Polish theatre served short at National
There’s an exhibition of Polish theatre photographs at the National that is something of a minor disgrace. The photos themselves are fine, but there is no captioning and no contextual literature for the show to make any sense.
The subject is poignant enough: the very last performance, in Milan in 1979, of Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum figuris, one of the most famous productions, in its day, of Grotowski’s “poor theatre” that continued the great 19th century tradition of Polish theatre and literature into the age of the late 1960s international avant garde.
If you already knew what he looked like, you can detect the great Christ-like Ryszard Cieslak — the hero in Grotowski’s even more (once) celebrated production of The Constant Prince, an adaptation of Calderon played in circumstances of monastic simplicity to an audience of no more than a hundred people.
Maurizio Buscarino’s black and white prints certainly convey the ecstatic intensity of Grotowski’s theatre in a series of scenes pullulating with anguish and catastrophe in equal measure, with Cieslak’s simpleton consumed by terror and fury.
During the heyday of the World Theatre seasons at the Aldwych we were regularly treated to the productions of Andrzej Wajda, Konrad Swinarski and other brilliant directors. But you had to go abroad to find Grotowski, or the work of his important Italian disciple, Eugenio Barba, at the Odin Theatre in Denmark.
We saw much more of Tadeusz Kantor’s work thanks to the intervention, in the first place, of Richard Demarco at the Edinburgh Festival fringe. But what do we know now of Polish theatre?
The National itself is presenting a new play, Our Class, by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, that centres on a shameful massacre of Jews in a small country village during the war.
But the dislocation between the intensity of the subject matter and the lightly dispassionate, admittedly fairly good, British acting is almost embarrassing.
It’s a neat, often playful, production without a scintilla of the grief and raw emotional power that burns through the Grotowski photographs; such a shame the National audiences aren’t being told what on earth is going on in them.