God’s Desert

Łukasz Drewniak, PRZEKRÓJ

Grzegorz Jarzyna carries out "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T" based on Pasolini as if he was slowly leafing through an old family album.
The play starts with a press conference. Paolo (Jan Englert), a rich and sober businessman with a trustworthy face has a lot to say about capitalism, public television and the society. But when somebody asks, "Do you believe in God?", evidently puzzled, he answers, "I do not understand the question." The sense of his confusion will sink in only during the following wordless scene which is repeated three times.

It is a summer morning. A high room, bathed in warm light. Lucia (Danuta Stenka) is putting on makeup in front of a mirror. The children (Katarzyna Warnke and Jan Dravnel) comb their hair, Paolo sitting at the desk browses through his paperwork. In a moment he will leave for the office and they will start waiting for him to come back. There is some harmony to this scene; there is family love and music. Jarzyna makes the viewers watch it until they detect the emptiness hiding behind the beautiful appearances; until they realize that there is something much more important than good, peace and order of which Paolo's world is composed. Why God? There is everything we need here.

And yet a stranger breaks into the house. Nobody knows who he is (the Saviour? An evil spirit?) or if he at all exists. Announced by a telegram "Coming tomorrow" the strange young man will become part of the family (Sebastian Pawlak); he will seduce everyone including Emilia, the maid (Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak). Pawlak quite demonstratively does not play the Tempter. Instead he mimics the other characters, their gestures and desires. And he appears just when he is needed by somebody. The director stresses the importance of spiritual transformation of the protagonists. Each of them in their own way surpasses themselves. In Pasolini's film all the characters went speechless after the departure of the mysterious visitor. They could not find the right words to express their despair and the feeling of abandonment which they suddenly experienced. Jarzyna turns the farewell scene into an intimate confession of each protagonist; it is as if the stranger taught all of them how to speak their minds. And now we can hear their hymns and the gospel of love. The boy shall become an artist, the maid a saint, the daughter shall turn catatonic and the mother will find oblivion in sex with strangers.

Jarzyna's thick and focused performance spreads inside the viewers' heads as mercury spills on the floor. Even in the clearest scene there is some space left for the flickering of God, the ambiguity of its message. It is impossible to free oneself from images and words, even though they enter out minds lightly and noninvasively. The director declares that "theater is to tell stories, and if a story is told well and truthfully, it brings us solace and structures our reality".
Jarzyna runs the performance as if he slowly leafed through an old family album.

He is charmed with a moment, the mood, the reflexes of light, the details of the character's garment. He smoothly combines narration styles, each break of convention is always carefully prepared and gradually introduced. The former restlessness of associations so typical for his theater is gone; there are no leaps or dissonances. The actors seem to be sedated. Music fulfills a different function; the scenes are put together differently. Jarzyna does not electrify the viewers with intuitions; he only says what he knows. Wisely, he shows that it is possible to establish a theatrical evidence for the existence of God and yet the result of this equation is astounding. Yes, there is God, but nothing else seems to be right as God is a desert. He starts where the life does not stand a chance. He gives away death and peace; the euphoria of absolute emptiness and the sadness of lonely agony. Paolo leaves his factory to his workers and dies in the desert. "The desert does not let you fall asleep or awake", says Angiolino, the hairy comedian and the most mysterious character in the play. Perhaps he is an angel, maybe just a messenger. With the makeup of Pasolini's favorite actor, Rafał Maćkowiak sees the downfall of the protagonist and explains the meaning of suffering. But in fact he can only understand God when a sunray lights up his face. It is warm. I am alive.