Tamara Trojanowska

Magnetism of the Heart (Poland)
World Stage Festival, Toronto, Ontario

Review

During this year's World Stage Festival, Torontonians could see, among seventeen main-stage productions from around the world, an imaginative staging of the Polish romantic comedy, Aleksander Fredro's Maiden Vows (1833), which was presented under its original subtitle, Magnetism of the Heart. The play was produced by Warsaw-based Teatr Rozmaitości (Theatre of Diversity). Although the company was founded thirteen years ago, it has functioned under its current name only since 1995. It has devoted itself to producing twentieth-century plays including those by prominent Polish modernists, such as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Igancy Witkiewicz, their early nineteenth-century precursors, such as Georg Büchner, their European counterparts, such as August Strindberg and Federico García Lorca, and contemporary playwrights, such as Tom Stoppard and Jean Genet.

The director of Magnetism of the Heart, Gregorz Jarzyna, is one of Poland's most talented young directors, even though he presents each of his productions under a different alias. For Magnetism of the Heart he uses the pseudonym, Sylwia Torsh. In spite of the possible confusion inspired by his love of aliases, Jarzyna has won prestigious theatre awards both in Poland and abroad and presented his work at many international theatre festivals. He is a student of Krystian Lupa (a renowned theatre director, designer, and teacher who is a cult figure for the latest generation of directors) and an admirer of two older artists, Jozef Szajna and Andrzej Wajda.

The play Magnetism of the Heart has a simple plot. Two sisters in a country manor, played by Magdalena Cielecka and Maja Ostaszewska, vow never to marry. Their suitors, played by Redbad Klynstra (Zbigniew Kaleta's alias) and Cezary Kosiński must learn how to love them and how to express their love before the girls' covenant breaks down. Fredro's works, however, are more than traditional comedies of manners. Some, particularly the later ones, reveal his critical insights into contemporary social issues and Jarzyna uses the text to present his own social critique by staging changing notions of love, social manners, and theatrical styles over the past two centuries. The production, divided into blackouts and with no intermission, is fluid. Serving as its foundation is an inverse relationship between the progression of the sophisticated romantic comedy and the sophistication of human relationships and communication. Through synchronized changes in the set, costumes, and manners (ingeniously staged by Jarzyna), the role of language decreases while the importance of movement, dance, and situational comedy increases.

The ultimate result is a deconstruction of Fredro's text, which the director treats brutally. At the beginning, the characters are still capable of using language, although the parody of Fredro's verse is immediately apparent. The dialogue is accompanied by satirical sounds, such as cackling and mooing. This commentary, too obvious for my liking, points to the end of the production, when the magnetism of the heart proves to be primarily a magnetism of the body. Jarzyna is clearly fascinated by the world of form (here he is an ardent pupil of Witold Gombrowicz) and its constrictive force and deceptive freedom, which is veiled by degradation.

This playful and provocative approach to the nineteenth-century Polish classic follows a long and rich tradition of such theatrical reinterpretations, which includes productions by Konrad Swinarski, Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Krystian Lupa, and Adam Hanuszkiewicz, who once set the romantic Balladyna on a motorcycle. Jarzyna, however, has increased the intensity of the discussion about directorial interventions into classic texts and become an idol of Polish theatre criticism in the process. His production was received with a standing ovation in Toronto. Why this uniform chorus of approval?

The final appeal of Jarzyna's production is not clear to me. In the context of the World Stage Festival, Magnetism of the Heart was unique. It was experimental, daring, and surrounded by too many middle-of-the-road productions. Nevertheless, changes in the modes of communication, of behaviour, and of human relationships were well observed but failed to surpass the diagnoses of modern civilization currently found on the pages of glossy magazines.

Although Magnetism of the Heart killed everything I love about Fredro: his sophistication, his sense of humour, and his warmth, my problem with the production is not Jarzyna's relationship to the text. The issue of how ”faithful“ a director should be to a text had been sufficiently theorized to dismiss any expectations on this point and much of what he reads into the play is already there. Rather, I have a problem with Jarzyna's ambivalent attitude towards the audience. Magnetism of the Heart makes me wonder if the director wants his young audience to assess his production critically and identify with it hesitantly or if he is playing at being cool to a generation raised on computer games and television in order to win its uncritical applause.

This concern has a direct bearing on the choices Jarzyna makes in his staging, which is loaded with quotations from theatre. One of the suitors, Albin, reminds the audience of Khlestakov in Meierkhol'd's production of The Government Inspector, and sounds effects parody the now legendary crickets in Stanislavskii's stagings of Chekhov. Although realism, expressionism, vaudeville, and many other styles and genres play brilliantly in Magnetism of the Heart, to appreciate these references, Jarzyna's audience has to be well versed in theatre history and aesthetics. If the director imagines that his audience is anything like the play's characters when he places them in the twenty-first century at the end of the play, his games with tradition, forms, and styles should be presumed lost. If, however, he counts on the playfulness and sophistication of his audience, it would find little in common with these disco characters for whom books and theatre are buried relics. This is an involuntary paradox that Jarzyna's production shares with most postmodern culture. Postmodernists count on a canonically educated audience that can recognize a plethora of parodies, while echoing the apotheosis of decanonized eduction and adding to this decanonization.

Magnetism of the Heart, however, is still an in ingenious production--provocative and perfectionist. Through the deciphering of a multitude of contexts, the play provokes thinking and stimulates intellectual joy. It also brings to mind other Polish playwrights whose playfulness changed the perceptions of Polish literary theory and theatrical traditions, such as Tadeusz Różewicz and his play White Marriage. Jarzyna's play, however, unlike those of his predecessors, kills free-spirited laughter and the belief that the world, no matter how silly and dangerous, can still be tamed and that art can help us do it. Ultimately the production makes a sad point about the way we view the history of human relationships. Their brutalization somehow gains directorial approval and is not diagnostic but affirmative.

© Tamara Trojanowska

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