SEEP Vol.16 No.2 Spring 1996

volume 16, no.
2
Spring 1996
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA), Graduate Center, City
University of New York. The Institute is Room 1206A, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Slavic and
East European Performance: CASTA, Theatre Program, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
David Crespy
Jennifer Starbuck
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR
Jay Plum
CffiCULA TION MANAGER
Beth Ouradnik
ASSIST ANT CffiCULATION MANAGER
Julie Jordan
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
CAST A Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 1996 CASTA
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that
desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared
in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in
writing before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No.2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy 5
From the Editors 6
7
Books Received 11
"Vaclav Havel's Notable Encounters in His Early Theatrical Career" 13
Jarka Burian
"Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free: the History of Squat Theatre 30
-a Retrospective Exhibition at Artists Space Gallery"
Eszter Szalczer
"Revelation and Camouflage: Polish Cinema from 1930 40
to the Present-a Symposium"
David Goldfarb
"After a Discussion of Romanian Arts Issues 44
at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts"
Eric Pourchot
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Tarkovsky, or the Burning House"
Part III of three parts
Petr Kral (translated by Kevin Windle)
REVIEWS
"Two from St. Petersburg"
John Freedman
"E.rdman's The Suicide at Columbia University"
Jennifer Starbuck
"Lithuanian Theatre in New York"
Marvin Carlson
50
57
61
66
3
"Volodymyr Kuchynsky's Les Kurbas Theatre from Lviv" 68
Larissa Onyshkevych
"Anca i ~ d e i s Always Together 74
At Ubu Repertory Theater
Eric Pourchot
Contributors 77
Playscripts in Translation Series 79
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and
film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works,
or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogol but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should
be submitted on computer disk as either Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS or
Wordperfect 6.0 for Windows documents (ASCII or Text Files will be
accepted as well) 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 Performance, cl o CAST A,
CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after
approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
As the century draws to a close, it is clear that an era in Eastern
European and Russian theatre is over, and it is only natural that some of our
current articles take a retrospective look at the accomplishments in the
performing arts during the past decades. Jarka Burian's "Vaclav Havel's
Notable Encounters in His Early Theatrical Career" examines the roots of
the contemporary Czech theatre in the early work and associations of its
most famous dramatist. Eszter Szalczer's "Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free: the
History of Squat Theatre-a Retrospective Exhibition at Artists Space
Gallery" surveys the work of an outstanding Hungarian theatre that, driven
underground and into exile, has spanned worlds. The sudden death of
Krzysztof Kieslowski marks the end of a great period in Polish Cinema;
David Goldfarb's "Revelation and Camouflage: Polish Cinema from 1930
to the Present-a Symposium" presents a report on the discussions of this
period by major practitioners and critics at the recent Polish Film Festival
in New York. This issue also contains the concluding section of Eric
Pourchot's report on the Roumanian Arts Festival and the final section of
Kevin Windle's translation of Petr Kd.l's essay on Andre Tarkovsky (Pages
from the Past) as well as reviews by John Freedman, Marvin Carlson,
Jennifer Starbuck, Larissa Onyshkevych, and Eric Pourchot.
-Daniel Gerould
6
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No.2
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Columbia University's Oscar Hammerstein II Center presented a
new translation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, directed by Joshua Tarjan
and translated by Michele Minnick. (See the review of this production on
page 61 of the current issue of SEEP.) The play was presented at the Horace
Mann Theatre from March 29 to30.
Slawomir Mrozek's The Emigrants, directed by Jeffrey Eric Jenkins,
was presented by Seattle's Little Theatre Off Broadway in March.
Playquest Theatre of New York presented Maxim Gorky's The
Zykovs, directed by Gary Filsinger, from Aprilll to 27.
Turkar Coker's Sarajevo MonAmour, an experimental, multi-media
play about genocide in Bosnia, was presented at La Mama E.T.C. Theatre
in New York from April11 to 22.
On April 19, 1996: in a celebration of the centennial of Tristan
Tzara, the Romanian Cultural Center in New York presented a series of
dramatic readings, Planet Dada, by Valery Oisteanu, poet and author of
books on Dada and Surrealism.
At the Salon in New York City, the Players Forum presented the
Second International Eastern European Theatre Festival, which brought
theatrical groups from Eastern and Central Europe to New York. The
Suziria Theatre of Kiev presented The Radiance of Fatherhood, by Karol
Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), in Ukranian, the Dramatic Theatre of
Bialystok, Poland, performed Mrozek's The Emigrants both in Polish and
Belorussian. The Mutants, written and directed by Simon Zlotnikov, had its
American premiere, and a new, single-actor version of Leonid Andreyev's
He Who Gets Slapped was directed by David Kaplan and performed by
Anders Bolang. The Festival ran from April25 to May 19, 1996.
From May 9 to19 at La MaMa E.T.C., Otrabanda presented
Alexander Blok's The Fairground Booth, (in Michael Green's translation),
7
directed by Roger Babb and Rocky Bornstein, music by Neal Kirkwood, set
by Ralph Lee, costumes by Gabriel Berry, and lights by Pat Dignan.
Anca i ~ d e i s play Always Together (reviewed in this current issue
of SEEP) is bring revived by popular demand at UBU Repertory Theatre in
New York from June 11 to 23.
Antigone in New York by Janusz Glowacki, directed by Michael
Mayer, was presented by the Vineyard Theatre in New York from April 10
to May 12.
The Threshold Theatre company, co-directed by Pamela Billig and
Eugene Brogyanyi, presented a festival of modern international one-act
plays at the Here Theatre in New York from May 13 to June 2. The
festival included works by Hungarians Carl Laszlo and Geza Nskandi, the
Polish writer Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski and Russians Valerii Briusov
and Vladimir Nabokov.
FILM
The Film Society of Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theatre
in New York presented a series of Krzysztof Kieslowski's films: the
complete Decalogue, ten hour-long films originally made for Polish
television, each illustrating one of the Ten Commandments, and the "Three
Colors" trilogy-Blue, White and Red-from March 8 to 14.
August, a new film version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya set in
contemporary Wales, was written and directed by Anthony Hopkins, who
also provided the music. The film was released in April.
As the fourth event in its 1995-1996 film series, the Center for
European Studies at New York University presented Return: jews, History,
and the European Home, which included Bye Bye America, the story of a
Polish emigre, her Jewish husband, and his best friend who all leave their
home of thirty years in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to make a pilgrimage to
Poland. The event and film were presented at the George Barrie Theatre at
the Tisch School of the Arts on April10, 1996.
8
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 2
Shtetl, a TV film by Marian Marzynski documenting the recent
return of a Polish American Jew to his native village, was previewed at the
Museum ofT elevision and Radio in New York City on March 26, 1996, and
shown on National Public Television the following week.
MISCELLANEOUS
"Gombrowicz in Europe, Argentina, and the United States: An
Evening with Rita Gombrowicz" was held on March 11, 1996 at the
Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. Rita Gombrowicz, the wife and
literary executor of Polish playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz,
spoke and answered questions about her husband's life. She has written two
books on his life: Gombrowicz en Argentine {1984) and Gombrowicz en
Europe {1988).
Slawomir Mrozek has announced that he plans to return
permanently to his native Poland after more than thirty years abroad. The
playwright left Poland in 1963, became a French citizen in 1968, and has
spent the last six years in Mexico with his wife Susana Osario Rosas.
Although he declared several years ago that he could never resume his old
life in Poland, a country of which he no longer felt a part, Mrozek now says
that the threat of crime and violence makes Mexico a disturbing place in
which it is increasingly difficult for him to write. The playwright will settle
in Cracow, where during the Mrozek festival in the summer of 1990 in
honor of his sixtieth birthday he was given honorary citizenship. (See SEEP
volume 10, no. 3, Winter 1990.) His last play, Love in the Crimea, has been
successfully staged in Poland, France, Scandinavia, and Russia. Mrozek has
completed a new play, which will be performed in the Teatr Wsp6lczesny
in Warsaw.
From March 16 to July 4 Moscow is hosting the Second
International Chekhov Theatre Festival featuring 42 productions by
outstanding companies and directors from Russia, Europe, and the Near
East. Chekhov performances include Peter Stein's Uncle Vanya {Teatro di
Parma, Italy-Germany); Eimuntas Nekrosius's Three Sisters {Lithuania),
Mark Zakharov's Seagull {Lenkom, Moscow), Ephim Zveniatsky's Ivanov
{Gorky Theatre, Vladivostok), Petr Lebl's Seagull (Divaldo na zabradH,
Prague), Anatoly Ivanov's Forgive me, My Angel of White ["Fatherlessness"]
{Koltsov Drama Theatre, Voronezh, Russia); Aleksandr Dzekun's Seagull
(Saratov Drama Theatre, Russia); Valery Akhadov's Seagull {Pushkin
9
Theatre, Magnitogorsk, Russia); Elmo Nuganen's Pianola or Mechanical
Piano [adaptation by Mikhailkov and Adabashyan] (Tallin City Theatre,
Estonia); Kaarin Raid's Cherry Orchard (Ugala Theatre, Vilyandy, Estonia);
Peeter Tammearu's Chekhov in Yalta [by Driver and Heddow] (Ugala
Theatre, Vilyandy, Estonia); and Naumm Orlov's Fatherlessness (Zwilling
Theatre, Chelyabinsk, Russia). Works by Shakespeare, Marivaux,
Giroudoux, Beckett, Ostrovsky, Aeschlyus, Webster, Woytyla, and a
number of adaptations of Dostoevsky were also among the featured
productions.
The 1996 Festival of Contemporary Art held in Ljubljana, Slovenia,
in May and June featured performances by experimental artists and avant-
garde companies from Slovenia, Japan, Columbia, Canada, USA, France,
Lithuania, and Spain.
Noted Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski died on March 13,
1996 in a Warsaw hospital following a heart bypass operation.
From January 16 to February 7 the List Gallery at the Lang
Performing Arts Center of Swarthmore College featured an exhibition on
Contemporary Polish Theater Posters accompanied by a gallery talk
"Performance, Politics, and the Comtemporary Polish Theater Poster" by Allen
Kuharski whose collection was on view.
On April 25, 1996 as part of "Les Triomphes Russe A Paris" Lev
Dodin and the Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg presented Dostoyevsky's The
Possessed. On April28, 1996 a requium concert for Andre Tarkovsky was
given by the orchestra, chorus and soloists of the New Opera of Moscow
under the direction of Evgenii Kolobov.
10
BOOKS RECEIVED
Buchmuller, Eva and Anna Ko6s. Squat Theatre. Based on the authors'
archives of Squat Theatre. New York: Artists Space, 1996. 229
pages. Includes "Caught in the Act," an introduction by Alisa
Solomon, an Introduction by Andras Halasz, an Acknowledgement
by Claudia Gould, and the following chapters: Underground 1969-
1976 Budapest: Selected Plays and Documents; Molting: Pig, Child,
Fire!; Page One Hundred; Andy Warhol's Last Love; from 1978 to
1981; Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free. The volume contains notes, a
chronology, and hundreds of photographs, sketches, and
illustrations.
Chekhov, Mikhail. Literaturnoye Naslediye (The Literary Heritage). Vol.
I: Memoirs. Letters. 542 pp. Vol. II: On the Art of the Actor. 588
pp. Edited by I.I. Abroskina, M.C. Ivanova, and N.A. Krymova.
Introduction by M.O. Kneble. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955. Includes
a detailed chronology of more than 100 pages covering all of
Chekhov's life and creative work, an index of names, drawings,
sketches, and diagrams, and 96 photographs.
Erdman, Nikolai. The Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman: The Warrant and
Suicide. Translated and edited by John Freedman. Luxembourg:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. 161 pages. Volume 1 of
Russian Theatre Archives, edited by John Freedman, Leon
Gitelman, and Anatoly Smeliansky. Includes an introduction, note
on the texts, and 16 photographs.
Fik, Marta, editor Przeciw Konwencjom (Against Conventions). An
Anthology of Texts about the Polish and Foreign Theatre from
Antoine to Present Times (1997-1990). Revised second edition.
Warsaw: KRA,G, 1995. 389 pages. Choice of texts and commentary
by Marta Fik. Afterword to the second edition by T omasz
Kubikowski. Selections include Antoine, Stanislavsky, Gordon
Craig, Konstanty Puzyna, Leon Schiller, Meyerhold, Piscator,
Brecht, Artaud, Grot owski, Kantor, Barba, Brook, Witkiewicz,
and many others. Contains a bibliography, biographies of authors
and artists, a chronology of major events 1850-1990, and an index
of names.
11
Kuziakina, Natalia. Theatre in Solovki Prison Camp. Translated by Boris M.
Meerovich. Volume 3 in the Russian Theatre Archive, edited by
John Freedman, Leon Gitelman, and Anatoly Smeliansky.
Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. Includes
notes, an index, and 30 pages of illustrations and photographs. 170
pages.
Soin, Maciej. Filozofza Stanislawa Ignacego Witkiewicza (fhe Philosophy of
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz). Wrodaw: Fundacja na rzecz Nauki
Polskiej, 1995. 88 pages. Contains the following chapters:
Difficulties with Witkacy, Historiosophy, Ontology, Aesthetics,
Reconstruction and Conclusion. Includes a bibliography,
summary in English, and index of names.
Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander. The Death of Tare/kin and Other Plays: The
Trilogy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin. Translated and edited by
Harold B. Segel. Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1995. 210 pages. Volume 7 of Russian Theatre Archives, edited by
John Freedman, Leon Gitelman, and Anatoly Smeliansky.
Includes an Introduction and 11 photographs of Meyerhold's
productions of the plays.
12 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 2
VACLA V HAVEL'S NOTABLE ENCOUNTERS IN HIS EARLY
THEATRICAL CAREER
J arka M. Burian
The late 1950s and early 1960s were years of interesting transition
in Czech theatre, a period within the first post-Stalinist decade when bureau-
cratic rigidities began to loosen and creative energies found increasing out-
lets. From our perspective today, we can more clearly perceive the way in
which individuals and ensembles began not only to shift and regroup but
also to start entirely new theatres. It was during the years 1956-1965 that
drama at the National Theatre acquired a new leadership and direction,
when new, untraditional playwrights and small studio theatres began to
establish themselves, and when the oppressive climate of socialist realism
enveloping all the arts began to dissipate. The way was thus cleared for the
full surge of vital theatre work that captured international attention in the
last half of the 1960s, when individuals like Vaclav Havel (b. 1936), Otomar
Krejca (b. 1921), Alfred Radok (1914-1976), Josef Svoboda (b. 1920), and
ensembles from the National Theatre to the Theatre on the Balustrade to
Laterna Magika became familiar names far beyond the country's borders.
A zoom shot closer to some of these individuals and theatres from
19 58-1963 reveals a number of special symbiotic interconnections and
relationships, perhaps even cross-pollinations that have often been
overlooked in overviews of that era. In particular, Vaclav Havel, usually
thought of as springing to artistic birth in the Theatre on the Balustrade in
the 1960s with the aid of Jan Grossman (1925-1993), actually had several cru-
cial theatre experiences with others both before and during his early years
at the Balustrade. By the time his own first full length play was produced
at the Balustrade (The Garden Party, December 1963), he already had years
of practical theatre work, and not only in that theatre. Moreover, even
Garden Party was not really a pure Balustrade production but a work of
decidedly more mixed creative parentage.
Using Havel as the focal point and key swing figure, I'd like to
sketch some details of several notable collaborations during that time
involving Havel with Krejca, Radok, Svoboda, Grossman, and others who
already were or were to become the models and leading lights of the post-
Stalinist renaissance of Czech theatre.
In the fall of 1960, Havel began his work at the Balustrade on a
rather informal basis, as a stagehand and general factotum, although he had
already been writing and publishing articles, some relating to drama, since
13
..
V:klav Havel in the 1960s
14
1955. The Balustrade had been operating since 1958 under the leadership of
Ivan Vyskocil (b. 1929) andJifl Suchy (b. 1931) in a free-wheeling manner,
producing essentially revue-type entertainments of poetry, music, and
sketches with high spirits and imagination, but without a stable drama en-
semble. But this limitation was corrected in that same fall of 1960. Havel
was not without practical theatrical experience when he joined the theatre.
He had his first hands-on theatre experience as an army conscript in 1957-
1959, when in addition to his regular duties he became involved as general
stagehand, actor, writer in two productions dealing with army life, Pavel
Kohout's September Nights and a collaborative work by Havel and some
fellow army recruits, The Life Ahead.
1
At loose ends in Prague at the beginning of the 1959-60 season after
his two-year army service was finished, Havel was still keenly interested in
theatre. He managed to get a job as scene shifter-stagehand in the fully
professional ABC Theatre, which at the time was headed by one of the
legendary figures of Czech theatre, Jan Werich (1905-1980), one half of the
the team of Voskovec and Werich 0/ + W) and their prewar Liberated
Theatre. Voskovec and Werich had produced a series of distinctive
productions combining exuberant, witty farce, musical theatre, and sophisti-
cated political comment in the 1930s. In the late 1950s, Werich was still re-
viving some of their hits, but with a new partner, Miroslav Hornlcek (b.
1918), thus keeping a notable tradition of prewar cabarets and small theatres
alive. Just what the full-season experience at the ABC as a backstage worker
meant to Havel is evident in his own remarks:
I came to understand ... that theatre doesn't have to be just a fac-
tory for the production of plays ... it must be something more:
a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self-
awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the
age meet, a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom,
an instrument of human liberation. . . . The electrifying
atmosphere of an intellectual and emotional understanding
between the audience and the stage, that special magnetic field
that comes into existence around the theatre-these were things
I had not known until then, and they fascinated me.
2
It was also during his season with Werich that Havel wrote an
original one-act play in the vein of Ionesco, An Evening with the Family, of
which there is no record of production, and the first version of what
became, years later, The Memorandum.
3
As Havel began work with the Balustrade in the fall of 1960, what
15
was the situation of Radok, Krejca, and Svoboda, respectively? Radok's life
scenario was the most dramatic and disturbing. Having been a topflight
director with mostly major companies since 1945, but also having
experienced harsh political vicissitudes in the early Communist 1950s, he
had been brought back into the National Theatre in 1954, and after
numerous successful productions (including two plays in which Krejca had
leading roles), he was given a leave of absence in order to develop, with
Svoboda, Laterna Magika for the Brussels Expo '58. A fusion of theatre and
film, Latema Magika made a huge international splash, which led, in 1959-60,
to Radok preparing a new, second edition of it for Prague as an offshoot of
the National Theatre. But Radok's fortunes with political authorities
curdled once again in April1960 at a preview of the new production, and by
the summer of 1960 he was not only fired as head of Latema Magika but also
out of work as a director anywhere. By great good chance, he was taken on
as a director at the Municipal Theatres by their head, Ota Ornest (b.1913),
and spent the fall of 1960 preparing a production of a mediocre German play
by Fritz Kuhn, Once We Hear from Barcelona:
In strong contrast to Radok's career, Krejca's was at one of its nu-
merous peaks in the fall of 1960. A leading actor in major theatres since
1945, Krejca joined the National Theatre in 1951 and by the mid-1950s
began directing there, as well as continuing to act. In 1956 he became head
of drama at the National Theatre and launched one of its great eras by
raising repertoire and production standards, largely as a result of creating a
production team of himself, dramaturg Karel Kraus (b. 1920), and chief
scenographer Josef Svoboda, who was also head of technical operations.
Krejca mounted a series of his own productions of Czech and foreign clas-
sics, as well as provocative new Czech plays (most notably Frantisek
Hrubin's A Sunday in August (1958), and Josef Topol's Their Day (1959)).
A significant contribution to the National Theatre's achievements in the late
1950s during Krejca's tenure as head of drama was also made by several
Radok productions, most notably Osborne's The Entertainer (1957), as well
as productions by two younger directors hired by Krejca, Jaromir Pleskot
(b. 1922) and Miroslav Machacek (1922-1991).
5
Svoboda's career and work, anchored in but not totally restricted
to the National Theatre, remained most constant among all these artists. In
addition to the Laterna Magika project, he was the scenographer for
virtually all the work by Radok, Krejca, Pleskot, and Machacek, including
a production partially based on the Laterna Magika technique, Topol's Their
Day, noted above.
6
For Havel, the next two seasons, from 1960 to 1962, were marked
17
Josef Svoboda in the 1960s
by significant ongoing work at the Balustrade in 1960-61, where he advanced
beyond his status as stagehand by also becoming Vyskocil's collaborator as
playwright and dramaturg, the prime product of which was their jointly
authoredAutostop (March 1961), a loosely organized, very entertaining satire
of contemporary fads, which solidified the Balustrade's status as the most
popular of the country's growing number of avant-garde studio theatres.
In 1961-62, however, Havel curtailed his work at the Balustrade and
instead worked as assistant director to Alfred Radok at the Municipal
Theatres, where he had the rare opportunity to learn from a man who even
then was recognized as a great theatre artist by his peers, if not by the
authorities. Havel, an exceptionally perceptive, diligent observer (then only
twenty-five years old), made extensive notes on his rehearsal and
consultative experiences with Radok, most of which were published during
the following years. They are sensitive, analytic accounts of Radok 's work
with actors, which Havel saw as brilliant, intuitive, strongly imposed
variations of Stanislavski's methods. The two Radok productions of that
1961-62 season were Radok's own dramatization of Chekhov's story The
Swedish Match, December 1961, and Georges Neveux's La Voleuse de Londres
[The Lady Thief of London], June 1962.
Havel found the gist of Radok's work in "his efforts to create
theatre that isn't static, composed of given and finished prefabricated ele-
ments . . . but theatre in process, dynamic, existential, describable only by
its own constant becoming; theatre not as a category but theatre as actuality;
simply, living theatre."
7
Havel then expanded on this:
The essence of Radok's guiding and developing [of his]
actors is his sustained effort to bring [the actor's]
personality to a total, coherent, existential understanding
of the character, to project the actor's own personality
into those [features] that characterize and determine the
character, [and] to bring [the actor's] existential fantasy
and his human expressive possibilities to bear in the
direction defined by the character and on the material of
the text written for this character.
8
Most pointedly, as early as 1962, before his work with Grossman
and contact with Krejca, Havel referred to Radok's significance to his own
work at the Balustrade:
19
Alfred Radok in the 1960s
20
I realized clearly that even that strange form of theatre to
which I'm drawn and whose relative possibilities I sense
somewhere in the future of the Theatre on the Balustrade,
indeed that very theatre is realizable from beginning to
end and always only as something that is essentially living
and existential. It can emerge only from a live, intellectual
tension that makes its presence felt; only by means of
living, concrete, dynamic acting, supported by a genuinely
open human personality, can it be achieved-otherwise it's
a fiction or a mistake .... This is the completely personal
significance brought to me by becoming familiar with
Radok's w o r k ~
While valuing him as his assistant director, Radok viewed Havel
primarily as a model young dramaturg, whose penetrating analyses of texts
were crucially strengthened by his sensitivity to the potential relevance of
a text to the world of the time. In fact, by early summer 1962, Radok was
planning on Havel literally being his dramaturg for his next production at
the Municipal theatres, Gogol's Marriage, but by that time, Havel had
become fully engaged back at the Balustrade. The direct collaboration of
Radok and Havel had come to an end, although they remained close and
corresponded regularly until Radok's death.
10
In the meantime, during those same two seasons of 1960-1962,
Otomar Krejca was undergoing a career altering transition of his own. In
1960-61, he staged only one work, Crystal Night, a second original Czech
play by Frantisek Hrub1n (April1961). At the end of that season, in the
summer of 1961, largely through internal politics at the National Theatre,
Krejca lost his position as head of drama but remained on board as director
and actor. In the 1961-62 season at the National Theatre, still with his team
of Kraus and Svoboda, supplemented by another new playwright whom he
had been nurturing, Milan Kundera, who subsequently acquired fame as an
emigre novelist, Krejca staged Kundera's The Owners of the Keys (April1962),
an extremely successful drama dealing with the occupation era.
The two seasons of 1962-64 involved several final instances of
creative symbiosis among these artists during this period. In the fall of 1962,
Jan Grossman became the new artistic head of the Balustrade; at that time
he was a respected critic-theorist, dramaturg, and occasional director, whose
earlier career in the mid-1950s had included work as dramaturg and director
with E.F. Burian. During the next six years, until 1968, together with
21
Otomar Krejfa in the 1960s
Havel, Grossman brought the Balustrade to international prominence, but
it is the beginnings of their collaboration that concern me here. Realizing
that the Balustrade ensemble needed to become more fully professional and
to experience work with an established, strong director, Grossman managed
to bring Otomar Krejca in for two guest directing appearances, and Svoboda
and Kraus came with him. Having lost his base as leader of drama at the
National Theatre, Krejca was at loose ends between major productions.
Thus, Havel and the entire Balustrade company were exposed to the
standards and production methods of the team that had brought the
National Theatre drama ensemble to its postwar peak. Clearly, the
premises, methods, and aims of Grossman-Havel and the Krejca team were
not entirely compatible, but the important point is that they shared
fundamental convictions about the role of theatre as an indirect critic of its
society, and about the necessity of a thoroughly prepared, demanding
production process. For Krejca, as Grossman put it:
Directing is not a matter of expert, skilled staging of
random plays; he grasps direction in a deeply engaged,
author's manner, as a way of discovering and
communicating problematics relevant to the present, and
he has the ability to embody this approach firmly into the
essence of the actors' work. And precisely this concept,
matching our own, was the starting point of our first
collaboration: from that we searched for and found a play
that was most appropriate at that time .... [Krejca's]
objectivity and matter-of-factness, his penetrating psy-
chology focusing not only on general truths in the
characters, but on the concrete form and background of
their thinking and behavior, which is firmly related to
their environment and is thrust at the audience with
intellectual and physicalized strength as both a message
and a challenge-all this didn't disturb the specific nature
of our theatre but fulfilled it.
11
Within two weeks in November 1961, the Balustrade had two
premieres: first, Grossman's and Havel's lighthearted musical play built on
the career and talents of one of their established performers, a popular
singer, The Best Years of Mrs. Hermanova; and then Krejca's production of
a contemporary West German play based on Sophocles, Claus Hubalek's
Antigone's Hour. Both were great successes, the former being the last of the
23
24
productions representing the earlier aspects of the Balustrade, the latter
becoming prototypical of the emphasis on serious issues (even when overtly
farcical) in fully developed dramatic form (rather than witty assemblages of
varied genres) that would characterize virtually all of the work at Balustrade
during the subsequent Grossman-Have! era.
One year later, in December 1963, Krejca did his second production
at the Balustrade, Havel's The Garden Party, which he had written earlier
that year to the accompaniment of Grossman's informal critical feedback.
It was Havel's first full length play to be professionally staged, and the work
that brought him to the attention of most of Europe. It also established the
essential "signature" of most of the Balustrade plays to follow: absurdist-
slanted works with clear social relevance making a strong appeal to the
audience.
Evidence concerning the preparation of the production is skimpy.
For example, no dramaturg is listed in the program, but it seems clear that
although Karel Kraus was Krejca's dramaturg on the Antigone play,
Grossman and Havel most probably fulfilled that function on Garden Party.
It is also clear that Krejca's work on Garden Party overlapped to some
degree with his work on Romeo and Juliet at the National Theatre (October
1963), which came to be his penultimate production there. Otherwise, brief
and indirect anecdotal testimony in a Czech biography of Havel refers to
Grossman and Havel's uneasiness with what seemed to them to be Krejca's
"heavy-handed" direction during rehearsals, their hesitant suggestion to him
to ease up somewhat, and the resultant success of the production.
12
The production of Garden Party was the culmination of the various
instances of notable, often forgotten collaborations among these theatre
artists at a significant historical "moment" in postwar Czech theatre, and at
critical times in their respective careers. To speak of specific influences is
difficult. Some influence must have been present in each case (as Havel's and
Grossman's testimony makes clear), but by the same token every one of
these artists had his own strong, distinctive bent and identity, and the issue
of influences is perhaps merely academic. What is worth noting, in any case,
is that Havel's experiences with Werich and with Radok were such as to
prompt his explicit, published commentary, whereas I have not been able
to find any explicit reference by Havel to Krejca's production work at the
Balustrade.n
Except for Werich, who finished his theatrical career by the mid
1960s, each artist continued to build on his previous work in the next several
years. Radok did four more productions at the Municipal Theatres, the
most impressive being his adaptation of Romain Rolland's The Play of Love
25
Alfred Radok and V aclav Havel
26
and Death (1964). He returned to the National Theatre in 1966 and suc-
cessfully collaborated with Svoboda on three productions before the Soviet-
led invasion of 1968, which prompted his almost immediate self-exile; he
never worked in Czechoslovakia again. Krejca went on to form his own
celebrated company in 1965, the Theatre Beyond the Gate, in a space he
shared with the Laterna Magika operation; he continued there for several
years even after the invasion. a Grossman and Havel guided the Balustrade
to its most celebrated years until very shortly before the invasion, when
both resigned for reasons internal to Balustrade operations. Grossman did
not work in a Prague theatre again until 1983, but had the satisfaction of
returning to the Balustrade in 1989, where he remained until his death.
Havel's story is better known. Alternately at liberty and imprisoned, he
remained in Czechoslovakia, but no Havel play was openly staged there
again until after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Despite intermittent
difficulties with authorities, Svoboda also remained in Czechoslovakia; he
continued his career to increasing international acclaim and is still extremely
productive today.
15
NOTES
1
The most accessible source for varying details of Havel's early theatre activity is
his own Disturbing the Peace. Trans!. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1990: 37-
72. The work is a transcript of his responses to questions posed by Karel
Hvifdala.
2
Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 40.
3
Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 40.
The "scandal" in the second Laterna Magika production was prompted by one of
its segments, a poetic paean to nature and folk rituals of the Czech highlands,
which was judged too arty and elitist by ministry officials. Hedbavny, Zdenek.
Alfred Radok. Praha: Narodnl Divadlo and Divadelni Ustav, 1994: 264-65, 280-
287. Hedbavnf's book is the most substantial source for details of Radok's life and
career. For a shorter overview, in English, see Burian, Jarka. "Alfred Radok's
Contribution to Post-War Czech Theatre." Theatre Survey 22, no. 2 (Nov 1981):
213-228.
5
There is no single, extended Czech source for career. In English, see
Burian, J arka. "The Dark Era of Modern Czech Theatre: 1948-19 58." Theatre
History Studies XV (1995): 41-66; "Notes from Abroad: Krejca's Voice is Heard
27
Again in Prague." American Theatre Q"une 1991): 36-37; and "Prague Theatre Four
Years After the Velvet Revolution: The Veterans Remain." Slavic and East
European Performance 15, no.1 (Spring 1995): 14-26.
6
Two main sources in English for Svoboda are his career autobiography, TheSe
cret of Theatrical Space. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993; and Burian,
Jarka. The Scenography of josef Svoboda. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1971.
7
Havel, Vaclav. "Nekolik poznamek ze Svedske zapalky" [Some Notes on The
Swedish Match]. In 0 Divadle. Ed. Karel Kraus. Praha: 1990: 377. The piece was
written in 1962.
8
Havel, "Nekolik poznamek .... ", 384.
9
Havel, "Nekolik poznamek. ... ", 394.
10
Havel's note to Radok after seeing the premiere of Marriage is worth noting:
"Perhaps my admiration is influenced by its all being so close to me-l mean to
say that it's close to the way I feel the world around me and the way I try to
present it in my writing. For me it's a sad mischance that I wasn't able to work
on precisely this production with you." In Hedbavny, 304.
A few more details round out the Havel-Radok association: Radok was
tentatively scheduled to direct Havel's Beggar's Opera in Goteborg, Sweden, in the
1975-1976 season, but the production never materialized. A final irony was that
Radok was in Vienna to start rehearsals of Havel's one-act plays Audience and
Private Showing at the Burgtheater studio theatre in the spring of 1976 when he
suffered a mortal heart attack and died on April 22.
11
Grossman, Jan. "Svet Maleho Divadla." [The World of a Small Theatre]. An
alyzy. Ed. Jifi Holy, Terezie Pokama. Praha: Ceskoslovensky Spisovatel, 1991:
299. The article was originally published in Divadlo 7 (1963): 13-22.
12
Kriseova, Eda. Vaclav Havel. Trans!. Caleb Crain. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1993: 52-53. The same source refers to Svoboda's scenography as changing
from the use of a large mirror to an abstract construction of spheres joined by
rods to form an open enclosure of the action, as if to suggest a molecular or
atomic model, perhaps an abstract metaphoric echo of the relentlessly "logical"
progression of the protagonist through the play. In that sense Svoboda's abstract
scenography was similar to what he created for Antigone's Hour, a massive, piston-
like rear wall that oppressively shrank and expanded the playing space by moving
downstage and upstage.
28
B Havel did make various passing references to work in relation to
Radok's. One such comment, in 1986, may refer to the two Balustrade produc-
tions: directorial method (at least as I observed it in two productions) is
in almost all respects the opposite of Radok's. Nevertheless, I would assert that it
was actually two or three old Radok productions in the National Theatre which
in a decisive manner foreshadowed the entire celebrated era and which
influenced himself. And first of all, in fact, in the way they raised the
actors' standard." Havel. "Radok Dnes" [Radok Today]. Do RW.nych Stran [In
Various Directions]. Praha: Lidove Noviny, 1990: 317.
14
Beyond the Gate Theatre lasted until1972. then worked two
seasons at a peripheral Prague theatre before spending fourteen seasons directing
abroad, until his return to his revived Gate Theatre in 1990.
11
A little noted, final, and other than artistic collaboration between Havel and
Svoboda occurred in the crucial early hours of the Velvet Revolution, when
Svoboda turned over the premises and facilities of Laterna Magika to Havel and
his Civic Forum for their use as a command center.
29
"MR. DEAD AND MRS. FREE: THE HISTORY OF SQUAT
THEATRE-A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION AT ARTISTS
SPACE GALLERY
Eszter Szalczer
When Squat Theatre-then known as Szobaszinhaz (Apartment
Theatre)-was forced by the Hungarian Communist authorities to go
underground in the early seventies, I, as a young teenager, had but a vague
idea of what was going on outside the officially sanctioned and subsidized
theatre. After moving to New York in 1989 I was able to catch one last
Squat production, Full Moon Killer, performed at The Kitchen in 1991. In
between these two points in time all my generation in Hungary knew about
Squat Theatre were legends: the legend of political defiance or the legend of
a fatal gunshot from a New York storefront.
A large crowd assembled at the recent opening of the retrospective
exhibition at Artists Space gallery in Soho entitled "Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free:
The History of Squat Theatre." As people roamed about the installation,
hugging and kissing, munching apples from the huge baskets filled with
fruit, memories came alive in their faces. It was like being at a family
gathering or at a party somewhere in Hungary. Looming above the
swarming crowd with a distant calmness were the giant baby sculpture with
Nico singing "New York, New York" in its TV-screen eyes (a prop from
Squat's Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free, 1981) and the enormous bearded man
hanging upside-down from the ceiling (from Pig, Child, Fire!, 1977). In a
scene from Andy Warhol's Last Love, 1978, Andy Warhol (Stephan Balint),
undisturbed, was interviewing an authentic witch (Kathleen Kendel) on one
of the video monitors, surrounded by a small space with self-reflecting walls.
Those who wished to walk along the gallery walls were led through the
mementos of Squat productions: photographs, posters, wigs, and other
props.
The exhibition was installed by Squat Theatre's Eva Buchmuller
who, when the company lost the lease on their home and theatre on West
23rd street in Manhattan in 1985, rescued the sets and props-her stunning
creations- and put them into a storage locker. Buchmuller and another
former Squat member Anna Ko6s wrote and compiled a remarkable book
that was published by Artists Space for the occasion.
1
The Squat Theatre is
not simply an exhibition catalog, but also a documentary of the history of
Squat from the formation of the group in Budapest in 1969 to the creation
of the last performance by the original group (Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free) in
31
1981. It includes a chronology that follows the doings of Squat members
up to the present. The documentation provides descriptions of all the Squat
plays, held together by a loose narrative.
For me, reading this book was a very special experience. A
multiplicity of different voices can be heard: written and improvised play-
t exts, literary fragments used in performances, letters and diary entries by
actors, participants, and other witnesses, and comments by spectators and
passers-by. The story that emerges from these rich and varied sources is by
turns tragic, ironic, and humorous. Squat Theatre is no longer a legend, but
a story, elusive and straightforward at the same time, but above all,
admirably honest and self-revelatory. It can be read as a fascinating family
epic in which continents are crossed, people are born and die, generations
grow up, and the cogwheels of history slowly grind in the background. The
book avoids theorizing, and yet from the chorus of all these highly personal
voices there emerges Squat's re-definition of theatre.
What then was Squat Theatre beyond the legends that it generated
by leaving Hungary? Squat did not start out as an explicitly political
theatre. But the very decision to continue to perform after having been
banned publicly was a political statement. In 1972 the group, then called
Studio Kassak, was officially forbidden to perform in public on the grounds
that they presented morally offensive and obscene material in one of their
pieces and that ' "from a political point of view, this work could be
misinterpreted" (3). However, the company decided to continue performing
in the apartments of its members and friends. The ban, and the group's
reaction to it, created a predicament for Squat Theatre, which, consciously
or not, became the hallmark of its aesthetics. "We had an indeterminate
spirit," Anna Koos said after the Artists Space screening of 16mm black and
white films of their work in Hungary during the seventies. "Theatre? That
was something totally arbitrary," Eva Buchmuller added, reminding me of
what I had just seen in their film, Sandmine, shot in 1972. In it the word
"theatre" is written in a bank of sand.
They had no clear-cut projects, no rehearsals, and their plays and
performances were born of communal discussions. "We needed to sit among
ourselves, undisturbed, brainstorming while lunch was cooking in the
kitchen and children played nearby or slept in their beds. Everything had
to be in one place: at home" {47).
Playing underground meant opening up their homes and domestic
life to the spectators. Since they were not allowed to go public, they let the
public into their private sphere. An early piece, Metamorphosis (1972), for
example, was given in the apartment of two founding members, Anna Koos
Guido and Tyrius
Squat Theatre, Szentendre, Hungary, 1974
Peter Halasz, Judith Scherter, Anna Ko6s.
33
and Peter Halasz, as a representation of "a couple's personal museum" (6).
Later in the same year the actors and the audience experimented
jointly in a new piece, Face to Face, which was conceived as "training to be
together for an unspecified time" (13). In a room of the apartment, actors
and spectators sat in a single group on chairs placed under a white sheet
stretched wall-to-wall, with their heads sticking out through holes in the
sheet. In 1974-75 the group experimented with various "house plays." This
time the actors played inside a small house built within the apartment,
where the audience could peep in through windows.
The company and its members' children (Anna Ko6s, Peter Halasz,
Judith Halasz, Peter Berg, Marianne Kollar, Stephan Balint, Eszter Balint,
Eva Buchmuller, Rebecca Major, and Borbala Major) emigrated from
Hungary in 1976 and moved to the United States in 1977. Their existence
continually depended on the correlation between home/theatre,
private/public, reality/fiction. By choice and by need, their home, their
lives, and their bodies-given up to the spectators-became their theatre.
In New York they lived and worked on West 23rd Street, in a
building with a storefront. Living space was upstairs, but even there they
would present theatre events; for example, the beginning scenes of Andy
Warhol 's Last Love took place in a second floor room, where an Alien
climbed in through the fire escape. The theatre proper was located on the
ground floor. The paying audience would sit inside, facing the "playing
area" with its background: the street seen through the storefront.
There was also communication between street and interior; the
action took place across the lines of demarcated space, and at the same time,
passers-by in the street would share in the events by staring in through the
window while being watched by the spectators inside. Squat Theatre made
voyeurs out of spectators, and fellow actors out of passers-by. Video
monitors were also used to multiply the layers of watching and being
watched.
In the volume, Squat Theatre, we find a statement of the company's
guiding principles:
34
Rituals and ceremonies, at their conception, had no
scripts. Revolutions and spontaneous events in the lives
of individuals had no scripts either. Yet we considered all
of these to be the origins of theater. . . . In our
performances we manifested an existence that overrode its
representation. (100-101)
Pig, Chiild, Fire!
Squat Theatre, New York, 1977
Rebecca Major, Peter Berg, Anna Ko6s, Peter Halasz
35
The destruction of barriers involved both strength and vulnerability. It
meant self-exposure and all-embracing communality. The children of the
company were included in its work. They had no choice but to take up
their parents' mission. Their birth, their bodies, their images became part
of the performances. As a consequence of their underground past, and of
their collectivity, individual achievements of Squat members were not
credited but instead melted into anonymity.
In Hungary Squat and its audience-the underground
intelligentsia-shared a common language. It was a language with ties to the
European avant-gardes, as is revealed by the group's 1972
Fantastic and poor. We don't live or work or think
together ...
No, we don't assert, we don't deny
we don't read Freud, Kafka, Petofi or any revolutionary
poetry at all
we don't stroll by the Danube
we don't leave and don't return
we don't live by our thoughts
we don't call each other on the phone ...
No, we are not harmless
we are not sensitive
we don't remember 1968 ...
No, we don't write manifestoes. (12)
After re-settling in New York, Squat Theatre had to appeal to a
heterogeneous audience in a strange city. A story Eva Buchmuller told of
their first steps in beginning a new life illustrates the difficulties. They were
ready to put on a show, but disdained advertising. In Hungary they had not
been allowed to publicize their work, friends simply spread the word. In
New York, they tried the same strategy and opened the theatre doors
expecting spectators to appear; no one came. Disheartened, they went
upstairs to their living quarters; when they came back down several hours
later, their stereos had been stolen.
They learned quickly. In their first year in New York Squat
received an Obie Award for their first play for Western audiences, Pig,
Child, Fire! Their next play, Andy Warhol's Last Love, won several awards
on their European tour in 1978. Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free was awarded an
Obie as Best American Play in 1982. After Peter Halasz, Agnes Santha, and
Pieta, Squat Theatre,
Wroclaw, Poland, 1973
37
Anna Ko6s left Squat in 1985, the group was re-organized and created new
performances. Between 1986-1988 Eva Buchmuller's sets and unusual effects
in Dreamland Burns and in L-Train to Eldorado won several awards, among
them two American Theatre Wing Awards and one Obie.
Leaving Hungary, we tied our lives and those of our
children to a theater that was to prove our existence, both
intellectually and socially. . .. The rich inventory of
images and actions we developed during our first six years
in Hungary were something to fall back on. The
storefront made us aware of the physical surroundings of
the performance and allowed us to adopt the accidental.
The need to address a more general public gave way to the
use of such figures as Stavrogin, Andy Warhol, the Virgin
Mary, etc. These figures were never characters per se;
they were always used as points of departure, cardboard
cutouts, allusions to their originals which gained new life
in the context of the play. (101)
As cultural icons were decomposed and reinvented by Squat, the actors
dramatized themselves in often challenging ways. An anecdote recounted
in the commemorative volume illustrates the point. In 1979 Squat was
invited to New York University to speak to graduate students about theatre.
The "lecture" began with loud music and
Peter drawing on the blackboard and Pisti pacing up and
down. Anna suddenly turned the music off and started to
speak haltingly about a terrible event that had happened
to her the other day. She said she was still shaking, and
that she had to excuse herself: she would not be able to
talk about theater at such a point of her life. She said she
was raped at knife point in the East Village. . . . Her
husband would not cope with the accident and would not
talk to her (150).
In the meantime Anna's husband carrying their baby showed up in
the classroom door, and Anna left with them. Shocked, the students "were
quick to offer their compassion," but were told by the remaining Squat
members that "it was all an act." The students still preferred to believe the
story and they were allowed to do so. "Thus began the discussion on
theater" (150), and thus Squat played with fictionalized presence and
contextualized fiction.
"Squat Theatre existed under the very specific circumstances of our
close community. As soon as the community dissolved, Squat ceased to
exist," Eva Buchmuller declared. But Anna Ko6s asserted that "what was
once Squat, has not ended, only it exists now in a more spread-out form.
Our ways parted, yet, individually we continue carrying within us and
living the same spirit." Like the NYU students we wonder: whom shall we
believe?
Notes
1
Eva Buchmuller and Anna Ko6s, The Squat Theatre (New York: Artists Space,
1996). In this article all quotations followed by page numbers in parentheses are
taken from this book. For further information see the BOOKS RECEIVED
section in this issue of SEEP.
39
REVELATION AND CAMOUFLAGE:
POUSH CINEMA FROM 1930
TO THE PRESENT -A SYMPOSIUM
David A. Goldfarb
As part of their month-long festival of Polish cinema, "Revelation
and Camouflage," the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a two-day
symposium moderated by organizer Richard Peiia and Polish film critic
Maciej Karpi.Dski, with directors Agnieszka Holland, Juliusz Machulski,
Andrzej Wajda, and Krzysztof Zanussi, writer Janusz Glowacki,
cinematographer Edward Klosi.Dski, actress Krystyna Janda, scholars
Annette Insdorf, Boleslaw Michalek, and Frank Turaj, critic Stanley
Kauffmann, Film Polski representative Iwona Lukianiuk, and representative
of the Polish state film agency Tadeusz Scibor-Rylski. The first day's topic
was Polish cinema prior to martial law, and the second day was reserved for
discussion of today's Polish film. Both events drew capacity crowds, first at
the Kaplan Penthouse of the Rose Building, adjacent to the Walter Reade
Theatre, then in the Walter Reade itself.
Andrzej Wajda served on both panels as Polish cinema's elder
statesman, who could recall being told in 1949, "Your education costs as
much as that of a fighter pilot, so we expect you to play a similar role."
From his perspective, the early experiments in Polish film during the 1930s
had practically no influence on postwar film. The devastation of the Second
World War was so great, he said, that "Polish cinema ends in 1939 and
begins in 1945," and that after the War, Italian Neo-realism, Hollywood
gangster films, and the European avant-garde were much stronger influences
on Polish film makers than the pre-war experiments. At that time, Wajda
recalled, the modest Polish film "industry" consisted of about ten
individuals, including Wanda Jakubowska and Aleksander Ford, a few
cinematographers and others who had the right leftist credentials to make
a new kind of film in L6di.
The Communists built the L6di film school on an American scale,
Edward Klosi.Dski remarked, reflecting the value they assigned to the cinema
as "the most important art," according to a dictum of Lunacharsky repeated
by Lenin. The early postwar innovators in Polish cinema strongly
emphasized the visual character of the medium and for this reason stressed
cinematography in the film maker's training, which remains the strongest
program in the Polish film school. Despite the immense government
investment in the early film industry, however, the small number of
practitioners of the cinematic arts made for a strong sense of equality among
cinematographers, directors, lighting designers, and actors.
Agnieszka Holland, whose education in Prague during the Czech
New Wave rather than in L6di gives her an interesting vantage point from
which to comment on the Polish film scene, raised some interesting issues
about the wide presence of Polish cinematographers on U.S. and
international film sets. Stanley Kauffmann was quite disparaging of the idea
that Polish cinema had any influence on world cinema. When pressed on
the question of the role of Polish cinematographers in the film industries of
many countries, he discounted it, suggesting that Polish cinematographers
did not bring any distinctive formal or stylistic innovations, reflecting what
seems to be his general view that the film is the total product of the
director's vision.
To pursue this question, I asked Edward Klosinski and the directors
on the panel, if they thought that there was a distinctive "L6di style that
has gone unnoticed, but may pervade the way that films are seen throughout
the world. The predominance of the theory that the work emerges whole
from the mind of the director seemed to have precluded much prior thought
on this question, though Klosinski and Holland allowed that there might be
something unique in the use of color by Polish Directors of Photography.
All, however, agreed that the L6di education fostered a particular working
style that made Polish cinematographers attractive to international directors.
Holland, Klosinski and Wajda concurred that the L6di film school
cultivated an ethos of community on the film set, where all participants
were there to serve the film; whereas, many non-Polish DP's might be more
concerned with leaving their distinctive signature on the final product.
Not all famous graduates of the L6di film school, though, have
incorporated this sense of community and public responsibility into their
work. Wajda recalled that Roman Polanski was convinced at age sixteen
that he would work in Hollywood. Offered the opportunity to make one
of his first films in Yugoslavia, Wajda claimed, Polanski saw no return in
that, and took the first opportunity he could to relocate to London. When
asked why he made Rosemary's Baby in Hollywood, Polanski responded that
in Hollywood "When I raise my hand, they give me a hammer before I even
think that I need to ask for a hammer."
Maciej Karpinski opened the second day's proceedings with a brief
assessment of the changes in the Polish film industry and the Polish film
audience since 1989.
1
He observed that martial law permanently diminished
the habit of movie going. That may be due in part to the fact that the
cinema and the theatre have been replaced by newspapers and television as
41
channels for political discourse. Most important, however, has been the
unregulated influx of foreign films via satellite and the huge overnight
expansion of videocassette recorders, which, according to Karpinski, made
Poles the highest per capita owners of VCRs in 1990.
Krzysztof Zanussi offered a strong argument about video piracy
and its effects on the Polish film industry. While the sudden rise of VCR
ownership in Poland has made video piracy-primarily of U.S.
films-rampant in Poland, Zanussi submitted that this has little effect on
Hollywood, since most Poles probably could not afford to purchase these
films at Western prices, so that Poland would be a small portion of the
market for these films anyway. Polish-Americans, however, who can easily
obtain cheap pirated versions of Polish films from Polish video and
bookstores in Polish neighborhoods, Zanussi claimed, are causing significant
damage to t he Polish film industry, because Polish emigres form a
substantial portion of the Western market for Polish films. Frank Turaj
suggested that the growth of film-on-demand might be the saving grace for
small-market films, since electronic distribution can extend to places that
even piracy cannot afford to reach.
While Zanussi's economic argument is very astute, one wonders if
the Poles are not currently being hoist on their own petard of a long-existing
culture of audio piracy. Audio piracy under censorship was often a
conscious political act, by which "subversive" music, such as jazz and rock
made its way to Eastern Europe, but given its ubiquity, it would seem a
great challenge to introduce an anti-piracy ethic with the same rapidity that
free-market capitalism was introduced under the guidance of Jeffrey Sachs.
One significant point of consensus among the participants in the
symposium was that with the growth of capitalism Polish cinema is
blending into the general culture of European and other artistic cinema.
Despite the growth of international co-production in Poland, Zanussi
related, there is not much money at home or abroad for artistic film; thus,
he does a fair amount of commuting. Krystyna Janda noted that Poles still
want to see Polish actors in their cinema and theatre, and Wajda remarked
that Polish directors want to work in their native language, but market
forces have changed the political goals of the cinema. Janda lamented the
emergence of overnight stardom, made possible by the dissolution of the
structures that once required that screen actors be formally trained. Juliusz
Machulski observed that many of his young colleagues see film more as a
form of entertainment than as a vehicle for complex ideas. Noting that it
is harder to outsmart the bankers than the censors, Machulski stated that the
director has to be a producer to have any independence.
Wajda proposed a Benjamin ian explanation with a distinctive Polish
phenomenological spin, of the difference between U.S. and European
cinema. He argued that in the United States, the producer is the initiator of
the work, and that "production" is repeatable, rather than unique. The
producer is concerned with filling the theatre repeatedly; therefore, the
producer is also producing an repeatable audience through the cultivation
of public desires and tastes. Though Wajda acknowledged no theoretical
debts and might not be entirely aware of them himself, this part of the
argument is not so different from Walter Benjamin's argument in his 1936
essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that "the
work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for
reproducibility ."
2
The European director, according to Wajda, wants every film to be
the last one, yielding a unique immediate contact between the film and
audience, which is incompatible with the producer's desire for repeatability.
One does not usually think about the "immediacy" of the cohtact with the
audience when considering the cinema, which seems so mediated by
industrial technology, in comparison, say, to the theatre, where the actor is
bodily present to the bodily audience. Wajda's phenomenological take on
the issue, focusing on the subject-object relationship of the film and the
viewer as a communicative one rather than as a relation of commercial
exchange, might offer at least some way out of Benjamin's dilemma. It
certainly is the case that artistic film cannot typically afford the sorts of
industrial interventions characteristic of Hollywood, but on the other hand,
the communication in any kind of cinema proceeds by nature only in one
direction: the actors in the cinema, unlike actors on stage, cannot hear the
audience laugh, snore, walk out at intermission, or applaud.
NOTES
1
T o compare the current picture with the assessment of the last major New York
symposium on East European film at the New School for Social Research in 1993,
see my article "Cinema in Transition: Recent Films from East and Central
Europe-Symposium," SEEP 13:2 {1993), pp. 51-54.
2
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
{1936), Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1969), p. 224.
43
AFTER E A U ~ E S C U A DISCUSSION OF ROMANIAN ARTS
ISSUES AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE
PERFORMING ARTS
Eric Pourchot
The Performing Arts of Romania Festival, produced by the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, has featured
contemporary music, dance, and theatre from Romania at the Library's
Bruno Walter Auditorium.
1
The festival concluded with a panel discussion
on March 30, 1996 on the state of the arts in Romania since 1989.
The panel was an exceptional gathering of contemporary artists and
critics. As one Romanian acquaintance remarked, this group of people
would not normally get together even in Romania. The unique nature of
the event was apparent from the audience members in attendance: the
Romanian Ambassador to the United States, Mircea Dan Geoana, and
several others from the Embassy in Washington, D.C.; the Consul General
from New York; representatives from the Romanian Cultural Center in
New York; members of the Society for Romanian Studies from
Washington, D.C. and New York; Professor Radu Florescu of Boston
College; author Nina Cassian; director/ designer Liviu Ciulei; a reporter
from Voice of America, and many others.
Each of the six speakers avoided duplicating material by focussing
on a particular area within the arts. The panel presented a cautiously
optimistic view of the performing arts in Romania today, although all
acknowledged the great difficulties faced in finding a new niche for the arts
in the post-Ceauescu era. These difficulties have arisen not only from the
decrease in government support for the arts, but from the sudden fall of a
common adversary who had united artists with their audiences.
The moderator for the panel presentation was Andrei Pleu, an art
critic exiled to a remote village in 1989 by the Ceauescu regime, who later
became acting Minister of Culture of Romania from 1990 to 1991. Mr.
Pleu not only introduced each of the panelists, but gave shape to the
various components of the afternoon's presentation and added humor to
what developed into a politically-charged event. He also placed the art
scene since 1989 in historical perspective. In spite of communism, Romania
supported an "incredibly intense cultural life." This was possible, he
limitations. Second, the dictatorship was not a monolithic, seamless
organization but, rather, a mixture of organization and chaos. There were
cracks open for artists to take advantage of, although the government was
unpredictable in its actions and such loopholes could be closed at any
moment. Third, cited the "imperfection of evil." Humor, hope, love,
and other positive elements always existed, "just in odd proportions."
After the revolution of 1989, the lifting of censorship meant that
there was no fun in being subtle or courageous, stated The lack of a
common enemy meant no solidarity and more loneliness. New styles of
artistic expression were also allowed, threatening some artists who had
learned to effectively exploit limited genres. With the decrease in
government support for the arts, material survival became more important
than spiritual survival. Also, before 1989, artists could have
"projects" -dreams of what they might do if they were only allowed to.
Now, with no external excuse artists must either follow their dreams or give
them up, a prospect which Pleu described as "very tiring."
Augustin Buzura, President of the Romanian Cultural Foundation,
novelist, and screen writer, read from prepared notes about the history and
current status of literature in Romania. Although difficult to understand at
times, he pointed out that several "daring books" were published during the
communist era. Because of government control, psychologists and
historians often used novels as vehicles for putting their ideas into print
during that period. A great deal of American literature was available in
Romania as well. Andrei expanded on Buzura's remarks by saying
that Romanian writers have suffered internationally due to the difficulty of
translation. He asked the audience to imagine what Shakespeare's influence
on world literature would have been if he had been born in Romania.
Director Andrei focused on his experience of returning to
Bucharest in 1990 to serve as General Manager of the I. L. Caragiale
National Theatre. The program notes described him as "a Romanian born
and educated American director," and he claimed to be ill-qualified to discuss
the current state of theatre in Romania. His remarks were similar to those
made in 1990 in an interview with Oana-Maria Hock published in
Performing Arts Journal.
2
He had come back to Romania after a twenty-year
absence, expecting a new beginning, to explore new realms, to be able now,
without censorship, to mirror the truth of human experience in the present.
At first, he found fertile ground. He felt "art feeding history," instead of
vice versa. In the summer of 1990, as the company rehearsed Fragments of
a Greek Trilogy, miners attacked demonstrators in the square outside. Later,
performances of The Trojan Women "assaulted and invaded" audience and
45
performers alike, but for a different reason: to jar them out of passivity.
~ e r b n felt the need for theatre to be stronger, clearer, and more sensitive
than the events in the streets, in order to offer a new vision to the
population. After three years, however, ~ e r b n found old ways slipping
back. The crisis over, history began repeating itself, and the director faced
"the old nomenklatura in Italian suits with western smiles," opposing his
attempts to change the role of theatre.
~ e r b n learned two major lessons from his return from exile. First,
that offering too clear of an image in the theatre is too uncomfortable for
the audience. Second, that political theatre is problematical; theatre can't
change the world. The theatre, said $erban, should show the difference
between the past and present, as well as visions for the future. In this, the
theatre would become a force for a needed evolution of the spirit in
Romania.
Adina Darian traced the history of Romanian film from the first
full-length feature in 1920 to present efforts and tied major changes in film
styles to social, economic, and historical factors. She has been writing about
cinema for thirty years, and has been Editor-in-Chief of Noul Cinema, the
first independent cinema magazine in Romania, since 1990. She is also
president of the Romanian Film Critics' Association. Pre-war film efforts
reached a peak with a film adaptation of Ion Luca Caragiale's play, 0 Noapte
Furtunoasa, which had the misfortune to be released in 1943, just as war
engulfed Romania. Following 1945, Romania's film industry gained an
industrial structure: studios were built, a distribution network created, and
a school for cinema established. Freedom, however, was lost, although
many film makers were able to create fine cinema. Darian called Lucian
Pintilie's Sunday Six O'clock, made during this period, his best film. Since
the subject matter of all films was authorized by the government, movie
directors often worked at the cost of functioning in complicity with the
communist regime. Those who dared to criticize the government risked a
great deal; the director of the 1959 "socialist comedy," The Boss, was not
allowed to make a film again for ten years. Although neo-realism was a
world film movement in the 1950s, Romanian film did not show this
influence until the 1970s, following the destructive floods of 1970 and the
earthquake of 1973. The graduating class of the Film Institute in 1970 shot
a great deal of footage in the streets, resulting in the feature-length
documentary, Water Like a Black Bull.
Censorship of films, which was very strict during the 1950s,
loosened somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s, and Romanian films began
winning prizes at international film festivals. The 1980s, however, saw a
46
return of strict censorship, and some directors were no longer allowed to
create films. Darian cited The Contest, by Dan Pita, as an example of a fine,
"aesthetically rewarding" film from the 1980s which, because of the subtlety
demanded by censorship, is "incomprehensible outside the Iron Curtain."
Darian feels that most films from before 1989 tended to be out of touch
with their audiences, because films were not intended to make money.
After 1989, the film industry changed enormously. Film makers
achieved their long-awaited freedom from government control, but now .
don't have the money to make their films, since the government is no longer
funding production. Films which have been released tend to be
metaphorical and still driven by ideology (although now directed against the
former regime instead of supporting it).
Alex Leo $erban, an editor of Dilema, a Bucharest weekly,
concentrated on the latest movements in visual and performing arts in
Romania. In theatre, he highlighted the small but growing trend toward
performances drawing from various disciplines, such as the recent
production of LaDameaux Camelias at the National Theatre in Bucharest
performed with cello and three actors, as well as similar experiments in the
city of Cluj. He noted that artists trying to bridge genres are not being
critiqued on their own merits, but on the standards of the particular genre
that the critic specializes in. In more traditional performances, $erban
highlighted the plays staged by Silviu Purciirete at the National Theatre in
Craiova, and a production of The Three Sisters directed by Alexandru Darie.
Overall, Serban finds pop music much livelier, intelligent, accessible, and
subversive than theatre. The band, "Timpuri Noi" (Modern Times),
underground before 1989, has recently released an album and uses irony and
humor in a "cool, mocking" tone. Another popular band in this ironic
mode is "Sarmalute" (Stuffed Cabbage) . Called by $erban "the Marx
Brothers of Romania" and "MTV gone literate," these classical and jazz-
trained musicians draw from many sources and released a CD last year. A
typical song title is "Nicu for President," referring to Nicolae
much-hated son-probably the last person one would imagine running for
office in Romania today.
The visual arts remain energetic and active in Romania, due in part
to the financial support of the Foundation, which has funded many
exhibitions. Television is a common target for contemporary artists.
Serban described the single channel available before 1989, as a "lethal"
combination of "Dallas" episodes and images of Ceauescu. Today
commercials are plentiful and poorly made, and irresponsible broadcasting
has turned what used to be "bad" into a media that is "mean and bad."
47
Gabriel Gafita, Secretary of State from the Romanian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and formerly Cultural Minister to Britain, reported on the
growing presence of Romanian theatre and opera in the U.K. The
Romanian National Opera Company appeared five times in the space of two
years in Britain, starting with an outdoor performance of Verdi's Nabucco
in a downpour which shorted out the microphones but couldn't disperse an
enthusiastic audience for the three-and-a-half hour performance. The
company was asked back with the same production to indoor venues in
Edinburgh and Bristol, as well as the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Theatre companies have likewise enjoyed recent successes in
England. With the ground prepared by tours of Liviu Ciulei's Bulandra
Theatre in the 1970s, Andrei Serban's staging of Turandot, and the 1990 tour
of Ion Caramitru's Hamlet, "a kind of stampede" of Romanian theatre hit
England from 1992 to 1994. The National Theatre of Craiova visited
several times, most notably with their production of Phaedra, the Teatrul
Magyar (The Hungarian Theatre) of Cluj presented Ionesco's The Bald
Soprano, the Odeon Theatre of Bucharest brought Richard I!! (one of their
last productions before disbanding), and Teatrul Evreiesc (The Jewish
Theatre) presented Maia Morgenstern's one-woman show, Lola Blau, at
Edinburgh.
Individual artists also worked in England during this period. Silviu
Purcarete directed The Tempest, and Mihai Maniutiu directed The Taming of
the Shrew. Singer Angela Gheorghiu impressed the reserved British press
with her performance in La Traviata at Covent Garden in the winter of
1994. Andrei l ~ u added that a key element in making these visits possible
was Ion Caramitru's leadership as Director of UNITER, the union of
Romanian theatres.
The generally optimistic picture of Romanian performing arts was
darkened somewhat during a question-and-answer session following the
presentations. Responding to a question concerning the role of the arts in
encouraging the tolerance needed for true democratization, l ~ u responded
that "educating" is "a worn-out idea, which has been expected from the arts
for years" in Romania. Contemporary artists are tired of attempting to
educate the public and wary of renewing efforts in this direction. Shortly
after this question, its relevance was demonstrated when Nina Cassian, a
Romanian children's author, was heckled by other audience members while
trying to comment on the presentation. On the brighter side, at least 100
poems have been translated and published in the United States since 1989,
and a British publisher has issued a collection of ten Romanian poets
translated by ten Irish poets (When Tunnels Meet); a follow-up volume will
translate Irish poetry into Romanian.
It is clear that the arts are in a difficult period in Romania as in the
rest of Eastern Europe. Artists face not only the loss of government support
for the arts but also the difficulties of surviving in an economy in turmoil.
When asked about theatre conditions in Romania following the Festival
performance in December, the performers in the theatre group Masca spoke
primarily about high prices and their concern with the cost of living in
Bucharest. The constraints of censorship have been replaced by economic
constraints.
Andrei l e ~ u closed the panel with a response to a question asking
for his conclusions: "We are in a transition period. We have been in a
transition period since the beginning of the nineteenth century." Since
Romania is in a transition stage, l e ~ u stated, no conclusions are possible.
NOTES
1
See Eric Pourchot's article "Performing Arts of Romania at the New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts" in our last issue (SEEP, Vol 16, no. 1 Winter
1996).
2
0ana-Maria Hock, "At Home, in the World, in the Theatre: the Mysterious
Geography of University Square, Bucharest," Performing Arts journal 38 (May,
1991), 78-89.
49
PAGES FROM THE PAST
TARKOVSKY, OR THE BURNING HOUSE
PART III
Petr Kral
for Ivan Divis
Dancing in the Open Air
Although balanced on the edge of a precipice, human life and the
world itself are not bereft of meaning for Tarkovsky. In Stalker there is a
scene in which the camera slowly rises from the moss-grown, clay earth to
a grey background which seems to be empty, but in which we suddenly
discern the waters of a lake. It is bound on the horizon by a row of trees,
whose reflections in the water look like fragile, immaterial roots. The water
resembles the materialization of a void, and the trees seem to have inscribed
a meaning identified with the void itself, with an awareness of that meaning,
and an acceptance of it. It is apparently a matter of simply taking on board
the strangeness of the world, without coming to terms with it, but making
it one's own.
Here Tarkovsky approaches Antonioni's probing of unknown
expanses of the universe. If he often brings the whole vast world into his
scenes, we are also-in Andrei Rublev and Stalker-witnesses to the way his
figures cluster in mid-canvas, their heads and bodies forming huge
agglomerations, a kind of shared body, which lends people something alien,
and abstractly monumental. The focus then shifts back to the distance, and
rests there, for comparison, marking out a possible displacement of human
boundaries. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with any conquest of
space; on the contrary, Tarkovsky constantly reminds us that we occupy
only a modest and relative position in the universe. The hero simply
disappears behind some trees in mid-screen (as in the park with the melting
snow, in The Sacrifice), or leaves a door open behind him, as when we, inside
the set, follow his progress around the house in Solaris, and are suddenly left
face to face with the yawning rectangle of the door, expecting somebody to
appear in it. The role assigned to us by such images in the totality of the
universe is assuredly only that of a small component needed to fill an empty
space, but in no sense an irreplaceable component: instead of a man, the
rectangle of the door is soon occupied by a grazing horse, and only after this
does the hero himself appear. The only power we can aspire to lies solely
in a paradoxical blending into the fabric of existence. At the end of Stalker,
the little girl who sends glasses flying from the table by merely looking at
them, as she faces the camera, demonstrates her supremacy here even if the
glasses really fall because of tremors caused by a passing train, which
happened to coincide with her look. If it is not given to us to impose our
will upon objects, we can at least link our will to theirs.
The loyalty ofT arkovsky' s heroes to what has been is possible only
at the price of an inner paradox, and in conjunction with the courage to leap
into the void. The emblem of their firm roots in the past and in memory,
presented by the burning barn in 7he Mirror (seen on the far side of a forest
clearing, over the heads of some people who seem to have already been
watching it), is matched like an echo and a necessary counterweight by the
recurrent motif of a house which is open to the world, a motif which is
characteristic of this director's entire oeuvre. In 7he Mirror alone, it can be
seen in several forms. The recurrent scene, insistently repeated, of a table
laid in a garden behind a house, from which a gust of wind-suddenly
shaking the surrounding woods-strips the tablecloth and sends a lamp
crashing onto it, somehow takes the house out of itself and brings it face to
face with the elements and timeless nature. The scene in which only the
billowing curtains show any sign of life amid the ruins does the same. The
looted, unroofed church in Andrei Rublev, into which both snow and
earthly time seem to fall, having been offered sanctuary in it, stands open to
nature and the cosmos,
1
thanks to the weather; just as they are received in
Nostalgia by a cellar given over to nettles and water. Also in Nostalgia, in
the old man's home, in which bottles filled with water and light from
outside seem to be participating in some unfamiliar ritual, the "open house"
appears in its purest form, surpassed only when the motif returns for the last
time in 7he Sacrifice. Like "interiors" and "exteriors," isolation from the
world and receptiveness to changes in it, poverty and wealth blend here too;
the structure made of bottles is the greater and the more realistic as a luxury
for being gilded only by the fleeting golden light of a moment. And the
house is the more credible as a house for not having its fragility disguised,
and remaining open to the breeze. In 7he Sacrifice, the hero's home is the
very thing that is at stake; when it is menaced by the spectre of war, the
hero paradoxically saves it, only in order to destroy it himself, as the
supreme sacrifice and offering to the gods. By burning the house down and
going to live in an asylum, he achieves his own salvation, by the voluntary
sacrifice of his own interests to those of others, thus merging forever into
the infinite oneness of creation. This merging into the multitude had
already been given definitive bewitching shape at the conclusion of Ivan's
51
Childhood, in which it is expressed in the agitation of the young nurse
searching in vain in the birch-grove for the particular tree under which she
experienced her first kiss. After hearing of Ivan's death, we see the hero
again as he was in his carefree pre-war days, playing his flute with some
friends on a beach. When he steps apart from the group and turns his back
on them, so that they can hide from him, this is merely a temporary
distancing, after which the joy of the shared game will be greater. The
significance of his heroic death is similar: it is the price which he pays to be
forever at one with the community of man, and the order of nature.
Diagnostic here is the "flashback" scene in The Sacrifice which immediately
precedes the hero's heroic deed: seen from above, a crowd of people rushes
to and fro across a yard, as a last reminder of the mass on whose behalf (and
in whose name) the hero is acting. And if their haste looks like panic before
an air-raid, they could also merely be trying to hide while he plays his flute.
It is as if cinematic art were in the process of rediscovering here, at
one of its most salient "subjective" moments, the "objectivity" and
anonymity which has long competed with individual (and stylized)
expression. There is even a double sense to this: Tarkovsky's vision, and the
respect he pays to the "memory" of the most ordinary things (in the special
style of a kind of magical documentary) is anonymous; and so is the altruism
he propounds. The hero of The Sacrifice, a former theatre director, in the
end stands directly for the artist renouncing his individual ambitions-and
with them the cult of art as an independent value-system-in order to take
an active part in helping the suffering. "All this talk! I'm sick of it! If only
somebody would stop talking and do something!" he says right at the
beginning of the film. And at the end, when he has crowned his mission by
burning down his own house, he himself falls silent. His son, however,
hitherto mute, gains the power of speech, seeming to receive it from his
father.
Here the burning of the house corresponds to the blazing barn in
The Mirror, or rather, it is an inverted replica of it: a gesture which lays open
the house, and contains within itself the inevitable loss of the house, yet
somehow blunts the impact of that loss. Long before the house goes up in
flames its windows and doors fly open in the breeze and its occupants scatter
among the trees in the surrounding grounds; the hero himself leaves it-
twice in succession-as if literally trying to shake off some spell. His flight
increasingly resembles a graceful dance of relief, as he makes his way
through the fir trees, out of sight of his family, circles the building in a wide
arc, casting last-minute spellbound glances towards it, picks up an
abandoned bicycle, mechanically rings its bell, straddles it, and rides off in
the gathering dusk along the tracks over the fields.
A similar grace certainly serves to lighten the concreteness of many
of Tarkovsky's scenes: gestures and whole actions, shimmering landscapes
and light effects, the movement of a glass or a cloud are for the director all
creative motifs, from which he builds the whole-by means of repetition,
variation, and intersection-as in a musical composition. And here, of
course, lies the anonymity of his vision: the mute discourse of the most
ordinary objects is elevated to the intensity of everyday revelations and
miracles. The dance at the conclusion of The Sacrifice is that much "lighter"
for the fact that its grace and harmony is filled with an awareness of human
frailty; and the fact that it is also an expression of the relativity of the
boundaries between our weakness and our strength, between power and
impotence. In spite of the gravity of the moment (and his "Russian"
melancholy), Tarkovsky nonetheless injects into the dance, quite naturally,
some little "gags" which seem to have their origins in the freedom (poetic
and human) that his message suggests, a freedom which "objectively" has a
place for humor too. We laugh when the hero's matches won't light as he
tries to set fire to his house; when, just before the blaze takes hold, he
reaches back on the balcony from which he has begun to climb down a
ladder, and quickly drinks the brandy left there; and when, in front of the
burning house, he escapes from the ambulance almost as soon as the
ambulancemen have bundled him into it. The humor has all the more
impact owing to the ingenuous delight the hero finds in this moment, along
with the courage to see himself-and come to terms with himself-in all his
nakedness, without illusions, and without striking attitudes.
A Backward Glance
The dizzying concluding scene of The Mirror was also a dance. We
had left the narrator's mother, as a young woman, in the background, on
the far side of a wheatfield. In the foreground, with the camera, we found
her in an updated version, much older and accompanied by two children,
one of whom let out a piercing cry. We then left them, retreating into the
darkness of a wood, where the trees gradually concealed this group from our
view. In one travelling shot we have left childhood behind and locked it
once and for all into the memory of the whole human race, a memory to
which another travelling shot (mentioned earlier) and its musical
accompaniment clearly pointed, by scanning the grass growing on the ruins,
to a Bach accompaniment, like a characteristic "synthesis" of eternal nature
and supratemporal art. In The Sacrifice the concluding ritual is somewhat
53
different: the hero, his wife, the ambulancemen, and the young peasant
sorceress, darting about in front of the burning house, over a meadow
covered with puddles and light from a now clear sky, celebrate both the
locality, suddenly illuminated by the light of the dying home, and the end
of that home itself. This scene is not merely the latest version of the
marriage of fire and water, but also the definitive coming together of space
and time, or rather, of times: the past, which is burning with the house in
the middle of the field; the present moment in the lives of the protagonists,
darting agitatedly hither and thither; and the future, which intrudes in the
form of the ambulance, like a foretaste of the hero's sojourn in the asylum.
At the same time, this sequence leads into another temporal loop,
in which a return to timelessness blends with a new beginning. And not
merely because life is being reborn from under the shadow of an apocalyptic
menace, in the way that the outbreak of war in Nostalgia was marked by the
expulsion of the women from paradise, and an encounter-through the
rising sun-with primal innocence. When we (with the sorceress on her
bicycle) unexpectedly catch up with the ambulance, which disappeared from
view in the meadow, carrying the hero, we again see the hero's son. He is
lying by the water under the tree his father planted, looking up at the
branches that spread against the flickering background like a vast web of
aerial pathways, and pronounces his first sentence, which, furthermore, is
"In the beginning was the word". One circle has been squared, the story of
the son may begin at the point where that of his father, who has lost the
power of speech, ends.
This scene also provides a striking conclusion to the whole of
Tarkovsky's oeuvre, being a symmetrically inverted echo-no doubt
unconscious-of the opening of his first film, Ivan's Childhood, where the
camera climbs a tall tree, while the boy moves away from it through the
forest. Both films are, moreover, closely bound up with the biography of
the director: Ivan the orphan, and his loneliness amidst the war remind us
of Tarkovsky's own childhood; The Sacrifice was completed shortly before
his death, before he could be reunited with his son, to whom the film is
dedicated ("with hope and confidence") as a last testament, and who thus
inherits the fundamental trauma of his career. This only bears out yet again
the truth of the old axiom, that an artist vouches for any work of
inspiration with his life.
The future which opens before the youthful hero at the conclusion
of The Sacrifzce-here we seem to be "conquering space", with the girl on the
bicycle and the spreading boughs of the tree-had previously opened before
the boy from The Mirror. There it blended with the dazzling light of a
summer ringing with the sound of cicadas, a light which unexpectedly drew
the boy out from under the window of his house at the very moment when
we approached the window with the camera, after passing through its empty
rooms. In The Sacrifice, it is all the more apparent that the "urge to
conquer" is a direct continuation of a loss freely accepted; that the light
linking father and son in the chain of generations is the light of the void in
which it is always necessary to start anew. This film (the most "linear" of
his works) is in this sense a true summing-up of Tarkovsky's philosophy,
just as the labyrinthine Mirror dealt (mainly) with his view of memory and
Stalker with his attitude to mystery.
The message here is also a memory directed towards the horizon,
in a direct continuation of the gesture by which the hero turns the burning
barn in The Mirror into the act of setting fire to his own house. The man
making this gesture seems also to find in it the answer he needs to his
mother and all women, to those evil-eyed, but restless agents of divine
power, to which his only connection is as a rejected element, cast out into
alien, earthly exile. Whatever pull his earthly sisters may exert, he must
ultimately turn away from them to face the void which yawns before him.
At the end of Ivan's Childhood, when the hero chases the other children
during the game of hide-and-seek, he first catches up with a girl we saw him
playing with earlier; he does not stop, but runs on, leaving the girl behind
him, like a space rocket shedding its first stage (in Stalker too, women are
cast aside, left on the border of the forbidden zone). When the hero of
Andrei Rublev leaves the nocturnal bacchanalia of the pagan sect, an
unknown naked woman, leaning on a wooden fence, watches him idly with
a languid gaze, which she slowly lowers to her own arms, enfolding him
within herself. But the man's path does not lie towards her eyes, but away
from them, as if they were his point of departure; even if he can find the
strength to break the maternal embrace of his original home, he will
confront it again-arms flung wide to greet him-in the freedom and light
of the surrounding area. His only hope lies in breaking those primeval
bonds; only this propels him towards the unknown, like the branches of
that spreading tree in The Sacrifice that assail the sky above it. If he puts
down roots, this must be right in the fateful space between his drive to
possess and his alienation, between the lost paradise and an alien world,
between the fullness he has before him, and the emptiness that awaits him.
This does not mean he must forget all he is leaving behind. "The
ashes will be poured into wine and drunk with it," we are told in The
Sacrifice, "but the memory will endure for the rest of your life." And it will
undoubtedly live on solely by its mystery, like Tarkovsky's films
55
themselves. Here, as elsewhere, the essence remains inexpressible.
Petr Kral is a well-known poet and essayist, whose writing has appeared regularly
in Svedectv{ for many years. In 1990 he was the (post-communist} Czechoslovak
Republic's cultural attache in Paris.
[This is the last of three installments; translated from the Czech by Kevin
Windle. Originally published in Svedectv{XX.III, No. 91, 1990]
Notes
1
"0utside history is falling like snow," said Andre Breton.
TWO FROM ST. PETERSBURG
John Freedman
Even before the March 30 opening of the Second Chekhov
International Theatre Festival, a marathon three-month affair featuring 35
productions from 17 countries, two touring shows from St. Petersburg once
again pointed out that much of the best theatre in Moscow in the 1995/96
season was coming from outside the city limits. One was Temur
Chkheidze's grand, acclaimed production of Shakespeare's Macbeth for the
T ovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre, while the other was Alexander
Lebedev's almost minuscule staging of Mikhail Ugarov' s play, 1he Newspaper
"Russian Invalid," Dated July 18 . . . for the Osobnyak Theatre. They
couldn't possibly have been more different in scope, theme and execution
although both were equally interesting.
First into town was the Osobnyak Theatre which on January 25,
1996 gave a single performance in a tiny hall at the Actors House on the
Arbat as part of the author's fortieth birthday party. Mikhail Ugarov is one
of the many writers of the "middle generation" -i.e., strictly speaking no
longer "young," but still decades from being "old"-who have had a terrible
time getting their plays produced. Ugarov's case has been complicated by
the fact that his intellectual, highly literary plays are often perceived as
lacking in theatricality. They all have been praised as masterful writing,
although productions of them have been few and far between.
1
After seeing the Osobnyak's version of "Russian Invalid," one can't
help but think that all the hesitation in regards to Ugarov is more than a
little misguided. Lebedev's production drives right into the heart of the
languorous play set in pre-revolutionary times and comes out with a fistful
of irony that makes the text and its characters sparkle with life. Ivan
Ivanovich (Dmitry Podnozov) is a bit of an eccentric who, in the two years
that he has avoided leaving his apartment, has continued to live a life in his
imagination that suits him just fine. Attempts by his edgy nephew
(Lebedev) and his impetuous niece (Olga Teterina) to draw him back into
the real world are fruitless; he is more than satisfied by the vicarious
pleasures he gets "going for walks" in front of his picture window and
reading occasional letters from a woman who may or may not be attempting
to get him to run away with her. He is waited on by a rather mysterious
and, seemingly, independent nanny (Yelena Sevryukova) in a white costume
and with her face covered by a veil.
The key components of Yevgeniya Gurina's simple, curtain-draped
57
58
set are a dinky divan-like train-car bench at center stage and the "picture"
bay window on the back wall featuring the image of a horse. The set is
"enhanced," so to speak, by an unidentified woman who comes out for a
kind of prologue and recites Ugarov's extraordinarily detailed set
descriptions, pointing to empty spaces or clearly inadequate props as if
encouraging us to believe what we hear and not what we see. On either side
of the stage are portrait galleries of great Russian writers and theatrical
figures, Lebedev's own addition, perhaps intended to teasingly draw
attention to Ugarov's reputation as a master of words and an "unstageable"
playwright.
The conflict between Ivan and his nephew Alyosha is to an extent
generational, but more importantly it is one of aesthetics and world views.
Ivan is neat, fastidious, reserved and cerebral, while the young, quick-talking
Alyosha, who at least claims to be looking for a rich widow to settle his
money problems, is crude, caustic and calculating. In many ways, this is a
playing out of Ugarov's own position as a playwright in an age that has seen
the aggressive vulgarity of mass culture become the norm. Ivan lvanovich,
perhaps like Ugarov himself, takes refuge in the seductive comfort of exotic
words and rarefied thoughts, although he is anything but a psychological
weakling afraid to face reality. His withdrawal is that of an aesthete, an
active, conscious step. That becomes most evident as the production draws
to a close and Ivan launches into a heated-and comical-tirade on his hatred
for "stories with plots" and categorically rejects the idea of "endings."
Podnozov shines in this scene, emerging from his hiding place behind a plaid
blanket with his face going red from frustration and the veins in his neck
visibly popping out. He temporarily gets a grip on himself only when he
drifts into a soothing description of a "bent lily."
By acknowledging the metaliterary basis of 7he Newspaper "Russian
Invalid," Dated July 18 . .. , and by having fun with it, director Lebedev drew
out the substantial theatricality inherent in it. His modest but effective
production leaves no doubt that Mikhail Ugarov is no mere author of
Lesedramen.
In Macbeth, which played under the auspices of the Theatre of
Nations at the Mossoviet Theatre February 22 and 23, Temur Chkheidze
found a way to have the best of two worlds. He staged a relentless, sweeping
social drama which, at the same time, never loses its human focus. Georgy
Aleksi-Meskhishvili's large but sparse, partly mechanical set (a moving
platform on tracks on the stage level, and a narrow runway stretching from
side to side high above the stage) highlights the former, while the actors, led
59
by Gennady Bogachyov's compelling Macbeth, play the tragedy of
believable people ground under by ambition, stupidity, intrigue and history.
Bogachyov, hairy, clunky and appearing enormous on stage, has a
brute, almost animalistic simplicity about him. In that, there is almost even
a glimmer of innocence or at least the kind of moral neutrality one would
grant a wolf or lion. He is easily manipulated by Lady Macbeth, because he
hasn't a shadow of her sophistication. When he finds himself on top of the
heap, he accepts his position as entirely natural; when he must fight to retain
it, he shuns no treachery. Then, as some vague memory of conscience seems
to dawn on his Macbeth, the actor creates a fascinating and gripping picture
of a man slowly self-destructing under the weight of his own bloody ways.
Early on, Alisa Freindlikh's Lady Macbeth is at a distinct
disadvantage. Frankly, the fine and popular actress is too old for the part,
and she buries her character in flurries of overacting. But in her final two
scenes she turns it all around and matches Bogachyov stride for stride right
through the grisly end. Her descent into sleepwalking insanity is played
with a palpable, cutting tension, while one of the production's finest
moments comes as her dead body is toted and tossed around by the grief-
stricken, uncomprehending Macbeth. Freindlikh, nearly bald but for a few
straggly wisps of hair, limp, pliable, and deathly expressionless, is a sight to
behold.
In Chkheidze's version of the macabre finale, the dead Lady
Macbeth sits propped against the wall at the front, left corner of the stage,
holding her husband's bloody, severed head between her legs as if it were a
newborn infant. Almost imperceptibly a smile begins to appear on her lips
but in time it grows into a horrid, scowling grin. It is as though even she
has realized that she is now free; the responsibility for the violence which
she spawned has now passed on to Macbeth's murderer, Macduff.
NOTES
1
Ugarov's published plays are Doves, written 1988 (Sovremennaya dramaturgiya No.
3-4, 1993); My Kitchenette, 1989 (Teatr, No.8, 1992); Orthography According to Grot,
1991 (Sovremennaya dramaturgiya No.2, 1992); The Newspaper "Russian Invalid,"
Dated july 18 ... , 1992 (Dramaturg 1/1993); The Ragamuffin, 1993 (Dramaturg 2/1994);
and The Green Cheeks of April, 1994 (Dramaturg 6/95), One play, an adaptation of
Hans Christian Andersen, remains unpublished: The Princess and the Pea, written
1990.
ERDMAN'S THE SUICIDE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Jennifer Starbuck
Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide was recently presented by Columbia
University's Graduate Directing Program under the direction of M.F.A.
candidate, Joshua Tarjan. Erdman's play, written in 1928, was stopped
while in its initial rehearsal and then banned by Stalin. Michele Minnick's
translation for this production is from the most recently published Russian
version,
1
which director Tarjan feels is more complete than any version
previously available. This is the same text that John Freedman uses in his
recent translations of Erdman's plays, calling it "the most reliable Russian
text."
2
The play, set in the early days of the Soviet Union, revolves around
the unemployed Semyon Podsekalnikov, whose depressed state of mind
leads him to a series of misunderstandings causing his neighbor to believe he
will commit suicide. On the basis of gossip, his neighbor, the local
entrepreneur Kalabushkin, sells the information to a variety of different
people-members of the intelligentsia, workers, artists, and even a vengeful,
love-sick woman-who try to use Semyon's life and death for their own
ulterior purposes. They throw a banquet in his honor, after which he is to
take his life. Having decided to go through with the suicide, Semyon seeks
courage in a bottle of vodka, but passes out instead, unable to complete the
deed. In the end, he elects to live, disappointing them all but making a plea
for a simple life: "I just want a quiet little life and a decent salary." Director
Tarjan, who has spent time studying in Poland and doing workshops at the
Grotowski Center in Wrodaw, was drawn to the play not only because of
its humor, but also because of the contemporary existential qualities
inherent in the questions posed about life.
Erdman's play follows the success of his earlier work, The Mandate
(or The Warrant), in a staging by Meyerhold in 1924. Both Meyerhold and
Star.islavsky fought for the right to produce The Suicide, and the Vakhtangov
Theatre convened a meeting of their Artistic-Political Council to determine
the play's worth after a reading in 1930.
3
However, the play's overtly
political themes-state oppression of the individual, unemployment,
despair- kept it from being produced in the fledgling Soviet state. The play
re-emerged in the late 1960s and finally began to gain international
recogmtwn.
For the most part, Tarjan's production remained true to Erdman's
satire. The farcical elements of the play, however, were foregrounded and
61
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Robert Mcintosh as Semyon Podsekalnikov
and cast of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide
Columbia University's Horace Mann Theatre
the physicalization of the actors often took precedence over the language
of the play, sometimes rendering it difficult to hear Erdman's text. Erdman
considered the language of the play as having primary value. "I select every
word as thought with a pair of tweezers," he wrote, "and I carefully weigh
it as if on scales. When I write I try to sense the proportionality of the
words, and I weigh each of them as though I were weighing a spider web."
4
Staged in Columbia's Horace Mann theatre, an underground black
box space, the production made use of the dreary physical surroundings,
such as a leaky water pipe in the hall leading to the theatre. The set itself
included a minimal, pseudo-constructivist and vaguely cross-shaped
construction tha.: loomed over a brown mound, and a plywood table that
doubled as a bed. A clothesline cut the space diagonally, and a hole in the
wall of the theatre doubled as an offstage room. The space was long and
deep, but this configuration was little used except for an inspiring sequence
during the banquet scene, when most of the colorfully-costumed cast formed
a series of freezes in tableaux that moved sequentially downstage, bathed in
an eerie yellow light.
Tarjan included an extratextual opening sequence: a humorous
introduction of uniformed workers mechanically miming their tasks-
exemplifying the laboring masses- as the unemployed Semyon runs from
one to the other trying simultaneously to assist them and steal their tools.
This addition set the tone for the sense of futility and frustration created by
Robert Bruce Mcintosh' s very animated performance as Semyon. Semyon's
wife, Maria Lukianovna, played with abundant energy by Julia Martin,
spends much of the play trying to prevent her husband's suicide. Martin
allowed her angular body to fly through the space, giving an overt
physicality to the character at the expense of the sentiment and true loss that
she begins to feel at the thought of her husband's death. Although Tarjan's
interpretation focused on physicality rather than on any political ideology,
the depth of Erdman's satire was still evident.
Interpreting such a politically pointed and historically specific work
presents a challenge to a modern American director. There is no longer any
need to tone down the satire for the censor in order to make political points.
Tarjan has instead chosen to emphasize the existential aspects of the play by
surrounding Semyon with larger-than-life caricatures. Thomas Lincoln
played Aristarkh, a member of the intelligentsia, as an exaggeratedly
hysterical embodiment of self-importance. Complete in a long black cape
and cap, Lincoln provided an effective contrast to Amy Brienes's haughty
Cleopatra, who wants Semyon to die for her so that she can take revenge on
her rival who is only capable of using "the body, the body, the body" to get
63
64
her man. Brienes has a wide vocal range, and her physicality was flawless.
Kim lma, as Semyon's mother-in-law, Serafima, provided a calm opposition
to the lively cast of hangers-on; her thoughtful performance allowed the
language to resonate.
Finally, Mcintosh as Semyon managed to maintain multiple
layers-of humor, frustration, idiocy, intelligence, questioning, and
fear-throughout a rather long, intermissionless evening. He added depth
to Erdman's poetic thoughts on life and death. When Semyon debates
whether to shoot himself through the head or the heart, Mcintosh's staccato
movements and wide vocal range portrayed a man afraid, shaken, and above
all, alone, questioning his existence and that of all humankind. The poet,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, committed suicide two years after the suppression
of The Suicide. The play inevitably leads audiences to ponder important
questions. Erdman's humor now gives rise to the liberating laughter that
was ruthlessly suppressed when the play was first performed.
NOTES
1
The Moscow version can be found in Nikolai Erdman, P 'esy, intermedii, pis 'ma,
dokumenty, vospominaniya sovremennikov (Moscow: l skusstvo, 1990).
2
John Freedman, ed. and trans. The Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman: The Warrant
and The Suicide (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
J A transcript of this meeting can be found in John Freedman, ed. and trans. A
Meeting About Laughter: Sketches, Interludes and Theatrical Parodies by Nikolai
Erdman with Vladimir Mass and others (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1995).
'Freedmen, p. xxiii.
65
UTHUANIAN THEATRE IN NEW YORK
Marvin Carlson
In early March, New York was visited by one of Lithuania's leading
experimental companies, the Vaidilos Ainiai Teatras (Theatre of the Sage's
Ancestors) from Vilnius. The theatre was organized four years ago under
the Artistic Directorship of Adolfas Vecerskis and includes leading actors
from Lithanian film and television, as well as from the stage. The
organization also ha close ties with Quadro, a prominent organization of
Lithuanian painters.
The company currently performs eight to ten times a month in its
cabaret-style theatre in Vilnius with a repertory of classic and original plays.
It also runs a professional training program for actors and has conducted
joint workshop and development projects with the Royal Theatre of
Sweden and the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. The major
offering of the company in New York was an original piece, Mirages, created
and directed by Adolfas Vecerskis and designed by company member Romas
Dalinkevicius. Also in the case were Saulius Siparis and Egle Tulevicuite.
This production was presented on the mainstage of the Little Theatre at the
C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University as a part of the twenty-ninth
annual theatre festival at that school. Originally formed as a festival of
American theatre, the festival has in recent years expanded to include
international work as well, with a Chilean company last year and the
Vaidilos Ainiai Teatras this year.
The basic story of Mirages, which the actors performed partly in
English and partly in Lithuanian, suggests a domestic melodrama. Adam
(Saulius Siparis) is a penniless young writer in love with Nina (Egle
Tulevicuite) who hopes to sell the book he is working on to gain enough
money to marry her. Adolfas Vecerskis plays a variety of other male figures
most of whom work to thwart this union. The manuscript is taken away
from Adam, he appeals for help in vain from Nina's eccentric father, and
ultimately loses her to a more secure rival.
This rather sordid and conventional story line is, however, only a
framework allowing the three actors to explore a wide range of emotional
and physical expressions and relationships. Vecerskis has perhaps the most
demanding role, playing a variety of eccentric characters with admirable
physical clarity and control, but both Siparis and Tulevicuite also display
enormous skill in playing everything from subtle psychogical realism to the
most exaggerated and grotesque sequences. Tulevicuite's physical and tonal
expressiveness was so great that even her monologues in Lithuanian held the
English audience spell-bound. The stage setting was extremely simple, a few
chairs and a table and a white cloth hanging from the flies. The skill of the
actors and the imaginative use of these minimal elements, especially the
cloth, which served as a backdrop, a screen for projections, a carpet, and a
costume created a visually rich production with these simple means. The
costumes also, especially the abstract forms with a hint of the Bauhaus worn
in those sequences where Nina became a more abstract idealized figure, were
quite effective too. The fascinating Ms. Tulevicuite also appeared in
Manhattan for a single evening on March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse
on West 49th Street in a one-woman show, The Last Night of Love, dealing
with a woman's attempt for the first time to express her true feelings for her
husband during his final hours. This production was also directed by
Adolfas Vecerskis and designed by Romas Dalinkevicius, with music by
Giedrius Zinkus.
67
VOLODYMYR KUCHYNSKY'S
LES KURBAS THEATRE FROM L VIV
Larissa Onyshkevych
On their recent visit to the United States, the Les Kurbas Theatre
of Lviv conducted workshops and performed plays in New York at
Columbia University, as well as at other campuses in the U.S. including the
University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The program included new
stagings of the classics by Ukrainian writers Skovoroda and Ukra"inka and
a new adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel-all in Ukrainian. The group also
held poetry readings of Taras Shevchenko and Bohdan Ihor Antonych.
Because the theatre could not bring all the necessary props from
Ukraine, the touring production of Skovoroda's Grateful Erodios differed
significantly from the original staging.
1
Rather than a whole background of
individual symbolic squares on several panels, two long sail-like runners
with eighteenth-century imagery were suspended on two crooked, dried-up
trees. Late medieval music, a Palestrina song, Eastern Christian church
chants, and secular tunes (in the style of Carmina Burana) accompanied the
entire performance, as did stylized ballet movements and dances to a strong
rhythmic beat.
Visual, musical and dance elements contributed greatly to the
production of Grateful Erodios, which actually belongs to the genre of
performance art. Skovoroda, an eighteenth-century philosopher, did not
intend his work as a play, and Kuchynsky's conversion of this supposedly
dry and heavily didactic parable into a theatrical performance was a major
artistic achievement. Repetitions of words, rhythms, and melodies produced
a rich texture of echoing questions and answers as in the Eastern liturgical
service.
Skorvorada's parable consists of a discussion between a stork,
Erodios, who is caring for his poor, aged parents, and a mother monkey
with fourteen children. The two discuss child-rearing and values. The
Monkey cannot understand an upbringing which stresses God, good
character, and love since she has taught her children to worship material
goods. Those who have ignored Erodios's teachings turn into writhing
creatures in hell. In striking contrast are the seeds and soil, which two
actors bring in little baskets, serving as emblems of the nourishment of love
and care for the heart that result in gratitude.
68
Natalka Polovynka as Dunia and Oleh Drach as Svidrigailov in Games for Faust
The! Les Kurbas Theatre from Lviv, New York Performance
69
As in other stagings by Les Kurbas Theatre, a single role was
performed by several different actors. Oleh Drach, Natalka Polovynka and
Oksana Tymbal appeared as the monkey, Pishek. Erodios was played by
Tetiana Kaspruk, Yuriy Mysak and Andriy Vodychev, each giving the role
a different emphasis-from the lyrical and emotional to the contemplative
and almost mystical. Vodychev's inspiring performance was one of his best.
The splitting of roles among several actors adds universality (especially when
both men and women alternate), although it may prove distracting to
spectators trying to orient themselves as to the identity of the characters.
The director, Volodymyr Kuchynsky, played the Father/Director, in a
manner reminiscent of Tadeusz Kantor, who served as Master of
Ceremonies in his own productions.
Kuchynsky claims that Skovoroda has enabled him to understand
Dostoyevsky, who likewise holds a special fascination for the director. The
Les Kurbas Theatre has already staged two different versions of the first part
of Crime and Punishment. The second part, Games for Faust, is based on i:he
penultimate scenes depicting Svidrigailov's visit to Raskolnikov and then
Dunia's visit to Svidrigailov. At the annual theatre festival in the southern
Ukraine, at the Khersones Games Festival in Sevastopol, Games for Faust was
voted the best play in 1994, while in 1995 it received the first place at the
Golden Lion International Festival in Lviv.
By naming the two scenes from Dostoyevky's novel Games for
Faust, Kuchynsky immediately signals the direction his staging will take:
representation of a Mephistophelian-Faustian tug of war over divided souls.
By isolating two particular scenes, the director has, as it were, placed them
under a microscope, centering all our attention on two inner and outer
conflicts: first the struggle within between Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov,
and then the battle without between Dunia and Svidrigailov.
In the first scene Raskolnikov has dream-like visions of his mother
and his sister Dunia. His mother appears, full of forebodings for her son,
who then asks for her prayers. All three Raskolnikovs are in white,
contrasting with Svidrigailov-Mephistopheles, who is dressed in black tails.
Svidrigailov, who holds a live mouse in his hands, plays a cat-and-mouse
game with Raskolnikov, relating his own similar visions and attempting to
trap Raskolnikov into confessing his own crime.
At the same time, Svidrigailov tortures Raskolnikov by talking
about his own desire for Dunia and the traps that he has set up for her. The
discussion is designed not only to torment Raskolnikov and ridicule his
rationalizations which, he maintains, allow those who are "above the law"
Andry Vodychev as Raskolnikov and Oleh Drach as
Svidrigailov in Games for Faust
The Les Kurbas Theatre
,......
"
to commit a small crime for the sake of a greater good; it also highlights
similar weaknesses in the characters of both the protagonists, indicating that
they are complementary doubles. Raskolnikov, played by the youthful
curly-haired Andriy Vodychev, projected the image of a child-like dreamer
detached from reality. Oleh Drach's Svidrigailov was a superb
Mephistopheles, who had to deal not only with Raskolnikov but also with
his own demons.
Svidrigailov, however, miscalculates his powers over Dunia, whom
he tricks into visiting him alone in his rooms. When she is ready to give
herself to him for the sake of her brother, Svidrigailov points out to her the
pleasure she takes in such abasement; but his arrogance makes her shoot
him. Dunia-Dushenka is Raskolnikov's soul, almost enslaved by
Mephistopheles before a last minute escape. It is at this point one fully
understands why the director called the two scenes Games for Faust.
As in his other productions with the Les Kurbas theatre, the
director digs into the deepest recesses of the protagonists' souls in order to
reveal the hidden motives for their actions. Dunia's sexual arousal, scarcely
perceptible in Dostoevsky's text, is made theatrically visual. Similarly, in
the initial scene, Raskolnikov's mother remembers rocking her son as a
baby, thereby making his infantile hiding in the bed easier to grasp. In
Raskolnikov's dream of his mother and sister, both are shown dancing and
singing enchantingly "0 sole mio"; these images stress Raskolnikov's
detachment from immediate reality. Natalka Polovynka was superb as the
sensuous and tempting Dunia, who at first lacks self-knowledge. From the
initial to the final scenes, Tetiana Kaspruk as the lamenting Mother, stressed
the eternal in the blind love between mother and child.
Kuchynsky continued the dialogue on moral and immoral deeds in
his new staging of Lesya Ura!nka's verse drama, On the Blood-Stained Field,
dealing with Judas's life after he has betrayed Christ with a kiss. Like a child,
Judas craves all the attention and blames Christ for drawing everybody's
gaze on Himself. Once we come to understand Judas we are almost ready
to forgive him.
To universalize Judas's crime and dilemma, the two roles in the
play-that of Judas and a Pilgrim-are performed by three pairs of actors.
Although the Pilgrim is usually presented as an old man, Kuchynsky has a
young man and then a woman play the role. Judas is also performed by
three different actors, as if to provide three different explanations for the
apostle's behavior. Oleh Tsiona plays Judas as a sarcastic contemporary,
Andriy Vodychev as a self-indulgent child, and Yuri Mysak as a dandy.
Simple, sparse props, Hebrew songs, Byzantine religious hymns, and
liturgical chants, and dancing create the background for this classic verse
drama. In these three productions by the Les Kurbas Theatre, Kuchynsky
has explored crime in relation to the laws of God and of human society,
uncovering the dark secrets of the human heart.
1
See my review and photographs in "Volodymyr Kuchynsky's Theatre of
Inquiry, "SEEP, vol. 15, no. 1, (Spring 1995} 34-49.
73
ANCA VI$DEI'S ALWAYS TOGETHER
AT UBU REPERTORY THEATER
Eric Pourchot
Always Together is a candidly autobiographical drama by Anca
an author who was forced to emigrate from Romania to Switzerland
at the age of nineteen. The play, written in French in 1990, deals with two
sisters, separated by the iron curtain, who try to maintain their friendship
and artistic careers over the years. The two-woman play traces their
relationship from 1973 through the overthrow of in December
1989.
Director Kourilsky accentuated the divergence between
the lives of the two sisters by casting American actress Maria Deasy as
Alexandra, the older sister who emigrates to Switzerland rather than face
censorship for her writings, and Thea Mercouffer, a performer who left
Romania in 1987, as the actress Ioana, the sister who remains behind. No
attempt was made to modify the accents of either actress, so the audience
was constantly reminded of the communication gap between the two,
especially later in the play when Alexandra complains that speaking
Romanian is interfering with her ability to learn French.
The production uses other deliberate incongruities and contrasts to
communicate the Kafka-esque world of Romania during this period, as well
as the wrenching dislocation of the young writer forced to express herself in
a new language. Logs and branches break the otherwise clean, modern lines
of the furniture. The set is split between the run-down, water-stained
apartment in Bucharest and a modern flat in Switzerland with built-in
cupboards.
The play begins as a dialog between the two school girls, and then
switches to letters, phone calls, and imagined conversations as their distance
increases. For those not familiar with Romania's recent history, the
procession of natural disasters, economic hardships, and political oppression
they describe may seem melodramatic. Sad to say, these events are
historically accurate. In addition to current incidents, segments of Puck's
speeches from A Midsummer Night's Dream are woven into the play,
through the use of an inset "stage" area at the back of the set.
The sisters are separated at first by the geographic distance between
74
Sla'rJicand East European Performance Vol. 16, No.2
Always Together by Anca i ~ d e i
Maria Deasy (left) and Thea Mercouffer (right)
Ubu Repertory Theatre, New York City
li)
!'-..
them, but the separation becomes much more severe when the younger
sister becomes the lover of the man who prevented Alexandra from getting
published in Romania. Only an annual New Year's card, reading "always
together," keeps them connected until, in parallel with the political thaw,
the two reunite, if only briefly. By 1989, Ioana knows that she can only
continue her acting career by remaining in Romania, and Alexandra is now
a "French" author who cannot return to her homeland. In this final
moment i ~ d e i captures the tragedy of the Romanian diaspora-although
the artists who have chosen or have been forced to leave can now return,
they have found new roots and cannot flourish in their homeland.
The script, written in 1990, received its premiere in Paris in 1994.
Stephen J. Vogel's seamless translation will be published this year by Ubu
Repertory Theater Publications in Plays by Women, Book 3. The play bears
reading-although the trials of immigration have been frequently been
treated in Eastern European drama, including The Foreigner, The Emigrants,
and Hunting Cockroaches, Always Together not only looks at the issue from
a woman's point of view, but also explores the special difficulties artists have
in leaving their culture or adopting a new one.
CONTRIBUTORS
JARKA BURIAN is a professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre at
the State University of New York at Albany. He has authored many studies
of modern theatre, including The Scenography ofjosepfSvobada and Svoboda:
Wagner. Professor Burian visited the Czech Republic on an IREX Grant in
1995, completing research on a study of Czech theatre from 1945 to 1960.
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City
University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of books and
articles on theatrical theory, European theatre history, and dramatic
literature. His publications include: Theories of the Theatre, Deathtraps, and
Performance: A Critical Introduction. He is the 1994 recipient of the George
Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism.
JOHN FREEDMAN is the theatre critic of the English-language daily, the
Moscow Times. He writes monthly reports on Moscow theatre for Plays
International (London), and is co-editor of Gordon and Breach's Russian
Theatre Archive, a series of books published by Harwood Academic
Publishers. For that series he has translated two volumes of plays by
Nikolai Erdman and Two Plays from the New Russia: Bald/Brunet by Daniel
Gink and Nijinsky by Alexei Burykin.
DAVID A. GOLDFARB teaches Polish and Russian literature at Hunter
College and is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Comparative
Literature at the City University of New York Graduate School.
LARISSA M. L. Z. ONYSHKEVYCH of the Princeton Research Forum
is a specialist of Ukrainian drama and theatre, and often writes on the
subject. Her two-volume bilingual Anthology of Modern Ukrainian Drama
is now in print. She also translates Ukrainian literature into English.
ERIC POURCHOT, a site director of Teletechnet at Old Dominion
University in Melfa, VA, has taught courses in theatre at Long Island
University and is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at
the City University of New York Graduate Center.
JENNIFER STARBUCK is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School.
77
ESZTER SZALCZER, a native of Hungary, is a doctoral candidate in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate
School.
KEVIN WINDLE is a tranlator of Slavic languages and a Senior Lecturer
in Russian at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Photo Credits
Vaclav Havel in the mid-1960s
Erich Einhorn
Alfred Radok in the 1960s
Dr. Jaromlr Svoboda
Havel's The Garden Party
Dr. Lubomlr Rohan
Otomar Krejca in the early 1960s
V. Praze
Andy Warhol 's Last Love, New York
Roe DiBona
Guido and Tyrius, Szentendre, Hungary
Peter Donath
Pig, Chiild, Fire!, New York
Robert A. Schafer.
Pieca, Wroclaw, Poland
Peter Donath
Anca Visdei's Always Together
Jonathan Slaff
PLA YSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A):
No. 1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.2 I, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredynski. Translated by Michal
Kobialka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski. Stage
Adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English verstion by Earl Ostroff
and Daniel C. Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .
No. 5 The Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 6 The Ambassador, by Slawomir Mrozek. Translated by Slawomir
Mrozek and Ralph Mannheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets
and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00
($6.00 foreign) .
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Toborski, Michal Kobialka,
and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C.
Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and Catalog
by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
79
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April 30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign) .
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
80
CASTA-THEATRE PROGRAM
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
33 WEST 42nd STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10036
Now in its 15th year, this journal, edited by Daniel Gcrould,
brings readers li vely, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and
fi lm in Russia and Eastern Europe. lndudes features on important
new plays in pertormam:e, archival documents, innovative
producti ons, significant revivals, emerging artisLs, the latest in
film. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Published three
times per year-$ 10 per annum ($ 15.00 foreign) .
!'lease end nlC the fullowin):
CASTA publication:
,\'ltt\'il' f.'urnpean
Ptt1UI111t ma _ (n> $10.00 per yc"r
(t'urcgn) _ (n
1

TotJl
Send order with check to:
CASTA, CUNY Graduate Center
11 West 42ml Street
New York. NY 101H6
\\
EUROP JQ
STt\GES rU
. "?_ \_/\ )

f s

c::jl
IH ,..,......;. _
'.! ... ""1>o..... t lt..YNI'< o
An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre
developments in Western Europe. Issued three times a year - Spring,
Winter, and Fall- and edited by Marvin Carlson, each issue contains a
wealth of information about recent European festivals and productions,
including reviews, interviews, and reports. Winter issues focus on the
theatre in individual countries or on special themes. The 1996 Special
Issue is devoted to contemporary women directors. News of
forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artistic directorships, new
plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and directorial
interpretations.- $15 per annum ($19.00 foreign).
Please send me the following CASTA publication:
Western European Stages
_ @ $15.00peryear
(Foreign) _ @ $ 19.00 per year
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre
in the USA - past and present. Provocative, thoughtful articles by
the leading scholars of our time providing invaluable insight and
information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its
continuing contribution to world literature and the performing
arts. Edited by Vera Mowry Roberts and Jane Bowers. Published
three times per year - $12 per annum ($18.00 foreign).
Please send me the following
CASTA publication:
Journal of American Drama
and Theatre _@ $12.00 per year
(Foreign)_@ $18.00
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
PhD Program in Theatre
at the Graduate School and University Center
of the City University of New York
Offers graduate training in Theatre Studies
Certificate program in Film Studies
Recent Seminars include
Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
The Current New York Season Feminist Theory and Performance Melodrama
The History Play Dramaturgy Simulations Film Aesthetics
African-American Theatre of the 60s and 70s
Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance
Theatre History Dramatic Structure Theatre Criticism
Strindberg and Modernism American Film Comedy Kabuki
Films and Theatre of Ingmar Bergman Minstrelsy 1865-Present
Italian Theatre Latino Theatre in the U.S. Women and the Avant-Garde
Interdisciplinary Options
with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields
and through a consortial arrangement with
New York University and Columbia University
Affiliated with Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts and
Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Western European Stages
Slavic and Eastern European Performance
Theatre faculty include:
Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Dan Gerould, Judith Milhous
and James Hatch, Jonathan Kalb, Miriam D'Aponte, Harry Carlson, Jane Bowers
Rosette Lamont, Samuel Leiter, Gloria Waldman, Ralph Allen, Albert Bermel,
Mira Feiner, Morris Dickstein, Stephen Langley, Benito Ortolani, David Willinger
Film faculty include:
Stuart Liebman, William Boddy, George Custen, Tony Pipolo,
Leonard Quart, Joyce Rheuban, and Ella Shohat
Theatre Program
CUNY Graduate Center
33 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-8099
(212) 642-2231
[email protected] .edu

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