Jarzyna: the End of a Rebel?
Jacek Wakar, DZIENNIK
"T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T." staged by Grzegorz Jarzyna is a performance neither finished nor exceptional, yet this intriguing play constitutes a turning point in the director's artistic output. This is not a scream of a rebel but a whisper of an adult who attempts to understand the world and give it some sense. Is not a moralist being born inside Jarzyna?
(...) I believe that the latest staging by Grzegorz Jarzyna is of fundamental value not only for himself, as it defines anew the strategies of the director. It constitutes a new opening for the TR as well. After this performance Warsaw shall have two important theatres: Warlikowski's and Jarzyna's and there will be a meaningful dialog between the two of them.
No stage name
The new performance shows that the former rebel of Polish theater, the one who started the fashion for new theater as well as the war between the young and the old, so said several reviewers, decided to relinquish the mask of provocateur. He abandoned the habit of signing the performance with always new pseudonyms or, as it happened with the penultimate domestic premiere of "Giovanni", with the brand name "Jarzyna", which has always been an element of a game with the audience and the media. It was already in that performance that some new tones could be heard. Based on Moliere's drama and on the opera masterpiece by Mozart, the performance was heading to a conclusion which was much too obvious. Western civilization with its perfect reflection of the main protagonist is becoming extinct, it loses itself in hedonism - seemed to be the director's message. He made the TR actors move their lips to the rhythm of operatic arias recorded by professional singers. The performance seduced the audience with its juggler like efficiency, however, it was rather disappointing both as an attempt to marry traditional theater to opera, as well as with respect to its diagnosis. Perhaps this staging, with rather unfavorable reviews, became the reason for Jarzyna's real-life and inner emigration. Something tells me that this has just ended.
"T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T." is not a scenic version of the famous film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is not, as it was with "The Celebration" when the director staged one of the flagship works of Dogma, a workshop exercise aiming at translating the cinema poetics into the language of theater, nor is it a kind of replacement of film images with purely theatrical ones. It is obvious that Jarzyna must have been considering Pasolini's film and his other pieces for a very long time and that must have been the reason why the script was composed not only of "Teorema". We can also find the poems of Italian magus, scandalizer and moralist as well as numerous fragments of his interviews. One may say that the evening with "Teoremat" was filled with structure, characters, plot and the growing atmosphere of oppression. However, Pasolini's statements where he tries to tame and understand the surrounding world and which became part of Paolo's role (Jan Englert), constitute something of a credo of the play. Spoken by Englert, the words sound unmatchingly bitter and yet I do believe that most of them could have been expressed by Jarzyna himself.
Following Warlikowski's trail?
Watching the latest performance of the author of "Bzik tropikalny" ("Tropical Craze") I felt for the first time that a complete artist was talking to me; the artist who will not say that he is young nor will he make his young age a trump card. Jarzyna will be forty-one in a few days and "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T." is a message of the man who is just about to cross the half-way point of his life. Hence the tone that prevails in the play, hence the difficulty in spotting the fireworks of his style as they stepped down to make room for seriousness. As both Pasolini and Jarzyna believe, there are demons inside us. Passion takes away the ability to see things as they are, heroes are capable of anything. A stranger is enough to catalyze the unforeseen phenomena. From the point of view of creating suspense, the performance brings to mind David Lynch's films. The menace is suggested by the brilliant music by Jacek Grudzień and Piotr Domiński, but at the same time, literality is avoided. Moreover, Jarzyna drew conclusions from his unsuccessful stagings of "Doctor Faustus" based on Mann and "Idiot" by Dostojewski. He understood that there are no topics that can justify the gloom on the stage, that one must at least try to win the audience with laughter.
In the first sequence, Englert's Paolo can hear questions from the auditorium. The last one is "Do you believe in God?" The actor's, maybe the protagonist's, look changes. He refuses to answer not only once, three times. This moment determines the meaning of the play. Jarzyna does not analyze Pasolini's complex relationships with God. He only uses his "Teorema" to pose a question regarding the existence of God in the world. The whole play seems to be about it, however we do not hear the final answer.
The play develops almost without words in a series of hypnotic and disturbing images. The house of the mogul (Englert), his wife (a perfect and very brave role of Danuta Stenka), his daughter (Katarzyna Warnke) and son (Jan Dravnel) is visited by a Stranger (Sebastian Pawlak). We do not know who he is nor where he comes from. In a short time he will bewilder and seduce all of them and after bringing the family to the edge, he will disappear. The self-appointed God? The Devil incarnated? Maybe just a usurper who reaches for power over individuals and humanity without a wink, the personification of the exceptionally dark face of history? Jarzyna leaves all the above interpretations open but I say the latter one is the most accurate.
The performance is broken. After the fantastic first part, in the second one the images start to overwhelm the content which is best seen in the five endings. It is clear that Jarzyna still finds it difficult to select his ideas, he seems to be a slave of the beauty of the sequences he designs. Nevertheless, "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T." is a mind-boggling piece of work which makes us look at the former spike-haired anarchist in a completely different way. Although the play is not as good as "Krum", it may appear to be a turning point for Jarzyna, just as that performance was for Krzysztof Warlikowski. I do not know what his further artistic career may look like, but his latest performance proves that putting Jarzyna amongst the next generation young angry men is simply pointless. The bitterness of "T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.", the importance of the questions put forward there and, last but not least, the ascetic effects prove that Grzegorz Jarzyna has for the first time stood amongst the classics, although it will still take some effort to retain that position.
End of war
The acting is superb. There are seven actors but the guest performances of Jan Englert and Jadwiga Jankowska Cieślak (the Maid) are just unsurpassed. The actress finds herself very well in Jarzyna's stylistics but the role of Jan Englert is particularly impressive - probably the best role since the one in "Duszyczka" ("Little Soul") by Jerzy Grzegorzewski at the Narodowy Theater. Englert gave his character all of his bitterness and painful knowledge. He also gave him the airs of a member of establishment where the actor himself belongs. Before the premiere, Englert admitted that he undoubtedly was an icon or an emblem for Jarzyna, a representative of another order and tradition; the one against which the TR artists used to oppose. The actor himself did not let them get away with it. As a result, both of them became, obviously involuntarily, flagships of the battle for theater which we could witness in the media.
Therefore Englert's creation presented in Jarzyna's performance is of an importance that goes far beyond the play itself. Since both artists combined their forces, the war is over unless the next battle is started by "even younger and even more talented artists" who may want to rise against Warlikowski and Jarzyna, the would - be representatives of theatre conservatism.