and 2) hybrid forms of non-profit theatres. The for-profit
"private theatres" range from one-time musical productions, through theatres
intended mainly for foreign tourists, to respected small repertory houses,
which base their repertory on successful small-cast foreign imports and the
star power of their performers. The for-profit theatres usually charge higher
ticket prices than the subsidiary and non-profit ones, and as a rule they are
one hundred percent self-supporting.
The two main models for the independent theatre companies
generally resemble Anglo-American theatre systems. First, there are the
tax-exempt, non-profit "civic associations." Second, there are the theatres
organized as "limited companies." However, the limited companies can be
created as non-profits as well in order to be eligible, along with the civic
associations, for grants and government support. Their tax structure
follows a complicated model of profit and loss, so designed that they end
up essentially tax-exempt as well.l
4
The difference is that companies that
are associated with a specific artist, or run by a strong-minded artistic
director, such as Jiif Suchfs Semafor Theatre or Jakub Spalek's Kaspar
51
Theatre in Prague, tend to organize themselves as limited companies
"owned" by the leading personality and lacking a board of directors. The
o'wner and operator of a limited company has the final executive power
over all artistic and financial matters of the theatre, so the model is best
suited for a strong leading figure. Other more ensemble-based companies
tend to stick to the civic association model, complete with a board of
directors, annual open meetings, and complete financial and
organizational transparency. The financing of both ranges from a medley
of different governmental and non-governmental grants and contributions
to a hybrid form of corporate support,l5 but their income is generated
primarily from ticket sales and secondary activities, such as theatre bars
and restaurants, spaces rentals, and guest performances in the provinces.
Unlike the subsidiary theatres, their survival and economic well-being is
not dictated by the fancies of the state or municipality but rather by their
own financial and artistic creativity.
The artistic and financial successes of the non-subsidiary theatres
are reflected in their average attendance numbers of eighty-five to ninety
percent, as well as their self-sufficiency, which often reaches more than
ninety percent. Yet despite their success, the approximately eighty non-
subsidiary theatres receive no more than two percent of the two billion
crowns of total state and municipal support. The following table will
demonstrate the relationship between the subsidiary and non-subsidiary
theatres:
Subsidiary Non-Subsidiary
Theatres 53
80-10016
Ensembles 80 so
Permanent venues 90 55
Individual productions 1,231 742
Performances 14,442 11,000
Audiences 4 million 1.5 million
Employees 7,162 1,800
Artists 3,275 approx. 1,800
(most employees are artists)
Self-support 30% 60-100%
% of total state support 98%
20Jo
Total state support
196 million 17 4 million
The statistical data Is only reinforce the obvious strengths and flaws
of the current financing and organizational landscape of the Czech theatre
network. As long as "he who pays the piper calls the tune" in Czech theatre,
theatre will not "belong to those who create it." The gulf between the
financial stability of most subsidiary theatres and the artistic freedom of most
non-subsidiary theatres has grown wide. It was not until 2002 that the city of
Prague took concrete steps to establish both fmancial stability and artistic
freedom. The so called Prague Transformation is currently in progress, and it
will be the subject of a following article.
NOTES
I Bohumil Nekolny, "Formace transformace, cast tretf," Svlt a divadlo 6 (2003): 33.
2 Ondl'ej Cerny, interview by the author, 6 September 2004.
3 Ivan Hronec, "Horizont dosazitelny v co nejkratsim casovem useku," Svlt a
divadlo 3 (1994): 129.
4 Milan Lukes, the former Artistic Director of the National Theatre, was Minister
of Culture in the "Government of National Understanding" between December
1989 and July 1990. He was followed by the Czech playwright Milan Uhde
between 1990 and 1992. It is telling that of the seven Ministers of Culture during
the last fifteen years, four had been theatre artists. The current Minister Pavel
Dostal, a former actor and director, has occupied that post since 1998.
5 Bohumil Nekolny, "Divadlo v Ceske Republice po roce 1989" (Prague:
unpublished manuscript, 2004), 7.
6 These theatre legislations, however, sometimes assume hugely bureaucratic
proportions. For example, the Austrian legislation has more than seventy articles
about its four leading federal theatres . That is about ten percent of the entire
Austrian civil code.
7 The Czech term kulturni politika has been subject to much discussion, since it
denotes "politics" rather t han "policy." Czech artists are allergic to hearing the
terms politics and theatre in one sentence, and this may be one of the reasons why
many have been so skeptical about a state-formulated cultural policy. Some
cultural officials have began to use the term kulturni strategie- "cultural strategy,"
which may be more fitting term.
8 The full text of the declaration is as follows: "The major principle of the
government's cultural policy is that the decisive factor in the field of culture is
neither the state nor the particular cultural institutions but rather the individual
for whom the cultural goods are intended. While we do not deny our
responsibility for the financing of cultural heritage and cultural creation, we want
53
to create an environment, which will allow the financial participation of private
and non-governmental organizations and individuals in preserving and creating
cultural goods. The government will continue the transformation of state
administration in the field of culture, in the process of gradual privatization of
number of cultural institutions until now administered by the state, and in the
creation of independent public non-profit institutions." Bohumil Nekolny,
"Formace transformace, cast prvni" (Formation ofTransformation- Part One), Svlt
a divadlo 4 (2003): 12.
9 Bohumil Nekolny, "Formace transformace, cast druha," Svlt a divadlo 5 (2003):
139.
I 0 Pavel Dostal, et a!, Vjrocn{ zprdva Ministers tva kultury 2003, 91
II So, for example, the rich city of Prague can afford to allocate more than five
percent of its annual budget to culture, out of which more than one third or about
480 million crowns goes to its subsidiary theatres and various theatre grants. The
enlightened Prague city government does not shy away from supporting
controversial works.
12 However, in 1996, the newly constituted Association of Regional Theatres has
successfully lobbied the parliament in order to obtain direct funds from the
Ministry of Culture as a supplement to their municipally allocated budgets. As a
result, the Ministry created a "Program for Support of Regional Theatres," which
allocates about thirty-five million crowns a year to thirty-three regional repertory
companies. Compared with the individual municipal and regional contributions
to the regional theatres, the thirty-five million divided among thirty-three
companies is a mere drop in the water.
13 Press Release by the Czech Theatre Institute, (Prague: 11 September 2002).
14 Since the endlessly discussed legislation about not-for-profit organizations has
not been passed, and doesn't seem to be anywhere close to passing, the
designations of "civic association" or "limited company" are essentially arbitrary
in terms of taxes and eligibility for grants. and other forms of support.
15 Because of the absence of a tax code allowing tax deductions for charitable
contributions, the corporte support for the arts is minimal in the Czech Republic.
However, some major Czech and international corporations support the arts and
the theatre. Because they cannot deduct their contributions from their tax bills,
they declare them as "advertising expenses" in their bookkeeping.
16 According to the Theatre in Czech Republic 2002-2003, 698, the non-public sphere
is difficult to capture statistically. Many companies come and go, and not all
private companies have replied to the Theatre Institute's request for statistical
information.
17 The offical exchange rate is 25 Czech crowns to a US dollar. However,
considering the buying power of the Czech crown in the Czech Republic, the ratio
is closer to about 10:1, suggesting the equivalent of200 million US dollars in total
state support for the theatre in the Czech Republic, a country of a little more than
10 million inhabitants.
18 All statistics are taken from the following sources:
Kucharova, Pavia, et al. Czech Theatre Directory 2002. Prague: Divadelnf Ustav,
2003.
Cerny, Ondrej, et al. Divadlo v Ceske Republice. Prague: Divadelnf Ustav, 2004.
Dostal, Pavel, et al. Vjrocnf zprdva Ministerstva kultury 2003.
55
THE OTHER COMES TO HOLLAND:
PARADISE REGAINED? FESTIVAL IN THE NETHERLANDS
Dasha Krijanskaia
Paradise Regained?-the second edition of the Eastern European
Theatre Festival-took place in Holland in November 2004. Compared to
the prominent Edinburgh Fringe, Ruhr Triennale, or KunstfestivaldesArts
(each boasts a budget of over six million Euros), this was a relatively small
event. It first came into existence in February 2002-the initiative of
managing directors of seven Dutch municipal theatres who decided to
present several stage works from the former Warsaw block under the catchy
title, Paradise Lost? Mixing genuine artistic curiosity with political sensibility,
the directors rode the wave of the approaching enlargement of the European
Union (EU) to obtain funding from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and a number of cultural foundations. The year 2004 proved especially
conducive to explorations of cultural diversity-in particular, artistic work
coming out of Eastern Europe or the so-called New Europe, since this was
the actual year of both the start of the EU enlargement and a Dutch
presidency of the EU.
The major part of the 600,000 Euro budget for Paradise Regained?
came from the Thinking Forward 2004 Foundation, a cooperative project
between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the PodiumKunst Cultural
Fund, and Mondriaan Stichting, which aimed at coordinating the European
cultural activities of the Netherlands during its EU presidency. For better or
worse, the current spirit of political transformation dominated the festival's
official opening, including the pages of its program, printed interviews with
festival directors, and other festival paraphernalia. While expressions like "a
new generation of theatre professionals" and "the aftermath of
Communism" bordered on cliche, the festival's motto unequivocally stated:
"We thought it was a wall, but it turned out to be a curtain." The statement,
though gesturing toward a reunited community of European theatre, was, in
the end, unable to mask the essential cultural differences between Dutch and
Eastern European theatre.
The most obvious of these differences resides in the dissimilar social
functions of theatre in the two cultures. Despite enormous efforts by the
government to promote theatre development, the Dutch people do not
strike me as strongly committed to the idea of theatre as a primary expression
of national culture. Perhaps it is the Dutch ethos of frugal expenditure that
is to blame for the nation's attitude toward theatre as a superfluous activity,
or perhaps it is the lack of a deeply rooted tradition of serious theatregoing.
The majority of the Dutch audience wants to be entertained or, at best, to
feel titillated yet undisturbed. Theatre that is capable of sparing them the
burden of a total intellectual/emotional experience is considered good, while
all other kinds of theatre are regarded as dubious. As a result, summer
festivals and cabarets enjoy a sweeping popular success. The most notable
among the summer festivals, Oeral on Terschelling Island in the North Sea,
is indeed fun for the masses; the tourist atmosphere skillfully combines bits
of cultural activities with traditional Dutch holiday activities. Audiences
need bikes to transport themselves from one venue to another or to the array
of cafes where they can sit in the sunshine and consume beer. Given that
biking and beer are at least as popular as theatregoing, it is no surprise that
the festival is enthusiastically supported by local businesses. The same goes
for cabaret: Youp van't Hek, the renowned Dutch cabaret artist, recently
enjoyed a six-week-long run in a fully sold-out Koninklijk Theater Carre in
Amsterdam.
The idea of a cute, tamed art, which is safely interspersed with other
daily activities in order to avoid the risk of having a profound spiritual
impact, has deep cultural roots in a country famous for its merchant-like
Calvinist mentality. While many entrenched national aristocracies in other
European countries have fostered the notion of non-utilitarian art as the only
art suitable for the cultural elite, thus endorsing its autonomous aesthetic
value, there was no aristocracy in the Netherlands capable of developing the
foundations of elitist culture. The Dutch royal dynasty was a creation,
installed in the state just before Napoleon. Even the Dutch Golden Age
paintings were considered a lucrative investment in the seventeenth
century-that is, a commodity capable of producing income. As it blends
historical peculiarities with a recently adopted slogan of social cohesion,
Dutch culture is well on the way to becoming one of the most democratic
among the European cultures in every sense of the word. It is indeed the
culture for the masses that takes into account tastes, desires, and art views of
its population of sixteen million.
In reaction to this, an elitist theatre that targets a small number of
intellectuals has declared its incessant interest in innovative and
experimental work. This work, however, created entirely in the spirit of
rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ensconced after-dinner
57
VISits, for the most part, tends to be superficially shocking rather than
artistically coherent.
Jan Zoet, Managing Director of Rotterdam Schouwburg (Municipal
Theatre) and member of the artistic board of the festival, explains: "Theatre
from Central and Eastern Europe is a complex phenomenon, which requires
audiences to think and has no Dutch TV celebrities. As a result, it is not sexy
for the Dutch audience; all it wants is to be entertained. Take for example,
the musical Crazy for You, playing recently in Rotterdam-it drew 50,000
spectators in one and a half months! We intended both editions of the
Paradise festivals to broaden the horizons of our audience, to open a
dialogue between different theatre cultures. We are not quite happy with the
results."!
The term "dialogue" has lately become a key word in numerous
cultural exchange projects. Despite official pronouncements coming from
European cultural agencies and foundations, and the attempts of such
international festivals as Dialog in Wroclaw, Poland; Nitra in Nitra, Slovakia;
Sibiu in Sibiu, Romania; and the Theorem Network of the Avignon festival,
dialogue-and theatre dialogue, in particular-proves to be an ideal
extremely difficult to attain.
True dialogue requires the recognition of a plurality of cultural
voices and necessitates one theatre tradition's organic predilection toward
another. It cannot be merely a demonstration of political goodwill. Such
interest, which is surely prompted by intellectual curiosity and some
preliminary cultural knowledge, can easily slip into a short-lived political
vogue or market-stirred tourist attraction for "exotic" cultures.
To be sustainable among the general public, a real exchange
between theatrical traditions calls for more profound links-in particular,
broad similarities in theatre aesthetics. Theatre aesthetics is defined by a
specific cultural history combined with the contemporary cultural
expectations of audiences. It is no surprise then that festivals in Wroclaw,
Nitra, and Sibiu, for the most part, present regional European works, while
occasionally inserting "exotic" components (whether they be shows from
Italy or Brazil), which are meant to speak for the festival's artistic standing
and its spirit of worldliness.
Despite their reputation for being open-minded and liberal (an
attitude, which sometimes amounts to "hands-off" indifference in daily life),
the Dutch are reluctant to change their minds and traditionally cautious
about everything that is new and unfamiliar. Given the underdeveloped
tradition of theatregoing in the Netherlands, it is only logical that such a
festival, organized in Holland, would present a much more problematic
event compared to a similar event in neighboring countries, like Germany
and France, which have richer theatre traditions.
To make the whole thing even more complex, one needs to keep in
mind that developed theatre aesthetics presents a construct of a particular
society, inasmuch as both its creators and recipients are social constructs
themselves. This accounts for fundamental differences not only in
interpretation of social themes but in theatrical components comprising the
totality of the shows. When Robert Wilson explores theatrical landscape and
Rene Pollesch hilariously comments upon the conditions of late capitalism
and globalization, they both reflect in their work the recent state of Western
post-industrial civilization, the state in which the human being has been
pushed away from the center of the universe and his\her emotional sphere
has become an object of manipulation by various social forces. Their theatre
manifestly declares death of character-oriented and human-oriented
approach to the theatre, including such issues as the fragmentation of human
consciousness, the continuity of human memory, the mechanization,
ritualization, and any other "ization" of the human condition. The work is
instead saturated with irony and self-irony, since postmodem Western artists
have ceased to believe in the possibility of a direct emotional impact on the
audience. In a cultural situation in which emotion is manipulated,
objectified, and finally commodified, any effort to establish empathy
between the stage and the stalls-not to mention catharsis-is futile. One will
evoke grinning instead of laughter and giggling instead of genuine tears.
In this light, the theatre situation in the Netherlands appears to be
complicated even further by the deeply engraved suspicion of the Dutch
audiences about the act of performance. The steady popularity of the Dutch
cabaret artists suggests that a human being who shares with a group his/ her
supposedly personal views for two straight hours appeals more to the Dutch
consciousness than an actor who presents something divorced from his/her
own personality. It is exactly this act of"divorcing," this gap between the real
and the presented, which is at the core of acting and in turn goes against the
grain of Dutch culture. A Dutch maxim states that acting "normally" is
already eccentric enough. For a nation that still harbors its Calvinist
suspicion about any kind of histrionic behavior-whether it is rendered as
postmodern or humanist-first-person storytelling has more weight than a
self-conscious performance act.
59
In contrast, Eastern Europeans are both unmistakably histrionic and
humanist in their theatre practices. Krzysztof Warlikowski's Dybuk2 (a co-
production of Rozmaito5ci Teatr Warszawa and Wroclawski Teatr
Wsp61czesny, Poland) is a paean to human memory with its attempts to save
the precious recollections from the forces of entropy. In this production,
through the act of remembering, spiritual continuity can be preserved and
history continued. The message is charged with a spark of ecstatic idealism
and has a dreamlike quality replete with somnambulistic transformations. All
of this stands opposed to the healthy materialism of the Dutch.
"Dybbuk" literally means a wandering spirit that dwells in a living
person. In his playscript, Warlikowski combines two existing Dybbuk stories:
the 1914 Jewish drama of An-ski (pseudonym of Solomon Zan vel
Rappoport) and a contemporary short story by the Polish writer Hanna Krall.
The famous An-ski play gets cut and rewritten: looking past the themes of
eternal love and betrayal, the director wrestles a tragedy of memory out of a
drama of exorcism. In Krall's story, an American professor of art history
discovers he has been possessed by the dybbuk of his half-brother, the
wartime child, murdered in the Warsaw ghetto some sixty years ago.
Warlikowski's style demonstrates a calculatingly slow rhythm that
after several excruciatingly discomforting minutes produces a hermetic yet
suggestive quality indispensable to the total theatre experience. The austere
dark space of Dybuk, lit with spotlights and immersed in metaphysical
silence, is reminiscent of the interior of a synagogue in its ascetic spirit of
minimalism. It is exactly this rhythm of contemplation that provides for the
difficult and much-sought unity of the piece's three parts: an epic preamble,
a condensed drama, and a non-dramatic narrative.
The preamble, metaphysically speaking, presents a process of
becoming: sitting downstage, each actor takes a turn to slowly tell the
audience a Jewish parable and is literally transformed into a character by the
end of the story. In a few stretched-out moments, the actors become
characters ready to step into the world of the play. This is perhaps what is
most fascinating about the production-in the absence of any stage business,
virtually motionless, Warlikowski's actors demonstrate the highest level of
interior acting technique based on stage presence and concentration. They
speak with a surprisingly primal quality, penetrating the hidden meaning of
words. They call for the unknown. To be sure, they are fully equipped to
implement the director's vision of a dark cabbalistic universe-violent and
yet utterly devoid of flesh. In fact, Warlikowski is concerned here neither
The wedding scene from KrzysztofWarlikowski's Dybuk
with corporeality nor sexual love. There is not much passion in the
production either, except the passion for remembrance and the passion for
the metaphysical. "Transcendental God's name is AJIN. AJIN means 'my
something' ... AJIN is nowhere. God is an absolute nothingness." To truly
comprehend such lines, one needs to be entirely immersed in the play with
no electronic supertitles to break the total experience. In the situation of
touring abroad, such a total immersion becomes impossible. In addition,
quite unfortunately for the piece, Dutch audiences overall do not display the
same passion for metaphysics and are generally in the habit of following
more easily accessible lines.
Two scenes, in particular, stand out in the production. In the first,
Chanan and Lea are together, naked, and while they speak out the lines of
"The Song of Songs," the back wall fills in with marvelous animals, plant
patterns, birds- all in red and white colors. The animation is skillfully done:
animals enter, plants grow, and birds fly in-all to become part of a carpet
61
with a unicorn and a lion posed in the center. The dark ritual space,
supposedly a mykva at the beginning, is transformed into the Garden of
Eden, Chanan and Lea signifying Adam and Eve. Meanings multiply.
The second scene comes before Lea's doomed wedding. A few
women, of various ages, sit in a row, each at her own dresser, doing her
makeup and hair, breaking silence from time to time. A man enters, his suit
reminiscent of the 1930s. No exchange follows. He smokes, his eyes fixed on
the women. Nothing happens, he just moves slowly from one woman to
another. The mise en scene is painfully intense and suggestive of several
intertwined meanings. It may signify a brothel: the objects are on display; the
client is ready. It may point to something less specific: the domain of the
deep female interior into which the male intrudes. What is certain, however,
is the undertone of restrained sexuality conveyed by the enigmatic and
languorous personality of the actor (Jacek Poniedzialek). Still staring at the
women, he slowly undresses, and then Lea enters his space to pick up and
put on the male clothes. The pants, the white dress shirt, the jacket are now
put on in an inverted order-a long ritual ends with the final buttoning of
the oversized male jacket. The transformation is completed: the actress
becomes androgynous, while the dybbuk, the spirit of her dead lover, has
consumed her character's soul.
Despite the amazing quality of acting, some questions remain.
Remnant Polish anti-Semitism has not been fully overcome, nor could Polish
failure during the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising be easily forgotten. In
cultural terms, the Jews represent the Other in a culture that defined-and
still defines-itself through the negation rather than the inclusion of
everything Jewish. Given the recent disclosure of new anti-Semitic incidents
during WWII, widely discussed in the Polish press, (for example, the
massacre of Jews by Poles at Jedwabne in 1941, documented in Jan Gross's
book Neighbors) what does the production signify in this context? A
recogni tion of national guilt and an attempt to atone for the sins of the past
history? What kind of memory does Warlikowski have in mind when he
refers to Dybuk as "the personification of the memory we don't want to get
rid of, we want to cultivate in ourselves"?3 Whether it is the historical
memory of infamous Polish behavior or the essentialist memory intrinsic to
all human beings remains unclear. In any case, I dare to say that the scenes
of life in a Jewish settlement interspersed with the monologues of a half-
Jewish American in search of his Jewish identity are bound to be perceived
as exotic and, therefore, detached from the ordinary Polish-and even more
so, Dutch-spectator. This raises the question of whether a production about
human memory, rendered as a Jewish story, will have an intended
universalistic effect or remain just an isolated tourist venture both for the
audience and conscientious Warsaw artist.
Unlike Warlikowski, Alvis Hermanis deals with seemingly
unpretentious matters. In Long Life (New Riga Theatre, Latvia), a drama
without words, Hermanis portrays a group of elderly people living together
in a communal apartment. This is a heritage of the Soviet era: apartments
with tiny rooms, one kitchen, and one bathroom in common use. To those
who have ever lived in the Soviet Union, the phenomenon is painstakingly
familiar: queuing at the door of the bathroom and fighting at the communal
kitchen is an unforgettable experience. While others, better paid and
successful, found their way out of the communals long before the crush of
the Soviet Empire, the old ones, surviving on their tiny retirement funds, are
stuck there for the rest of their lives.
Unlike Warlikowski, Hermanis has no interest in metaphysics.
Instead, he meticulously recreates the process of physical, down-to-earth
living, as if zooming in each detail under the microscope. What fascinates
him is the way the old bodies move around the spatial cubicles and old
hands touch the objects. Yet his major concern is to present individual
characters-authentic and substantial human beings become the highest
artistic value in his theatre. "Old people are way more interesting than you
and me," states the director.4 This specific brand of hypernaturalism, first,
identifies the director as a Stanislavskian artist, and second, puts him in line
with the rest of the Eastern Europeans. For them, a human being, whether
realistic or typified to various degrees, manifestly remains the goal and the
subject of the theatre art. Furthermore, the Stanislavsky approach is clearly
discernable in the acting technique of the actors: in Long Life the young
actors not only present their elderly characters, but literally melt into them,
reliving bodily and emotionally a completely alien experience. Without any
makeup, the actors-the majority of them is in their late twenties-become
aged: they step cautiously, sink down into the chairs unsurely, drink slowly,
and get dressed clumsily. The general character-oriented approach shouldn't
come as a surprise to those who know that most of Hermanis's actors
graduated from St. Petersburg Theatre Academy, a top Russian drama school
firmly promoting the Stanislavsky system. What is surprising is the level and
quality of transformation-the meticulously recreated physical manner
sustains an illusion that is more tangible and juicy than life itself.
63
To establish this illusion, Herman is uses his signature trick. As some
undetermined life matter makes its first morning moves under the shabby
blankets at the opening of the show, a stuffy smell of medicine and old age
spreads around the auditorium. Likewise, in Inspector General, the director's
previous piece that was set in a Soviet-era canteen, the audience was to smell
sickening vapors of burned, overcooked food, an ironic reminder of the
failure of the Soviet restaurant system.
Nonetheless, Hermanis is, by and large, serious rather than
entertaining and humorous rather than ironic. He may depict an old
babushka shaving her chin before going out, or an elderly couple pouring
clay into condoms to make souvenir candle-holders, yet he remains
unequivocally caring. "We win the audience with our tenderness," says the
director.s The result is a bitter yet touching portrait of elderly people left to
misery and oblivion in a country like Latvia that attained at last its desirable
EU membership.
Despite the director's loud protestations, the production conveys a
discernable political message. How could it be that in a country that
supposedly satisfies all EU requirements for human rights, the monthly
pensions are far less than the minimum standard of living? "You know, we
sold out our elderly when entering the EU," says the director. "We needed
to invest in the development of the market economy, and the only money
the government found available was the pension fund."6 All in all, it is these
particular aspects of so-called democratic reforms that Hermanis
unintentionally questions. Even the title, Long Life, has a sarcastic ring to it,
hinting at the state's secretly held view that under the current economic
conditions, a long life is hardly feasible. Yet, to turn the most vulnerable
population into an easily disposable group is an unacceptably high price for
entering the promised European paradise, let alone the compatibility of such
an approach with the principles of a society that claims to be civilized.
Compared to the chamber style of Long Life, Oedipus Rex based on
Sophocles (Oskaras Korsunovas Theatre, Lithuania) is quite ambitious both
in scale and implementation. Oskaras Korsunovas, who launched his
directing career by staging Daniil Kharms some fifteen years ago, keeps
demonstrating his penchant for absurdist intellectual riddles rendered
through a variety of formal means.
The stage presents an oversized playground with a recurrent set of
objects provided for children's recreation: a carousel, a seesaw, a climbing
wall, a gigantic mushroom, and a sandbox suitable for adults to play in.
64
65
While the oversized objects immediately project a rather disturbing feeling,
the director adds more to the nightmarish atmosphere by populating the
stage with a huge teddy bear and a chorus of babies with enormous heads
turning into mice turning into Greek masks with suffering facial expressions.
Babies and mice are threatening, for they signify Oedipus's deep
subconscious instincts; the Priest sounds like a pedantic teacher; Tiresias, the
blind seer, is presented as a Pinocchio-like automaton emerging from the
sandbox. The huge teddy bear, an imaginary childhood friend, represents the
original Greek chorus, always addressing his comforting lines to Oedipus.
What is Greek and what is childish become intertwined throughout the
p1ece.
The production enlists all the features characteristic of Andre
Breton's classical surrealism-"[the] extreme degree of immediate absurdity"
and "the omnipotence of dream"
7
are employed to portray the world of the
child's subconscious. As the tale of the unfortunate Oedipus progresses in
the form of a childish horror story, it reveals where the director's main
interest lies. It is the Oedipus complex rather than the dynamics of free will
and predestination that becomes the core of Korsunovas's work, providing
for various critical interpretations. The story of coming of age has been
already read against the political background of Lithuania as a story of a
nation with an inescapable past by some critics and labeled a successful
contemporary reinvention of the Greek heritage by others. Each of the
statements is perfectly legitimate: what appears somewhat unconvincing is
Korsunovas's mechanical, calculating style, oversaturated with allegories that
readily lend themselves to various intellectual decoding.
Arpad Schilling, artistic director of an independent Kretakor
Theatre group from Budapest (Hungary), made an attempt to avoid
altogether the seriousness, passion, and dominant psychological tradition of
the Hungarian theatre in his latest piece, Black/and. The show is a political
satire structured as a series of separate episodes; amidst the official voices of
triumph, it offers bitter criticism of the country's state of affairs with regards
to its newly acquired EU membership. The stage space is rendered as an
empty yet stylish salon in white and pink, as if to pi t elegant wrapping against
the absurdity of the so-called civilized world that Hungary has just entered.
As ladies and gentlemen in black evening dress walk across the bright white
floor, it becomes clear that the director intends to enlist the various forms of
manipulation, alienation, and sheer madness that an individual encounters
in a developed Western society. In addition, the piece is further accented by
the specifics of the Hungarian transition from communism to capitalism.
Unfortunately, this time the tremendously talented and already
prominent Schilling has failed to be artistically persuasive: the piece doesn't
live up to his earlier works, such as W-Workers' Circus and Seagull. He tries to
be detached and ironic, yet lapses into cheesy effects and vulgarity. In
addition, complete alienation understood as an actor's detachment from a
stage persona-and even more so, stage body-seems to be too difficult to
achieve for Schilling's otherwise supreme cast. As a result, one witnesses
cheap nudity instead of the objectified body and gets an impression of the
director's bad taste instead of his intended sardonic attitude.
Schilling's earlier work, Chekhov's Seagull that premiered in 2003
and was shown during the festival as well, completely redeemed the director's
artistic reputation. Hailed by the leading Hungarian critic Judit Csaki as "the
best theatre Hungary can offer today,"8 the show is played out in what at first
Seagull, directed by Arpad Schilling
67
glance may be seen as a minimalist style. The cast performs in their own
clothes, with a pair of shabby chairs and a small table used as scenery. The
houselights remain on.
Yet Schilling's minimalism has different roots. It is prompted by
the director's desire to create and explore an environment that would
trigger the actors' authentic-and most of the time, physical-response to
specific stimuli. These authentic physical reactions gradually build up, in
turn, into a prevailing impression that living on stage rather than
performing becomes the cast's utmost objective. Indeed, in W-Workers'
Circus and in Seagull, in spite of the distinctly different stage milieu, the
actor's being on stage is neither imitated nor performed but is genuinely
relived as an immediate experience. What one witnesses in Seagull is a rare
phenomenon of narrative acting, which approaches the character-actor
relations from a different angle. The company of contemporary
individuals does not mold themselves into the characters; instead, they
keep their personal image intact, trying to navigate the play's
circumstances as they are, without using affective memory and other tricks
of the trade. Stanislavsky's famous motto, "me in the given
circumstances," gets re-invented. To this end, the lines referring to the
characters' age are altered, as several members of the cast are visibly
younger than Chekhov's characters. Furthermore, the actors start the play
seated in the audience, which reinforces the atmosphere of extreme
intimacy between the stage and the stalls. The result is the Chekhovian
story superbly played out by a particular company at a particular moment
of time and history. This is the reason why the Irish journalist Grania
McFadden labels the production "a modern-day tragedy" and registers its
"contemporary, almost casual air."9
All in all, out of thirteen shows the festival chose to present, the
five works discussed above are the most telling. They stand for
contemporary cutting-edge drama from Eastern Europe, reflecting both
the politics and aesthetics of the younger generation-directors and actors
who are in their early forties at the most. Although unmistakably
individual in style, they elucidate essential features of Eastern European
theatre, a theatre whose riches await to be discovered and integrated into
the West European practices. Otherwise, it forever remains the Other-an
exotic tourist attraction and a whim of political vogue-patronized by
advertisements such as the following: "Cafe Restaurant Floor offers a
special Paradise Regained? dinner menu. Come and choose from the
variety of Eastern European starters, main dishes, and deserts for only
21.50 Euro. In addition, free zakuskas will be served."
The good news of course is that the price is given in common
European currency. Yet, one can hardly imagine such a package
accompanying, say, the Royal Shakespeare Company tour-something like
"come enjoy tasty fish and chips right after this great British show!" To kill
this kind of attitude, the Paradise Regained? festival has to go on with its
mission. Unfortunately, discouraged by financial problems, it will most
certainly cease to exist. According to Jan Zoet, "the municipal theatres won't
do another festival, but will concentrate on presenting shows staged by
particularly interesting theatre makers. Region won't be a criterion anymore."
NOTES
I Jan Zoet, personal communication with author, 11 November 2004.
2 I keep the Polish spelling of the title.
3 As quoted in Tomasz Cyz, "Dybuk," in Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 43 (2003),
translated by Kamila Jansen, Paradise Regained? press materiaL
4
Alvis Hermanis, personal communication with author, 11 December 2004.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 See Andre Breton, "First Manifesto of Surrealism."
8 As cited in Paradise Regained? booklet.
9 Grania McFadden, "The Seagull: Qleen's Drama Studio," Festival reviews, Belfast
Telegraph, 1 November 2004.
69
FORTUNE'S FAVORITE: VASSILY K.ACHALOV
Maria lgnatieva
The television programs and a special gathering at the Moscow
Art Theatre Museum marked Vassily Kachalov's one-hundred-and-
thirtieth birthday: surely no male dramatic actor in the twentieth-century
Russian theatre was as deeply and tenderly beloved by the people as
Kachalov. Kachalov's son, Vadim Schverubovich, died in 1981;
Kachalov's two grandchildren-one of them, Alexei Bartoshevich, a
prominent Russian Shakespeare scholar-were there.
In the contemporary United States understanding of the term,
Kachalov was a true celebrity. More than a hundred books and a
thousand articles have been written about him; crowds of admirers always
chased after him. During the first decade of the twentieth century,
Kachalov would leave his apartment in Moscow through the servants'
entrance to avoid the group waiting for him near the main door. He
would change his home telephone number twice a year (with the help of
yet another of his fans who worked at the central telephone station). In
his book about the Art Theatre and its people, his son, Vadim described
how their servant was caught selling Kachalov's used socks and underwear
to his aficionados. But despite those "theatre psychopaths," as
Stanislavsky always called them, Kachalov, in reality, was a true people's
artist, wrapped in the admiration of generations.
The epithets that describe Kachalov in various memoirs, books,
and articles about him seem too good to be true. Among others, we can
quote Olga Knipper-Chekhova, who was not easy to please. She wrote
about Kachalov's "dazzling and n obl e beauty, his magic charm and
grace ... and his whole essence being beautiful and captivating. "! Olga
Gzovskaya, another actress at the Art Theatre who played Ophelia in
Gordon Craig's Hamlet, wrote about Kachalov's elegant "way of walking,
his divine voice, the graceful movement of his beautiful hands, the look
of his clever, kind eyes-sometimes ironic and mocking, sometimes
pensive."2
A beautiful man, a magnificent partner, the best actor at the Art
Theatre: Kachalov was worthy of his legend, which was inseparable from
his actual being, and that is the reason it has lasted so long. A rather dry
and non-sentimental Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to him:
Vassily Kachalov
71
I love you warmly and tenderly-tender[y is a good word here, you
could be loved with such tenderness only. My love for you
steadily grows stronger. And this feeling is unchangeable, I am
absolutely certain of it.3
Maria Lilina wrote to Kachalov in 1910:
Thank you for your telephone call yesterday, which filled me with
remarkable joy. Inspiration carne to me, and I started to envision my
role. Thank you for being you !4
Vassily Ivanovich Shverubovich (Kachalov was his stage name) was
born in 1875 and grew up in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), in the family of a
Russian Orthodox priest. In 1896, Vassily quit his study of law, after
dropping out of St. Petersburg University, and plunged into theatre. First at
the Suvorin Theatre of the Literature and Artistic Society in St. Petersburg,
then in private enterprises in Saratov and Kazan, he sometimes played over
seventy new roles a year. He did not have any formal professional training,
but then neither did Stanislavsky, nor any of the group that came with
Stanislavsky to the Art Theatre from the Society of Art and Literature.
In 1900, a two-year-old Moscow Art Theatre was in search of a leading
man, unjeunepremier, and Kachalov was invited to join the troupe (the actor's
references were so high that he was offered a contract to sign before being
seen by the founders). He was "a born actor," tall, blonde, and good-looking,
with a beautiful, deep voice, but Stanislavsky diagnosed him as useless for
the Art Theatre. Stanislavsky told Kachalov that (at the age of twenty-five!)
he was already spoiled rotten by provincial theatre habits and was a bad pick
for the Art Theatre.s
Thus Kachalov experienced his first and only grand failure in life,
but he accepted it with humility. Although he had offers from other
theatres, he decided to stay at the Art Theatre. But as happens in some
marriages by arrangement, whi ch turn out to be love matches, Kachalov,
who was invited as "a cat in a sack," ended up becoming the best actor of
the Art Theatre-its pride and glory. Within a few months, Kachalov was
converted to the Art Theatre religion. During his quiet attendance at
rehearsals, he re-evaluated everything he knew about acting, for the Art
Theatre was more than just a theatre. When Stanislavsky asked him to read
for Berendei in Ostrovsky's The Snow Maiden, Kachalov already knew what
Vassily Kachalov
was wanted and gave more than anyone expected. In tears, Stanislavsky
rushed toward him, exclaiming, "That's a miracle! You are ours! You have
understood the whole essence of our theatre!"6
Kachalov's first public role at the Art Theatre was an instant success.
He played the old, fairy, Pagan Czar Berendei. "And suddenly, there was the
sound of Kachalov' s voice, as if thick honey had been spilt, as if a beautiful
cello had started to play."7
Kachalov favored challenge both in his professional and personal
life. Tempted many times to leave the Art Theatre, he remained faithful to it
and to Stanislavsky. Often in love with other women and constantly
inspiring female adoration, he remained a husband to one wife.
8
73
Kachalov, unlike other actors at the Art Theatre, was "permitted" to
play outside the Art Theatre during summers, a rare honor. It was not only
the founders' respect for the actor's necessity to play more than the Art
Theatre could offer but also Kachalov's status at the Art Theatre that
guaranteed him such freedom: he was not a share holder.
But Kachalov was never able to leave the Art Theatre. In his letter
to Maria Andreyeva in 1904, he explained why:
You will easily understand this feeling if you remember what
Stanislavsky has done for me. Of course, it's not about helping me
with my parts ... and not even about the fact that I am obliged to
him for my status, success, and my name-that's all trifles. I am
talking about an artist in me that he brought to life, perhaps a small
artist, but a sincere and convinced one; he showed me artistic
horizons that I have not even dreamed of, and which (without him,
I) would have never become reality. That is valuable, that obliges,
and that causes my everlasting gratefulness.9
To the Art Theatre, Kachalov brought his unique portrayals of turn-
of-the-century men, with their inner turmoil, psychological instability, and
the greatest spiritual struggles. He also motivated their complex split
personalities. His best-known roles were Tuzenbakh in Three Sisters (1902),
the Baron in The Lower Depths (1902), Trofimov in Cherry Orchard (1904),
Hamlet in Gordon Craig's production (1911), Ivan Karamazov (1910), and
Nikolai Stavrogin in Possessed (1913). He successfully played in Dostoevsky
and Hauptmann, Ibsen and Gorky, Ostrovsky and Turgenev.
He loved to change his appearances beyond recognition, most
drastically in Leonid Andreyev's Anathema. This inner and outer elasticity,
which enabled him to change himself from Trofimov to Brand, from Julius
Caesar to Nikolai Stavrogin, striking the emotional cords of spectators and
winning their hearts, was Kachalov's personal gift, but it was also an
expression of the aesthetical and ethical philosophy of the Art Theatre. The
goal was to create live people experiencing real emotional fulfillment on
stage.
Before the October Revolution of 1917, the Art Theatre included a
wide range of foreign plays in its repertory, but Kachalov always "translated"
his foreign characters into a spiritual language understood by his Russian
spectators. Thus, he was a Russian Brand, who came "from the sadness of
Vassily Kachalov as Tuzenbakh in Chekhov's Three Sisters
at the Moscow Art Theatre
75
76
Vassily Kachalov as Trofimov in Chekhov' s Cherry Orchard
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No. 2
Vassily Kachalov in the title role of Chekhov's Ivanov
77
the Russian steppes;" a Russian Johannes in Hauptmann's The Lonely Lives,
full of repentance over his failure to preserve his home; or lvar Kareno in
Knut Hamsun's trilogy. One of the Hamsun's plays-Near the Gates to the
Kingdom-had the longest life at the Art Theatre, with Kachalov still playing
Kareno in 1935 at the age of sixty.
By choice (his son was in the White Army), Kachalov stayed
abroad in 1919 and become the unifying center of the so-called Kachalov' s
Group. Having realized that his art was dying away from home, he joined
the Art Theatre in its tour to the United States, and then came back to
Moscow. Freedom for his son, a former enemy of the Red Army, was the
only thing he asked for as the price of his return.
For Kachalov, Stanislavsky was an anchor and helmsman from
start to finish. They were a contrasting pair: one was a leader and the other
a follower. They were akin, too; both were fortune's favorites, and yet
neither exploited "their gifts" or ever became satisfied with what came
naturally. Kachalov, following Stanislavsky's footsteps, realized that the
actor's greatest task was a conscious, life-long effort toward self
improvement.
Their striving to learn more about acting never ceased. A scene in
a hotel room in 1932 is revealing. Two gray eminences, each a legend,
showered with state prizes and titles of Soviet times, were still trying to find
the perpetuum mobile in acting. It was then that Stanislavsky in outrage
yelled at the celebrated Kachalov: "You're a dreadful amateur!" The next
morning, both men were able to laugh about the quarrel. The episode is a
remarkable indication of the overwhelming passion for acting that
characterized both men.
78
In 1935, Stanislavsky wrote to Kachalov:
You cannot complain about your destiny, for you spent your
artistic life luminously .... You are fortune's favorite! Your artistic
gift was fully given you by Nature itself. Only now, in my old age,
deepening my thoughts about our art and penetrating into it with
my heart, can I conclude that the most important gift for an
actor . . . is stage appeal, which was granted you without
limitations. tO
In 1938, at a celebration at the Art Theatre, which had become an
official Soviet State Theatre by that time, the sixty-three-year-old Kachalov,
who had first appeared in the role in 1906, played the twenty-year-old
Chatzky in Woe from Wit. At about the same time, Kachalov wrote:
I had hoped before that when old age came, this passion to live and
this infatuation with life would fade. And I thought that the longer
my old age lasted, the more easily and calmly I would tolerate the
idea of dying. But recently I have lost that hope .... Devil knows,
sometimes I am ready to cry because I am not yet ready to die. II
Kachalov died on September 30, 1948. The legend lives on.
NOTES
1 "Knipper o Kachalove," in Ezhegodnik Moskovskogo Khudozhestvennogo Teatra, 1948,
tom II (Moskva: lskysstvo, 1951) 465.
2 "Olga Gzovskaya o Kachalove," Ibid., 471-472.
3 "Nemirovich-Danchenko o Kachalove" (a letter), Ibid., 645.
4
Maria Lilina to Vassily Kachalov, 1910, a letter, Kachalov's Fund, #10215.
5 "Vassily Kachalov: Moi Pervyie Shagi na Stsene," in Ezhegodnik, 42.
6 Ibid, 43.
7 Tatyana Schepkina-Kypernick, "Kachalov v Snegurochke Ostrovskogo," Ibid., 138
8 Nina Litovtseva, a clever, thorny, and sharp actress, later and acting teacher and
director, was one of the most independent spirits of her time. A notable provincial
actress of the turn of the century, she tried to prove to her already legendary husband
her independence, and in 1907 took an engagement in Riga, at the Neslobin
Enterprise. She was tragically "punished" by circumstances, ending up with sepsis on
the operating table in Riga, and later becoming an invalid at the age of thirty.
9 "Vassily Kachalov Mariye Andreyevoi" in Maria Andrryeva (Moskva: Iskysstvo,
1961) 67-68.
10 "stanislavsky Kachalovu," in Ezhegodnik, 648.
11 "Vassily Kachalov"(a letter), Ibid., 846.
79
INSPECTOR GENERAL FROM KYIV ON STAGE IN
PHILADELPHIA
Larissa M. L. Z. Onyshkevych
During the last ten years, it has become almost an annual event for
a major theatre from Ukraine to visit Philadelphia. Last October 6, it was the
Ivan Franko National Academic Theatre of Ukrainian Drama from Kyiv,
with a performance in a Ukrainian translation (Mykola Sadovskyi) of Gogel's
Inspector General, under the artistic direction of Ihor Manasiev.
Theatres in many countries often stage this popular satire in a
manner that points to the specific social problems of the land and of the
day. The first edition of Nikolai Gogel's Inspector General was completed
in 1835; since it was not too warmly received at first, the author kept
making changes until 1842, leading to four different editions.
The Franko Theatre's production gave a very effective
contemporary staging, which made the play relevant for today's
Ukrainian citizens. Focus was placed on current negative aspects of post-
Soviet behavior, which continued the bad habits deeply engrained since
the days of the Russian Empire: the provinces' inferiority complex and
adulation of anything coming from the center, the constant servility of
minor officials before their superiors, the bribing of officials, and the
endless corruption. To these old staples of social criticism, another was
added: the Ukrainian complex (developed during the years when Russia
ruled over Ukraine) of attempting to please government officials by
speaking Russian to them, and even copying the Russians' manner of
dress. In terms of language, many Ukrainians still speak Russian today
either out of habit or to impress others. In other words, the obsequious
sycophants are alive and well, and some are still living in Kyiv.
Afanasiev's production primarily stuck to the essentials of
Gogel's story: the town fathers suspect that an inspector is coming from
the capital and that he is probably incognito in order to spy on them. At
that time, a young dandy, Khlestakov, happens to be staying in a hotel
and not paying; people come to believe that the man must be the
inspector. The town caters to him, pays for his food and hotel, and the
mayor is even willing to marry his daughter off to Khl estakov. In the
denouement, however, Afanasiev introduced a new character.
Ivan Franko National Academic Theatre of Ukrainian Drama's
production of Gogol's Inspector General,
directed by Ihor Afanasiev.
81
In the chaotic atmosphere that foll owed Khlestakov's departure,
a tall headless figure kept appearing in a soldier's overcoat, echoing those
found in Gogel's story "The Overcoat," as well as additional surreal
depictions in his other works (e.g. "The Nose"): a figure without a nose, a
nose as a figure, a figure without a head. The unusually tall, faceless, and
headless figure, called Incognito, wearing white gloves and gesticulating in a
grandiose manner (always to the same musical phrases), appeared as a
personalization of the guilty conscience or fear that the citizens had of the
man who could see through their fake civic behavior and by means of his
negative reports to the center, could punish them accordingly. It was a very
effective means of representing the people's anxiety over awaiting the
unknown/faceless inspector. In a way, Incognito served as a substitute for the
"pantomime" that Gogo! introduced in the fourth variant of his play. In that
pantomime all the actors are to appear in one pose, as if petrified, without
speaking. In this production, Incognito struts across the stage in silence,
heightening the mystery.
Khlestakov and his servant had rather eccentric, colorful costumes
performed several movements from Swan Lake with subtle homoerotic hints.
Gradually, scene after scene, almost all of the men began to dress just like
that pair, copying even their earrings. This is how fashion used to spread
from St. Petersburg and Russia to the provinces.
This influence on many aspects of manners included the language
used by the people in Ukraine. Since the Russian language is different from
the Ukrainian language, the mayor has problems understanding Khlestakov
but tries hard to speak in Russian. His widely-traveled underlings have to
correct him, for example, telling him not to use the word tsukor but sakhar,
not pomeshkannia but kvartira (for sugar and apartment, respectively). This is a
most effective means of drawing attention not only to the different
vocabularies in the two languages but also to the current overuse of Russian
words and language in Ukraine, as well as the tendency to use a Ukrainian-
Russian linguistic mix (surzhyk), which signifies linguistic carelessness as well
as a disregard for individual and national identity. By the end of the play,
everyone speaks Russian, and when they do speak Ukrainian, they often
make grammatical mistakes by copying Russian phrases that take different
cases in Ukrainian.
To provide a more direct impact for the Ukrainian-American
audience in Philadelphia, the actors inserted several English words as well
(traffic, travel), which provided a comic effect and drove the lesson home.
82 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 25, No. 2
00
w
Ivan Franko National Academic Theatre of Ukrainian Drama's production of
Gogol's Inspector General, directed by Ihor Afanasiev.
(The overuse of English words in Ukrainian is also a problem in Ukraine
today.) Since only a few English words were inserted, it served its purpose
well; however, by having the actors speak mostly in Russian in the last part
of the play, the concept was weakened. As in the case of language choice, in
several other situations, too much repetition of effective jokes or gestures
went counter to the subtlety that is always more powerful.
The linguistic/bil ingual aspect that the Franko Theatre introduced
into their production has implications that go beyond the situation in
Ukraine in 2004. There is a hint of a slight dig at Gogol's national, or rather
linguistic, ambivalence. Although he was Ukrainian, Gogo! chose to write in
Russian, as they did in St. Petersburg, and as the Empire preferred. In other
words, he acted just as the characters in Manasiev's production did at the end
of the play. In truly artistic hands, Gogel's old Inspector General continues to
have relevance even in the twenty-first century.
The performance was strong on technical aspects and elements of
burlesque; after all, this production was called a "buffoonery play." The
Incognito figure was unforgettable. The rhythm of t he scenes was augmented
by excerpts of musical pieces from Tchaikovsky, as well as by popular arias
from various operas, Ukrainian folksongs, and Russian pop music. The
traveling sets were simple and quite striking: for example, what appeared to
be large wooden boxes were actually stockpiles of towels, which were most
appropriate, since the beginning of the play takes place in a public
steam bath.
The Franko Theatre was represented here by Bohdan Stupka, its
leading actor, who played the mayor; Yuriy Repryk was the headless
Incognito, and Ostap Stupka played Khlestakov. While Bohdan Stupka
usually dominated the stage, his son Ostap depicted the role of a rather
insecure and uneasy visitor, who quickly learned to take advantage of any
situation or person. A. Mikhina was the mayor's bubbly daughter; with her
lively movements and gestures, she added much to the vigor and tempo of
the play.
84
THE RESURRECTION OF CZECH BLACK COMEDY IN
v
JAN HREBEJK'S UP AND DOWN
Leonard Quart
Few Czech films have appeared in New York movie theaters in the
last decade or so, and the work of major Czech directors that were known to
every film-lover-men like Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting, 1965), Jan Nemec
(Diamonds in the Night, 1964), Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains, 1966)-are
no longer shown. In addition, the most famous Czech director, Milos
Forman (Loves of a Blonde, 1965), has, of course, been working in the States
since 1968, directing respectful literary adaptations, like Ragtime (1981) and
Amadeus (1984), and winning Academy Awards for best picture and best
director for his personal and idiosyncratic adaptation of Ken Kesey novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
In the work of Jan Hrebejk, however, one is conscious of the
resurrection of that black comic and ironic vision that was the Czech fi lm's
trademark. I have seen two of Hrebejk's films-both done in collaboration
with scriptwriter Petr Jarchovs!<y.
Divided We Fall (Musfme si pomdhat, 2000), which received an
Academy-Award-nomination for Best Foreign Film, is a black comedy that
takes place during World War II in a small, Nazi-occupied town in
Czechoslovakia. In this film, every character, including Josef and Maria-the
central couple who bravely give refuge to a Jewish escapee from a
concentration camp-is flawed. Everybody has to enter into compromising
situations in order to survive in a world where suspicion, betrayal, and
murderous repression are the norm. There is nothing saccharine about the
fi lm, and though by the end the good ultimately triumph, Divided We Fall's
vision of human nature is a darkly comic one.
Hrebejk's Up and Down (Horem Pddem, 2004) won the Czech Lion
for Best Film of the Year. It wrestles with nothing less than the disintegration
of traditional European identity through a bunch of seemingly unrelated
Czechs whose paths keep crossing in unexpected ways.
It is a crammed, busy film that contains two main narratives with a
third story about a couple of bumbling, comic illegal-alien smugglers who,
with lowlife underworld connections, engage in a variety of criminal
activities including selling infants.
85
Franta (Jii'l Machacek) and Mila (Natasa Burger)
in Jan Hrebejk's Up an Down
The film begins with the smugglers discharging their cargo of
Indian immigrants at the border, but in the chaos, a baby is left behind.
They bring it to a pawnshop used as a front by their underworld contacts.
The baby is sold, in turn, to a couple that is at the center of one of the
narratives.
In this narrative the husband is a hare-lipped, brutally sensitive
security guard and former soccer hooligan, Franta (Jii'i Machacek). The wife
Mila (Natasa Burger) is a melancholy unhinged woman who can't conceive
a child but longs obsessively for a baby to the point of trying to kidnap one.
The second narrative centers on the messy family relations of an
aging professor, Otto (Jan Hfska), who has been restored to his job and
comfortable house after being persecuted by the Communists. Otto
collapses with a brain tumor. His estranged, restrained, and very sane son
Martin (played by Milos Forman's son Petr) returns home after twenty years
living in a sun-drenched, Eden-like Australia. (The open-spaced Australian
cityscape makes for a striking visual contrast to the gray, crowded streets of
Prague, which the director captures by an evocative semi-documentary style
tracking.)
Martin was once the former lover of Otto's blond, beautiful
companion, Hana (Ingrid Timkova). However, Martin's mother Yera (Emilia
Vasaryova), an acerbic, extremely resentful wig-wearing, beer-drinking older
woman, is still Otto's legal wife, despite being abandoned years ago.
(Vasaryova provides the film's most layered performance.) The family
dynamics are, obviously, very complicated, but various plot details are not
what is significant in this film though Hrebejk juggles them with
consummate fluidity.
Up and Down's main thrust is to use these small, often comic,
human stories to project a larger vision of contemporary Czech society beset
with racism, crime, and a general social malaise In preserving the humanity,
the film avoids turning its characters into mere symbols or illustrations for
political and social concepts. (Unfortunately, some of the comic scenes with
the criminals feel strained and tedious.) In an edgy luncheon-attended by
Otto, Martin, Vera, Hana, and Lenka, Otto and Hana's eighteen-year-old
daughter-the fragile civility is broken over the question of immigration.
Hana, a liberal refugee counselor, talks of humanitarian aid to the third
world and sets Vera off on a self-pitying rant against her Gypsy neighbors
who have made her life miserable.
It's not only Vera (a bright woman who feels profoundly cheated by
life) who expresses rage toward the new immigrants, but also Hana whose
liberal persona is shattered in one scene. After Martin's wallet is supposedly
stolen, she wrongly accuses a hapless immigrant for treating Prague as a
"hunting ground" and only caring about his own kind. She then says she
will never "lift a finger" again for the immigrants-demonstrating that her
humanitarian commitments are far from firm.
The criminals who feel their turf is being invaded by "slanty- eyed
Chinese" and Albanians echo Vera and Hana's reactions. That's also true for
the working class whose xenophobia is exemplified by a skinhead friend's
response to Franta's brown-skinned Indian baby-"Did you screw a
chocolate bar"-before abruptly drumming Franta out of the brotherhood of
Sparta Praha soccer team supporters. In a powerful scene these supporters,
including Franta (who has rejoined the fold), are seen chanting in unison like
racist Neo-Nazis for their team and cursing out an opposing player as a
"black motherfucker." Even Martin must hide from Vera and Otto the fact
that his Australian wife Peggy is black for fear they would disapprove.
If, however, there is a general antipathy to the new immigration
from most Prague residents, there is also a scene where the then president,
87
Vaclav Havel, greets a political dissident Burmese couple. The welcome that
the Burmese couple receives is one of the few images in the film offering
some alternative to the essentially dark view of contemporary Czech society.
For a brief moment Prague becomes a refuge for the oppressed.
Still, none of the characters in Up and Down, except for Martin and
possibly Lenka, seems slated for much happiness. Though the film views
most of the characters without a touch of sentiment, they are given
redeeming qualities and are not simply judged. For example, Vera's anger
and resentment can seem overwhelming, but she has a life force and a
capacity to laugh-collecting Western kitsch such as singing plants and other
farcical artifacts.
Hrebejk and his scriptwriter JarchovskY succeed in constructing a
quirky vision of contemporary Czech society that radiates a mood of black-
comic hopelessness. One note in the film that I felt to ring false was the
crosscutting at the film's conclusion. We see the film's various characters in
Prague looking filled with despair and rage, before cutting to Martin and his
mixed-race kids playing soccer on a sun- saturated beach in Australia. Martin
may be happy to have escaped Prague but the suggestion that Australia is
some interracial utopia is too heavy-handed and facile a contrast for a film
that almost always eschews the simplistic.
CONTRIBUTORS
MARIA IGNATIEVA is Associate Professor in the Department ofTheatre at
the Ohio State University-Lima. Before coming to the United States, she
taught at the Moscow Art Theatre School Studio, and in the 1980s curated
youth and puppet theatres at the USSR Ministry of Culture. Ignatieva's
portfolio includes over forty publications on contemporary Russian theatre
and theatre history. Her recent publications include: Between Love and
Theatre: Young Stanislavsky, (Theatre History Studies, 2005), The Troublemaker
of the Whole Venture: Stanislavsky and Maria Andrryeva, in Teatr (Russian
Theatre, Past and Present, #4, 2004, USA-Netherlands); Adieu, Adieu, Adieu,
Remember Me: and Irina Rozanova (Theatre History Studies,
2004). In 2004, Ignatieva received the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for
Women Grant, which supported the completion of her book Stanislavsky and
Actresses.
KRYSTYNA LIPINSKA II:J:.AKOWICZ holds a Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from NYU, where she teaches in the General Studies Program. She
began her theatre studies in Poland, focusing primarily on Samuel Beckett;
she writes about modern discourse, cultural exchanges between East and
West, issues relating to peripherality, and about Gombrowicz, Witkiewicz,
and Schulz.
DASHA KRIJANSKAIA, an Amsterdam-based theatre critic, scholar, and
dramaturg, holds her MA degree from St. Petersburg Theatre Academy
(Russia), MFA from Yale School of Drama (USA), and Ph.D. from Utrecht
University (the Netherlands). Her research interests include contemporary
Russian and East European theatre, modernist theatre as well as directing
systems of the twentieth century. She has worked as a dramaturg for several
projects in the United States and the Netherlands. She is Associate Professor
of Theatre and Drama at Roosevelt Academy (the Netherlands) and guest
lecturer at GITIS-Scandinavia Acting School (Denmark), where she teaches
several courses in theatre history from Ancient Greece to the twentieth
century. She is also a special correspondent for Kultura ('Culture') newspaper
(Moscow, Russia), and has contributed as a freelance writer to a number of
publications, both in the United States and Russia.
89
LARISSA M. L. Z. ONYSHKEVYCH is a literary scholar specializing in
modern Ukrainian and comparative drama. She is the author of numerous
articles and the editor and compiler of two anthologies of Ukrainian drama.
She has taught drama at Rutgers University and Lviv University (Ukraine). At
present she is the president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
LEONARD QUART is Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College
of Staten Island and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He
is a long-time editor and contributing editor of Cineaste. Most recently he co-
authored the third edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 (Praeger)
and The Films of Mike Leigh (Cambridge University Press).
ELISABETH RICH is Associate Professor of Russian at Texas A&M
University. She has published essays and reviews in The Nation, The
Washington Post, and Civilization/The Magazines of the Library of Congress, as
well as in many leading Russian and US scholarly journals. She is a frequent
contributor to SEEP.
STEPAN SIMEK is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Lewis and Clark
College, Portland, Oregon. As a teacher and freelance director, he has
directed a number of modern Czech plays in his translations in Seattle and
Portland, and he travels regularly to Prague to research Czech theatre after
the fall of Communism.
90 Slavic and East European Pel}ormance Vol. 25, No. 2
Photo Credits
Karol Wojtyla:
Photos courtesy of the www.catholicpressphoto.com
Andrzej T. Wirth:
1) Photo courtesy ofreter Jacobs
2) Photo courtesy of Andrzej T. Wirth
Aleksei Kazantsev:
Photo courtesy of Aleksei Kazantsev
Klicpera Theatre:
Photo, courtesy of Klicpera Theatre
Dybuk:
Photo courtesy ofRozmaitosci Teatr Warszawa and Wroclawski Teatr
W sp61czesny
Oedipus Rex:
Photo courtesy of Oskaras Korsunovas Theatre, Lithuania
Seagull
Photo courtesy of Kretakor Theatre
Kachalov:
All photos courtesy of the author.
Inspector General:
All photos courtesy of Ivan Franko National Academic Theatre of
Ukrainian Drama from Kyiv
91
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewi cz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The
Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and
Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his
theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
about the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by
the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and
Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd-Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Arrabal-of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties. it is high time that this major playwright should become better
1-. :nown in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
USA $20.00 PLUS SHIPPING $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Mai l checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
+
fOUR fRENCH COMEDIES Of THE
17TH AND 18rH CENTURIES
@
@ rw ....
@
@ Lq.: tlw&o.daitJ..Law.
TRANSLATED AND EDITJ!D BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modem era.
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 100164309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestd
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868

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