Piotr Cieplak: The reason for our meeting is Stockholm, the participation in the preparations for significant theatre - culture undertakings on the occasion of The European Capital of Culture. But not only. Now, at the Variety Theatre (Teatr Rozmaitości), I'm working on the play "Snake Skin" by a Croatian, Slobodan Snajder. You are dealing with the Balkans and all the possible borderlands, and the play is concerned also with that. The latest two editions of "Krasnogruda" devoted to ex-Jugoslavia have been read over and over by my troupe. What can be considered our common plane is "borderland", which can also be translated into my "variety". I believe in something like a variety of worlds, tones, in paradoxes the world is saturated with. I believe there is nothing like one exponent. When there is only one - theatre dies. I believe there is a conflict, a tension, a mystery on all the levels: in the way of narration, inside a theatrical spectacle, but also on a wider level, in a community of people, in the world.
Krzysztof Czyżewski: You have at once given our conversation an air of solemnity. You do not want small talk. I daresay that is what you have always been like: treating things seriously, concentrated, aiming high, requiring a lot from yourself and from others. How are you getting on with a Piotr Cieplak like that at the Variety Theatre, a small theatre but a professional one, situated in Marszałkowska Street? How are you getting on as the artistic manager of a so-called repertoire theatre which must be "for people" who may not understand "variety" in the way you do, but just as a light variete, for example? And what about institutional rigidity, little time for preparing first nights, financial troubles. . . ?
The Variety Theatre has also its chief manager, Bogdan Słoński. He is an expert in a lot of things, it is he who takes decisions and solves a lot of maintenance problems. On the other hand, the kind of tension and intensity which occur in this theatre are very good for it. It is the smallest theatre in Warsaw, thank God! If the existential intensity of the group of actors could be translated into the intensity of theatrical performances, it would be great. I sometimes seem to think that it works. My theatre is a fairly uncommon combination of an institution with something which is a sort of a social-artistic off group. There are two elements combined here, the elements that have been somehow in opposition to each other in theatre until now. What we aim at is to combine it in order to take advantage of what is the blessing of institution and what is the experience of all sorts and kinds of theatrical groups. I do not even mean Grotowski or such experiences, but about something which has been functioning in various wandering theatrical troupes from the beginning of the world. And to some extent we are different from other capital city theatres. Here, some basic movements are enough to be very clearly seen.
What movements are they, for example?
It may sound funny or even prosaic, but, for example, that we talk to one another. For us, the plays we are putting on are not successful titles the theatrical factory undertakes to produce. "Snake Skin", which we are working on now, is an utterance which somehow concerns us and, in connection with that, our co-existence stops being just a purely artistic or aesthetic problem. It is necessary for us to live. We argue about the world, and not from which wing an actor is to enter. We talk to one another, which makes our troupe integrated, at least more than in other theatres. It influences directly our everyday intensive kind of work. There is no revolution here, we do not run barefoot if it is not necessary. Externally it does not differ from the standards and principles in force everywhere, but it is saturated in a different way. We sing a lot together. I am present at every performance, so we can comment upon it without delay.
And what about the skills? Do you work on them, do you invite anybody from the outside?
We spend some days a month with Ms Olga Szwajger, an expert in human voice and the regions it comes from. It is wonderful as far as the skills are concerned, but what is perhaps even more important is the influence of these meetings on the spiritual climate in the group. After such meeting it is easier for us for talk to one another, we are more patient, more lenient. For me, such direction of work is not fortuitous. I have been thinking intimately about a theatrical group. I mean working with a permanent troupe, a performance where the work is not finished at the time of the opening night, the value of putting on another production with the same people, so as to be able to develop the experiences from the previous one. Still, it may appear that what is going on in the Variety Theatre, which is a sort of a compromise, will not be enough, that it will be necessary to leave for a barn somewhere in Sejny. But for the time being it is as it is and it seems it will be so for a long time. Kantor did not have such conditions of work as we have here.
From what you are saying , there emerges a certain separateness of your theatre. It is also recognized by viewers and critics in Poland. Something different is beginning to go on within institutional theatre. You are talking about a different atmosphere, about creating a troupe, about different conditions of work. I wonder what it results from. I think that there is an inner necessity like that in you and in your troupe, that you have been missing something like that, that you are looking for your own theatre. Isn't it connected with the reaction to what is going on in theatre abroad? Do you agree with the opinion which is generally expressed in our country, that theatre is in the state of crisis, and it is most certainly so in the Polish theatre? And that it already is something serious, not a temporary bad mood? In Poland where theatre has played a very important role for the latest decades, it has been in the artistic and philosophical vanguard, just in Poland it is said today that all has fallen down, that theatre has become commercialized and has lost its identity. There are people who notice the fact that it was Kantor who marked the end of the epoch of great directors and stage - managers, while some other people say - and it is difficult to disagree with them - that theatre's gravity centre has moved East, that great performances still occur today in Lithuania, Estonia or Russia.
Well, yes, but somebody like Kantor is born once a century, and it is without reference to the tendencies or some general trends. There is no doubt that there is a process of change going on, that a certain idea of theatre has finished. I daresay it is natural. At the moment, a new generation of actors and directors is said to emerge, and a new theatre with them. There are really plenty of new names, but I am afraid that what really connects them are their acts of birth. They are younger. But it may be risky to point out any more aspects they have in common. The old opposition of the alternative and institutional theatre has been completely done away with. The music which we can hear at the theatre today, often hard rock music, would have been out of the question until recently. It is so with the use of the pop culture language as well, but not the gangrenous and Americanized one, but the one connected with fast montage, cellular telephone, techno or rap music. These are the things which may be good or bad, but they belong to modern language, they have their rightful place in theatre. Some time ago there was a violin only... All that has perhaps appeared in the alternative theatre first, but by now it has got mixed up and it is O.K.
So you do not feel any special generational kinship with your contemporaries who entered theatre with the new wave, for example with Anna Augustynowicz?
I am friends with Zbyszek Soza, because we simply know each other. Annie Augustynowicz, who is achieving her triumphs now, is just my university colleague who I have been quarreling with since the second day of our acquaintance. I think they are a well - mannered society, well - disposed to one another, but maybe that is why - in spite of having quite different ideas connected with what should be done in theatre, having different tastes, being so far away from one another - they can simply like one another.
You have pointed out the things which are the discriminants of the New in theatre and which are connected with some aesthetic aspects, as the pop culture language, new music or mounting. Still, it seems to me that your revolution, your rebellion in theatre, is concentrated not on aesthetics but on a sort of ethos which you and the people dear and near try to find, giving it some perspective into the future. My theatrical experience, as you know, comes from alternative theatre. When I think of what was particularly precious in it, I believe it must have been inter-human intimacy in carrying out a common cause which requires a different way of working, and tearing routine off, looking for a new language of conversation and meeting. It also had its bad sides though. Wandering with "Gardzienice" and meeting various alternative theatres all over the world, I used to notice how easily that community spirit became distorted and changed into slavery under the dictate of some theatrical "guru", how quickly the theatrical language which had been considered authentic, got fossilized in routine and mannerism. There even was a time when I looked with envy at professional actors of institutional theatre who come to the theatre at a given time, do their professional work and then go quietly to their private world and no "guru" meddles with it. And after some time I meet you who says: well, now, ... appointed hours of work are all right, but it is not enough...
While working, somewhere at the beginning of my creative track in Wrocław, on the Mediaeval drama "The Story about Our Lord's Glorious Resurrection " by Mikołaj of Wilkowiecko I wanted to make a publicist sketch in the spirit of picaresque tales. And suddenly I read: "... Death comes." And what now? Is it only a sketch figure or real Death? How to play Death? It was the first time when I asked myself that question. Very slowly I was coming to realize that theatre may include a significant sphere of subjects, referring to myself personally. In order to do something about angels, death or love, one should work on it for a longer time, one should think about one's theatre, about a certain common cause. One can't drink vodka and do a good theatre. One can't go dubbing and then do a good theatre. Then there arises a question of spirituality, of the necessity of concentration, of mutual relations among actors. And as theatre is my life, and I have already ruined so many things in my life, theatre remains my chance for redemption. That is why working at the theatre for only those appointed hours resulting from the professional agreement is not enough. . .
Aren't you afraid to offer the viewers at that varieté of yours in Marszałkowska Street the play by Slobodan Snajder, a cruel and gloomy play, recalling the tragedy in Bosnia, the tragedy we would like to be as far from as possible?
It seems to me that our theatre has already got its own, a bit different, audience. Warsaw is a great, one - and - a half-million city, while our house has only 250 seats. A lot of young people come to us. They have realized that we do serious things here. Serious does not mean deadly bombastic, but it means we treat them seriously. We have done "Dog's Last Will", a play which is awfully funny until all the persons start murdering one another.
I'm not going to hide the fact that I am glad that "Snake Skin" is going to have its first night at your theatre soon. It's for the first time in our country. I have a feeling that ,in Poland, we have overslept Bosnia a little. The most important event in the Europe of the second half of this century has passed almost unnoticed here, there has been nothing more than some press news, without deepened reflection, without any special debates on the subject. As you know, we have been trying to do something in "Borderland", and we are still trying to make Bosnia closer to Poland, but it is still very little.
I think you are right in thinking that Bosnia did not stamp itself deeply in Poland. But maybe it isn't accidental, maybe it does not result from the Polish foolishness or parochiality, but from the fact that the Polish, so deeply tried by History, have been enjoying freedom, democracy and epidermic wealth. Keeping your passport in your drawer, having a possibility to buy one out of twenty brands of beer at a night shop - we feed on it. In a human being there is a natural self-defence against scratching tragedies, against war, against the subjects that have been debated in Poland for years and years.
It would be interesting to trace how it looks like in various places in Europe after the year 1989. We were in Stockholm together not long ago, to see the performance of their theatre "Tribunalen", based on the play "Powder keg" by a Macedonian dramatist Dajan Dukovski. We were both shocked and a bit disgusted with the naturalistic language of the spectacle, full of cruelty and violence expressed directly. Someone who was shocked, too, was the director from Macedonia with whom we were watching the play together and who had put on the same play in Skopje. But he had directed a comedy which had made people roar with laughter. There, in the theatre in the Balkans, it is not possible to speak in a different way about the reality which is so close. In Stockholm for a change, while entering a back gate of a street keeping up appearances of wealth and self-satisfaction, one felt the necessity to take everything seriously, and to scratch wounds. This impression deepened when I was in Uppsala some time ago, to see a spectacle about refugees in Europe, entitled "Pentecost", directed by Jasenko Selimović, a director from Sarajevo, now very popular in Sweden. I was sitting in the house with people who perceived intently the tale about persecuted refugees, but most of all they perceived the accusation aimed at Europe, its hypocrisy and conformism. I felt the necessity of a new European contending in that house. The ovation seemed neverending. And let us take our country after the year 1989: at last there is peace and quiet, fascination with the West, with wonderful Europe from which we have been separated by the iron curtain.
To some extent I have a feeling that I am doing the play against the tide. I also have a feeling of the universal character of its message. This play is also about Poland, it is written in a modern language, recalling modern metaphors and pictures, for all the world like a Polish romantic play. It speaks about sacrifice, about the hypocrisy of Europe, about the loneliness of a victim who sacrifices himself/herself on the altar of values. And besides, this going against the tide of the Polish reality of today has its sense - a few metres from my theatre there are buildings in whose walls one can still see the bullet holes from the World War II. I have a feeling that the town from "Snake Skin" - in which you do not know who wears what uniforms and who believes in what God, because there are many and it is better not to ask - that it is Warsaw too, and who but the Polish understand so well what the wheel of History means, the wheel that turns in all directions.
Besides, there is something in Snajder that I would call a fresh reading of old myths, and it is possible only thanks to experiencing the tragedy from the end of our century from a short distance, from Zagreb, from the Balkans themselves. Let's take Christmas, for example, associated in our country with a carol, with something warm and bright. Our cultural memory does not any longer preserve the real picture of those times, when the Massacre of Innocents took place in the world, when everything was dipped in the night full of monstrosity and cruelty. Only the messengers from there, from the territories of ethnic purges, mass rapes and slaughters, bring back to us, in its completely bare form, what we have had time to varnish and tame.
It is intimate to me to speak about religious aspects like that, to use religious figures so that they are not as if they were taken out of the Christ child's crib, not full of bigotry, but so that they carry real meaning in them, and then also cruelty and drama are revealed. Religion is not a series of little tales for good children, it is also drama, fear, devils, death, it is nonentity and salvation. It is not Sunday school. I have found an ally in Snajder.
I know that you went to Croatia to meet him, that you were talking for a long time.
It was important to me to get to know this man personally. And what about the country itself? I was shocked with its beauty and normality. This impression is the more shocking the sooner you realize what lies in wait round the corner. One has a natural tendency to move macabre things away from oneself. One thinks it cannot happen in a civilized world. Zagreb is simply a small Vienna - a wonderful, wealthy, quiet, bourgeois town.
Well, and in that normal European town you met a man who feels ill at ease, fights and is fought against.
Yes, nowhere is it praised to tell one's countrymen unpleasant things. Snajder has troubles because he says unpleasant things to Croatians, hurts them. He has troubles with the Croatian government, because it is a country with a monolitic, dictatorial government. I remember an unusual scene when, when we were going for a walk, a woman came up to Slobodan to thank him for the texts that had been published in some local newspaper some time before. She spoke in a low voice, looking around her. A scene like those of the time of martial law in Warsaw. I gained a lot due to that journey. I realized I understood Snajder because I was Polish. A common Central Europe experience helped me to find a common language with him very quickly. What was, until then, parading with my own particular pain, with a sort of tangling in my own mood, suddenly appeared to be a value making it possible for me to communicate and to have a real conversation. Meetings of that kind lead me, just as they do you, to Stockholm, where, together with a lot of creators from various countries, we are to make a common project on Europe, to create a museum of Europe's sins, and this circumstance - without reference to artistic results of this undertaking - is really very precious to me, some Polish parochial bourgeois. I may be using platitudes, but it is only in connection with that Stockholm adventure that I discover to what extent Polish theatre is closed up. I do not want to say that it is bad, because the aesthetic side of thinking about theatre is very mature, because theatrical taste in our country is really refined. But at the same time our theatre is closed up. We are in great need of travels. Well, now for example, on coming to Sejny, I get to know a lot of things I need for my work on the spectacle, for example what symbolism and myths about snakes there are among Gypsies or Lithuanians...
On coming to Sejny you may experience the same that Slobodan Snajder experienced on reception of his "Snake Skin" - the farther East, the more it changes, because the devilish image of a snake, connected with Christianity, gives way to not yet fully eradicated pre-Christian or Oriental traditions. Here you are on the Polish-Lithuanian borderland, where, until recently, girls used to put out a bowl of milk for snakes on the threshold of their houses, because they believed they would bring them happiness in love and matrimony.
During our conversation in Zagreb Slobodan said he felt a slight thirst after the first nights of his play put out mainly in the West (the world premiere took place in Tübingen), and it was connected with a sort of a rationalization of the sphere of religious imagination. Dried-out imagination does not treat seriously such notions as heaven, ghosts or angels. He said then that he counted on Slav potentials. It is funny that he used that expression quite seriously. In Poland the word "Slav" does not have good associations, because we have heard it mainly from the mouths of Russians, and behind it there stood imperial Slavophilism identified with Rusophilism. But there is something in that potential of ours.
Don't you seem to think that religiousness, and what is more, the religiousness in the traditional sense, so, in case of Poland, mostly the Catholic one, comes back among the the younger generation as the definition of their own identity? After the generations looking for their identity in rationalistic, post-modernistic, new-age trends, there comes a time for a serious approach to one's own traditional religion. I don't mean the Catholic integrism which is dangerous and quite popular in the circles of our young intellectuals, but about a kind of re-evaluation of the approach to tradition, which used to be treated much more liberally.
This problem refers to me in the most serious way, on the condition that it is liberated from all the patriotic and national dimension. I am looking for religion in the theatre of a great Polish poet, Miron Białoszewski, in case of whom all the mysticism is born out of simple tales about going downstairs and buying cabbages. I bridle up when I hear that I do religious plays, but I do not object to people's opinions that I do morality plays.
A morality play is a word that, until recently, could not have appeared in young directors' mouths. It smells patina.
One must be awfully careful not to make a black-and-white lecture out of it. It is theatre's duty to ask questions.
And what question would you like to ask Europe in Stockholm?
I daresay it would be a question about soul. The pitch of this question is not like the one of Dostoyevsky's, who asked Europe about soul. It is the question of a Pole who declares that his favourite reading matter is Winnie-the-Pooh. This question is not asked pathetically. The lack of soul can be noticed in the street, but I am sure it is somewhere. I do not know where it is hidden. Maybe it has simply left the places in which it used to be located before, and it has passed somewhere else. Sometimes, while travelling across Europe, I have an impression that it is hidden in prosaic things, for example when, at a station, a porter drives a wheel-chair very fast to help an elderly lady who is trying to catch the taxi ...
April 1998
Translated by Ewa Stąpór