Against the theatre of disaster

Dariusz Kosinski's afterword to Zenon Fajfer's book Departure

Is it possible to make theatre out of a disaster?

This seemingly rhetorical question received quite an unretorical answer when, from April to April, on a national stage that emerged suddenly and necessarily between the former palace of the imposed authorities and the headquarters of national culture, we staged the contemporary Dziady (Forefathers' Eve), composed with surprising precision of parts II and III, with the classic omission of part IV. The year-long public performances unfolding from scenes of mourning and agora through sequences of spiritual and political revolt to the establishment of almost sacramentally monthly commemorative festivals, ultimately led to a change still unimaginable a year earlier. Those who believed they had no one to lose to were pushed to a defensive depth so deep that - especially after the transfer of the captain - they had to start desperately bricking the goal to avoid having to run off the pitch. The face of the earth had changed, and while it was not so complete as to end the dramatic and spectacular POPiS of the contradictory power that has ruled us for almost fifteen years, there is, after all, no doubt that the events of the year of the catastrophe have made Poland today and the Poland of ten years ago a very different country.

Political scientists and sociologists are racking their brains about the essential causes of this change, underestimating what I persistently reiterate despite various symptoms of reluctance and disbelief: that this change was brought about by a truly total mass performance invoked on a street stage according to a romantic scenario, using the aesthetics of monumental theatre and contemporary spectacular technology. It was this spectacle that aroused affects so strong that no rational arguments or the most sincere declarations of peace and a desire to end the civil war could dampen them. It was the performance that created a strong bond of identification with the protagonist, a relationship of loyalty that not even his most politically incorrect statements and legally dubious machinations could break. Finally, it renewed the strongest bond of Polish culture - a commitment to the dead. "If I forget them, you God in heaven, forget me". After years of exile, when it seemed that the Polish Romantic drama had already been successfully exorcised, it returned with a bloody spectre to call up new Karus, new Sobolewski and new Peter Priests. Hic obiit Gustavus inscribed the crowds on the asphalt and, disdaining the warm water, they set off for the March of the Outlaws with the belief that each of them wears the spirit of Konrad under his patriotic T-shirt. "Amen for you. And for yourselves."

The catastrophe of which I speak, and from which Zenon Fajfer's dramatic poem emerged, did not occur at Severnyy airport near Smolensk. It occurred later and was the result of an accumulation of irreconcilable elements of a never-existing and unadapted to any reality (de)construction, which is the Polish collective imagination. Contradictory scenarios, divergent memories, patterns of behaviour bursting from within, confused languages - all this, covered for a long time by the obligation to rejoice in reclaiming our own dustbin, finally exploded, ignited by the Smolensk spark, to reveal that, although we proclaimed solidarity to the world, we had never talked to ourselves, not even enough to agree on a protocol of divergences. The smashing of this façade might even have been salutary had it not been for the fact that it was almost immediately replaced by a deadly contract according to which the only possible binding force between us is to be the sacred love of our beloved homeland expressed in the fact that we are ready to give our lives for it. The growing and unquestioning cult of the fallen (including the "fallen at Smolensk") strengthens and cements the national foundations, cooperating with the martyrdom Catholicism of the inevitable sacrifice. For which, while we wait, we settle our own affairs and look after our own interests, increasingly reinforcing Poland's centuries-old division between the backstage of everyday coping and the scene of public soaring acts culminating in a frenzied charge to which another monument will one day be erected.

The theatre of the catastrophe is being made of us and us constantly.

Can theatre be made of this theatre?

Again, a rhetorical question, because not only can it be, but it is being made by attempting to defy the dominant scenarios and their iron cultural logic. This is most often done through irony and even mockery, combined with countering the monological construction of official ceremonies with a counter-dramatisation that questions it and itself in constant pursuit of a possible alternative. This ironically critical theatre is lined with despair and helplessness, for although it is able to challenge exclusivity, it is unable to counter it with an alternative, arriving at best at a collectively experienced sublimity of impotence or wishful declarations of another politics, another community, another something.

Zenon Fajfer's Departure differs from these attempts insofar as it is a dramatic poem that returns to the very eye of the cyclone, to a moment of catastrophe that does not occur but persists in the paradox of theatrical metaphor. Thanks to the combined forces of contemporary poetry and drama not beholden to existing theatre, the play staged in the pages of the book does not represent the cultural and spiritual catastrophe we have lived through and are still living through, but gives it to us to experience in a manner as sharpened and scalpel-precise as only poetry of the highest order can. It may seem surprising, but it is the non-obviousness of the associations, the combinations of words and images, the games of language, expression and graphics, that is able to invoke the horror and grotesqueness of the thunderous nightmares we embody with ghastly persistence every day. The surprise, however, is momentary and somehow unauthorised, for after all, Departure refers directly to the great and obvious tradition of biting poetic irony, of which Juliusz Słowacki was the grandmaster and Stanisław Wyspiański the continuator. "To my spirit she gives in her muzzle and goes" is perhaps the most authentic relationship between the collective (sub)consciousness of Poles and poetry. Our spirit is also given a slap in the mouth by Fajfer, who, however, does not walk away like Lady Di, but seems to watch intently and tensely to see what we will do with this slap. Shall we give it back? Will we cut the hand raised at us? Will we applaud in masochistic ecstasy? Or perhaps we will awake from our hypnotic slumber to something that seems to be within reach, also for which the Polish heart and mind yearn - life with all its complexity, beauty and horror. Towards a present that is not veiled by the cult of the dead and visions of a bright future. I want that on a summer's day....

By staging his dramatic poem on the print stage, Fajfer is clearly invoking not only the drama of catastrophe, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, the theatre of its opposite: a wordless hymn to love lasting in the perpetual present of the eternal kiss. Although it is hinted at by essentially two words that we fly by with our eyes without even spending part of the time it takes to read the verbalisation of the catastrophe, they do, after all, occupy almost as much space on the stage of the book's pages. Departure is a dramatic poem not so much because of its theatrical potential, but because, already as a text, it uses not only words, their arrangements and meanings, but also the two most basic elements from which theatre is made - time and space. Deployed graphically, even in silent reading it produces its own rhythm, its own specific temporality and spatiality, which enhance the performativity of the act of reading and result in the establishment of a poetic scene of the imagination. This is, of course, also a Romantic tradition, only that it has been filtered through the proposals of the avant-garde and directed against the dominant convention of the theatre of representation. Theatre of Departure does not create an image of some reality, or even invoke its own. Instead, it gives us an experience of something that is as real as what we are used to considering as such, and which, to our misfortune, we often treat as 'fiction': constructions of the imagination, scraps of memory, words that speak for themselves, phantasms that live their own lives and in our blood.

Is it possible to make theatre out of this theatrical text?

This is no longer even a rhetorical question, but evidence of a lack of imagination and courage. Heiner Müller once said that the best text for theatre is one for which a suitable theatre does not yet exist. A text that challenges, itself with curiosity to see what will happen to it on stage. Having observed Polish theatre for years, both the stably institutional and the independently ephemeral and constantly searching, I am convinced that many artists and companies operating within it can respond to the challenge of Departure, and in a way that is completely surprising to the Author and to the text itself. That is, just as it should be.

Let the tragedy of disaster be answered by the joy of surprise.

10 April 2019

Dariusz Kosiński

Theatre researcher, professor at the Institute of Polish Language Glottodidactics, Jagiellonian University. From 2010 to 2013, Programme Director of the Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław and then, until December 2018, Deputy Director of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw. Major publications: Polski teatr przemiany (Wrocław 2007), Teatra polskie. Histories (Warsaw 2010), Polish Theatres. The year of catastrophe (Warsaw 2012). He has also published, among others, two monographs on the early performances of the Theatre of 13 Rows: Grotowski. Profanations (Wrocław 2015) and Farsy-mystery (Wrocław 2018), a collection of essays Performatyka. W(y)prowadzenia (Krakow 2016) and the book Uciec z Wesela (Krakow 2019) dedicated to Stanisław Wyspiański. Recently, together with Dorota Buchwald, he prepared and edited the three-volume publication Changing Settings. Polish theatrical and social scenography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Warsaw 2020), recognised in the Polish Theatre Research Society Competition as the best book on theatre published in 2020. Since autumn 2016, he has continuously collaborated as a theatre critic and columnist with Tygodnik Powszechny. In 2020, together with Katarzyna Woźniak, he founded "żywosłowie.wydawnictwo", of which he is editor-in-chief.