Director Has Grown More Mature

Janusz Majcherek, E-TEATR

Grzegorz Jarzyna made us wait for his new performance. "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.", based on Pasolini, shows that the former wonder-child-director has grown more mature once he crossed the shadow line.

In his "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T." Jarzyna seems to carry on with the topic which he took up in "Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda" (Iwona, the Princes of Burgundy) (1997) i.e. the transformation which takes place in the hermetic and formalized world founded on rites and social arrangements. The transformation is triggered by a vague and mysterious visitor coming from the outer world. His mere presence disturbs the long-standing social arrangement. Needless to say, from the point of view of poetics Gombrowicz's grotesque is light years away from Pasolini's realism. But their artistic, intellectual and political non-conformism, the radical criticism of contemporary culture and civilization, revealing the mechanisms of acting in the theater of everyday life, the pessimism and anarchism, constructing one's own life as a mythical figure of fate, and especially their eroticism so dialectically obsessed with death bring both authors closer to each other. I do believe that "Teoremat" would not have interested Jarzyna had he not encountered "Iwona" first. By the way, he understood the drama contrary to the long-standing tradition, perhaps inspired by the lecture of a French Marxist and structuralist Lucien Goldmann who saw the interaction of Yvonne with the royal court as the encounter with the essence. In his dissertation "The Theater of Gombrowicz" he wrote that the essence reveals the truth to the society in which everyone tries to hide it not only before everyone else but also before themselves. Following this trail and perceiving Iwona as a person in a personalistic sense, Jarzyna opened a perspective of transcendence and, as it was once interpreted by Jacek Kopciński, raised an interpersonal drama to a drama going on between man and God.

In "Teoremat" the references to the sphere of sacrum seem to be more evident as, contrary to atheistic Gombrowicz, Pasolini a radical and heretic follower of the teaching of Jesus in his film inserted the signs with religious or even mystical connotations. One of such signs is silence (most of the script does without words), the image of the desert, the miracle of assumption of Emily, the maid (Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak), Paolo the tycoon and family man (Jan Englert) getting rid of his clothes St. Francis style, the quotes from Rimbaud and Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illich"; the strange newcomer (Sebastian Pawlak) seems to be the sign of essence. He arrives unexpectedly and leaves so. And during his stay with Paolo's family he spreads immense destruction. The destruction, however, is not really of moral character and is not limited to with sexual relationships which the Visitor enters into with all the family members: the father, the mother (Danuta Stenka), the son (Jan Dravnel) and the daughter (Katarzyna Warnke) as well as with the maid. The destruction involves the exposure of spiritual emptiness, or even spiritual desert of the people involved, it aims at taking them to the edge of their world ordered so elegantly and harmoniously. I daresay that the Visitor causes scandal and depravation in the sense used by the New Testament to describe the radical and inexplicable transgression. In his beautiful poem „The Crucifiction" Pasolini, who saw his own fate reflected in the figure of Jesus, directly quotes this fundamental connotation by citing Paul's "Letter to the Corinthians" which says: "But we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness."

It is evident that Pasolini's "Teorema" is a parable and signals the possibilities of meanings instead of imposing the meanings in an arbitrary manner. Jarzyna managed to maintain this attitude and, contrary to his younger colleagues who change theater into a tool of primitive propaganda, he built a polysemantic and poetic play composed of ascetic images of great beauty which follow their own slow, slightly somnambulists rhythm and which encourage the viewer not only to aesthetic contemplation but, which is rather rare nowadays, to reflection.

The actors face an interesting task; they do not carry out any dialog, they utter few words, their scenic activity constitutes a synthesis of everyday behavior and is strongly marked with form, they have very few artistic means to construct their characters which must be somehow grasped and accumulated or condensed in one expressive sign of presence. I like the way they do that, especially Jankowska-Cieślak, Rafał Maćkowiak (Angiolino, the Postman) as well as Englert whose participation in this particular play could be the subject of an interesting study.