Quite frankly, I am not competent to judge the musical merits of Michal Zadara’s and Franck Ollu’s production of Iannis Xenakis’s Oresteia at the National Opera. I barely know a little bit more about music than Mr. Ż, the journalist I sat next to at the performance: he asked me during the tuning of the orchestra if they had begun yet. Still, determining how well conductor Franck Ollu coped with this difficult piece, or if Maciej Nerkowski sang the part of Cassandra perfectly, or whether the choir’s singing was „exquisite” goes beyond my capacities as a theatre critic. I trust Jacek Hawryluk, Gazeta Wyborcza’s music critic - who wrote in his review that musically, everything in this production works very well.
Hawryluk’s opinions about Michal Zadara’s staging, on the other hand, are unacceptable: he dismisses it with a few condescending remarks. He complains that Zadara „completely annexed Aeschylus”, thereby depriving the audience of „the pleasure of experiencing the greek original. [...] there is no space for one’s own associations, there is no permission to experience the tragic history individually. Aeschylus has been replaced by Zadara.”
Leaving aside the absurdity of demanding to see „the original” in the case of a greek tragedy, I can try to reconstruct Hawryluk’s cognitive dissonance. Instead of the fall of the house of Atreus, what he saw on stage was a short course on Polish postwar history: from the PKWN manifesto and the rural reforms in 1945 to the 1970 strikes and the era of joyous consumerism under first secretary Edward Gierek. Instead of the town square in Mycaenae, the action takes place in the offices of a land redistribution committee, a worker’s cinema and a factory cafeteria. The greek chorus is populated by Polish farmers, workers, soldiers and militiamen, while the main characters of the drama are soldiers, members of youth organisations and party activists.
But is it really, as Hawryluk claims, an abuse of Zadara’s directorial competence to turn Iannis Xenakis’s Oresteia into an opera about Polish history? That depends on how one understands the Oresteia, and, by extension, Greek tragedy in general. If all one sees in the tragedies are tales about Greek kings who butchered each other, Zadara’s staging seems not only audacious, but downright stupid. Can there be communists five centuries before Christ? If, however, we look at the Oresteia in mythic categories, as an analysis of a fundamental civilizational transformation, Zadara’s theatrical-operatic concept turns out to be not only justified, but also a true discovery.
The Greek Oresteia turns out to be an excellent key to Polish history in the latter half of the twentieth century because it outlines the beginnings of Athenian statehood. Just like in postwar Poland, the new Athenian system emerged from the ruins of old laws and old gods, in the shadow of a recent war. The old world of Agamemnon, Klytemnestra and Aigisthos, based on natural law, is replaced in the Oresteia by a new order, based on human law. Democracy replaces tyranny. Orestes’ trial is the deciding moment: he is acquitted of matricide on the Athenian Aeropagus. In this way, Aeschylus, an opponent of tyranny voiced his support for a democratic state.
In Zadara’s staging, the three parts of the trilogy correspond with three periods in Poland’s post-war history: Agamemnon takes place in stalinist times, The Libation Bearers during the thaw of 1956, and The Eumenides after the bloody crackdown on the strikes on the coast at the beginning of the 1970’s. While the characters have acquired a Polish identity, their dramaturgical function remains the same.
Agamemnon returns victorious from a war - not the Trojan War, but the Second World War, as a soldier of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Klytemnestra betrays him with Aigisthos, a communist activist, and has taken on the new faith herself, helping with the land reform. On a symbolic level, the old order dies when Agamemnon is murdered by representatives of the new order. The recently concluded war justifies the bloodshed: the chorus of peasants watches newsreels of endless suffering and destruction in a makeshift cinema.
In The Libation Bearers, the crime is punished. Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns among a group of former political prisoners to kill Klytemnestra and Aigisthos, which reads as a symbolical punishment for stalinist crimes and as the end of the stalinist period.
The Eumenides bring forgiveness and unity after another social upheaval: the 1970 strikes. Zadara ascribes the function of the goddess Athena to Edward Gierek, the first secretary of the communist party, who greets the spectators and asks them his famous question: „will you give a hand?” The opera ends with a vision of the „propaganda of success” of the 1970’s - a chorus of workers and children praises the peace between the people and the state: „Let joy give birth to joy/you, who believe in joy and prosperity/go in peace/you are no longer children of the night.”
Is this conflation of Polish history with Greek myth not an abuse of Aeschylus? If so, then it is an crime that the classics of polish literature are guilty of. Jan Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Ambassadors, a renaissance-era play that takes place during the Trojan War, includes reflections about the responsibilities of the rulers of the Polish commonwealth. In Stanisław Wyspiański’s turn of the century November Night, the Greek gods Athena, Nike (in several incarnations) and Ares observe Polish officers planning the 1830 overthrow of the occupational Russian government of Poland. Zadara is not the first artist who uses greek mythology to talk about modern Polish history, he only does it more radically than others. Accusing him of „annexing Aeschylos” is pointless.
Furthermore, Zadara has not omitted any text from Xenakis’s Aeschylus-based libretto. He has made a new translation that uses contemporary language and „polonizes” certain phenomena and terms. Instead of „the gods”, we have „God” - which is not a long stretch from Aeschylus’s near-monotheism. Instead of „Mother Night”, the Furies (in Zadara’s staging: furious workers) turn to the Virgin Mary („Holy holy mother/Mother black as the night”). After Agamemnon’s death, the chorus does not mourn the „king” but their „lord” - which is a reference to indentured servitude, abolished after the war. The most changes appear in the last part, where Athena’s speech has been colored in a way reminiscent of communist newspeak: „we are building prosperity, [...] you trust guarantees your security [...], common good [...], take matters into our own hands.” A radical but justified approach: in Aeschylus’s play, Athena represents state ideology, after all.
This approach to tragedy also appears to be close to Xenakis’s spirit, himself a survivor of the second world war, a veteran of the Greek resistance, who lost his eye during the war, and - as a communist - was forced to leave his country, where, in his absence, he was sentenced to death. It’s hard to imagine that someone like him would adapt the Oresteia in order to „experience the Greek original”. He would not have written this kind of raw, brutal music, in which we hear the sounds of machine guns and the dissonant cries of the victims.
Instead of asking whether a director has the right to transpose a text, one can ast a more interesting question: what is can be learned from this transposition of myth to postwar history? In my opinion, quite a lot. Above all, Zadara shows us the mechanism of how crimes are repressed. In Aeschylus, harmony can only be restored if three crimes - the murders of Agamemnon, Klytemnestra and Aigisthos - are forgotten. The court acquits Orestes, even though he has committed one of the most heinous crimes: matricide. Athena transforms the Furies, the gods of revenge that chase Orestes, into Eumenides - the gracious ones, who from now on are to watch over the well-being of the city. She promises them a deal: if they submit to the law, she will protect them. Athena says, in Zadara’s translation of Aeschylus’s text:
"Neither anarchy nor tyranny are good. We have to find the golden mean. Who would want to live in a country where everything is allowed? I promise that the courts will be just, incorruptible, that they will be strict and know mercy, to protect the calm sleep of the country. By respecting these terms we will create more wealth - in this city and in the whole country - than is possessed by any other country, in the west or the east."
Wealth in exchange for forgiveness and unification. This social contract carries the seeds of future conflicts. Crimes, unfortunately, cannot be forgotten. Sooner or later, someone will want to avenge them. Neither welfare nor consumption will cause them to disappear. We have enough proof for this in our own country, constantly shaken by an unsettled past. On the other hand, however, Aeschylus demonstrates how a lack of forgiveness leads to annihilation: revenge breeds revenge from generation to generation. Only a democratic decision can stop this circle of revenge.
The second important problem addressed by Zadara’s staging is the responsibility of our whole society for communism. In the last twenty years, it was common to hear that communism in Poland was only supported by a few individuals, but that the Nation as a whole was opposed all along. Zadara questions this myth: „the people” play the most important part in the performance. This is, of course, a consequence of the construction of this chorus-based opera. The chorus of peasants and workers takes an active part in this history, is not its object, but its subject. This chorus watches Agamemnon being murdered, partakes in Orestes’ revenge, and then organizes a strike, only to turn into a chorus of „kindly ones” who praise social peace and welfare.
This last scene seems to be the most interesting and controversial in the whole performance. It takes place in the early 1970s - the era of „proaganda of success” - and portrays the utopian unity of party and nation. The strikes and repressions in Radom have not yet taken place, the committee to defend the workers (KOR) has not yet been founded. Poland is growing stronger, the people are living more comfortably, as evidenced by the citrus fruits and the motorcycle on the stage. The chorus, dressed in worker’s overalls, is praising the government - as if we were at a government-sponsored rally. They are praising their good rulers, who are „taking care of the country and our children” as they promise: „we will double the amount of livestock in the fields, and the miners will incessantly be retrieving the black gold from the mines.”
This scene, finally, opens up a polemic space where a real discussion with Zadara’s staging should take place. What does this apotheosis of the Gierek era mean - an era which the young director knows only from his partents’ tales? Is this really an attempt to rehabilitate the 1970’s, or, quite on the contrary - to criticize a politics based on gagging a society with prosperity and consumerism? Why does Zadara show us Poland from before the Solidarity strikes and Martial Law, not yet judged by historical politics, in utopian happiness?
In statements made before the premiere, Zadara explained that he wanted to show the beginnings of today’s post-political thinking in which ideas have given way to prosperity and economic growth. The social contract that Gierek made with the population resembles, in Zadara’s opinion, today’s social contract, agreed upon at the beginning of the 1990’s: history is over and we have to forget all of the old crimes that might stop us from building capitalism together.
At first, that thought seemed absurd to me: after all, this ostensibly joyous Gierek-era Poland, this country flowing with milk and honey, was supported by a repressive police apparatus that resulted in the Radom strikes and police brutality. The analogy to today’s Poland seems false - today, one can even insult the president with impunity.
But Zadara prepared a trap for the audience that provides food for thought. Just before the end of the show, the spectators receive large pieces of paper, labeled as follows: „wave this paper when the conductor gives a sign.” And when the last bars of Xenakis’ score are heard, maestro Ollu gives the sign, and the audience joins the euphoric atmosphere by energetically shaking these pieces of paper. It reminds me of the atmosphere at communist-era rallies. I looked around the auditorium: no one resisted, everyone waved, including me.
I don’t know if we all felt nostalgia for the time when comrade Gierek was first secretary, if it was just an question of crowd dynamics, or if we all just wanted to join the celebration. Either way, without hesitation, we all let ourselves be overtaken by mass enthusiasm, even though we had been witnesses to a series of bloody murders just a few moments earlier. Zadara thereby revealed a shameful aspect of the human psyche that is hidden in our day to day lives: the capacity to repress disquieting memories in order to continue functioning. Twenty years have passed since the fall of communism, but we still allow ourselves to be led by the hand like children. The question is whether this only takes place at the opera.
Roman Pawłowski, Warsaw, 2010
This article was orginally written as a polemic to by published in the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Roman Pawłowski is a culture critic and journalist with Gazeta Wyborcza, the biggest opinion-forming newspaper in Poland. He studied theatre studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and has been writing on theatre and culture since 1990. In his writing, he focuses on new playwriting and cultural politics. He has published two collections of new Polish drama: The Porno Generation and Other Distasteful Theatrical Pieces (2003) and Made in Poland (2005), both of which gave a very strong impulse for the development of contemporary playwriting in Poland. A laureate of the Zbigniew Raszewski Award for the best Polish press critic, he is a regular contributor to „Notatnik Teatralny”, a theatre quarterly based in Wroclaw.