The Stary Theatre’s new production has the force of Michal Zadara’s best earlier productions and a literary scope that has been developing in Pawel Demirski’s work from play to play.
While New Yorkers watch Grzegorz Jarzyna’s mega-production 2007:Macbeth (produced by TR Warszawa) underneath Brooklyn Bridge, the audience in Krakow can see another classic tragedy set by the director in a contemporary military base – Michal Zadara’s and Pawel Demirski’s Iphigenia.
Both productions are an analysis of the media image of the war in Iraq – Mr. Jarzyna’s production, however, strays into the unfortunate realms of a Hollywood-like spectacle. Iraq was the first war from which Poles received regular and colorful accounts of “our brave boys” – of their successes, their mistakes and their deaths. War correspondents became heroes of the collective imagination. The images of army transports crossing the desert, filmed for effect and propaganda, turned into an American action series on TV set against an exciting background of global politics. Jarzyna’s Macbeth was a reflection of this. The action of Zadara and Demirski’s Iphigenia also takes place on an army base in the Middle East (Troy, besieged by the Greeks in ancient times, is in today’s Turkey). The basic problem is the same as in Racine’s and Euripides’ tragedies of the same name: the weather is the reason (this time, there is not too little wind, but a hurricane) why the allied commanders Agamemnon (Jan Peszek) and Achilles (Arkadiusz Brykalski) cannot begin their attack on Troy. A local religious leader, Kalchas, insists that only the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Barbara Wysocka), the daughter of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra (Anna Radwan-Gancarczyk) can change the weather. Agamemnon agrees to this sacrifice, for political reasons.
Mr. Zadara employs a simple strategy: he tells this story in a space somewhat reminiscent of a television studio. Omnipresent prompters (the largest of these is a text projection on the sole set piece – a two meter high wall that cuts the stage in half diagonally) feed the actors their text, multiply their words and form visual echoes. Sometimes the audience can only read the text off the prompters, because the actors become invisible or unhearable in roaring of the hurricane. The production becomes a celebration of text, a baroque monster of declamation, articulation and assertion. Through this overproduction of language, the authors maintain their fidelity to Racine, a writer balancing between the baroque and classicism. The characters do not enter into dialogs, but proclaim monologs filled with rhetorical figures, proclamations, and declarations.
The TV-like nature of the performance turns this play into a critique of western military politics. Do we help others to help them, or to televise ourselves helping? The text is full of references to “broadcasting broadcasts”, “media spectacles” and so forth. The characters do not – as in Racine’s original version – speak of their honor or dignity, but of their position and their prestige; traits based on self-promotion and self-presentation. Even when she goes to die, Iphigenia is concerned with what she wears – because, as we suspect, films of her execution will make their way onto YouTube.
Mr. Demirski’s and Mr. Zadara’s diagnosis seems to be this: what Racine and Euripides perceived as a drama of two rights, today has dwarfed into a conflict of interests and publicity. This is a cynical post-politics, whose most emblematic figure is Jan Peszek’s Agamemnon: he invokes the grandness and history of Europe after every crime he commits, and calls on others to sacrifice themselves to benefit his interests.
This is not Mr. Demirski’s first play to deal with Poland’s participation in global wars. One of his previous plays, Padnij (Drop Dead), dealt with the situation of the wives of Polish soldiers serving in Iraq. He showed not only the drama of waiting women, but also their materialist approach to their husbands’ work (“Why couldn’t they go and stabilize somewhere in the Bahamas? Then we could go and visit them…”, or, “I don’t mid if he beats me, as long as he brings home a general’s wages.”) and the paternalistic approach to the citizens of the countries being “stabilized”. His new version of Iphigenia also concentrates on women. What is most interesting besides the main plot of Iphigenia – the daughter of a high-up general – is the story of Eriphile (Ewa Kaim) and Doris (Malgorzata Zawadzka), Achilles female prisoners. The young general captured them after annihilating their homes on Lesbos, after which he regularly beat and raped them. This subplot exposes the motif of misogyny and the costs that women pay when the boys go and play with guns.
Mr. Demirski and Mr. Zadara combine these themes with the issue of the instrumentalization of human rights and “peacekeeping missions”, which not only worsen the situation of the victims of these conflicts, but also – used cunningly – turn their lives into currency tha is exchanged for the prestige of generals, politicians and corporate heads. Mr. Zadara shows Eriphile and Doris as refugees with no rights beside their human rights. The problem of stateless persons has been theorized by numerous philosophers, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, who suggested that they way a society treats its refugees is a measure of its respect for humans in general. Seen in this light, Mr. Zadara and Mr. Demirski paint a bleak picture of our society.
This production - with very strong roles by Anna Radwan-Gancarczyk, Jan Peszek, Barbara Wysocka, and a disarming comic finale by Roman Gancarczyk (Ulysses) – is one of the highpoints of the careers of both of its authors. The writers and directors of this generation do not play war like their older colleagues, but are able to deeply justify their pacifism.
Joanna Derkaczew
Gazeta Wyborcza nr. 153 / 2008
Translation Stary Teatr.