Irish Drama in Poland by Barry Keane

Author:Barry Keane [Barry, Keane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783206100
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Horzyca and the Morality of Mrs Warren

It was perhaps fitting that Lwów, the city that had seen off Mrs Warren’s Profession, should play a part in its revival. The production was directed by Wilam Horzyca and came at the end of his turbulent tenure as director of Lwów’s Municipal Theatre. In 1924, Horzyca had co-founded with Leon Schiller the Warsaw Theatre of W. Bogusławski, where he was content to work as a low-profile literary director and sounding board for Schiller. Both men believed in a literary theatre wherein a drama’s words were understood as possessing a poetic magic that acted on intuition and the imagination, and that, in turn, proposed a Monumental theatre that would harness the grandiose visions and ideals of Poland’s Romantic tradition.47 In 1931, when Schiller lost his position as director of Lwów’s Municipal Theatre due to his left-wing sympathies, Horzyca promptly re-employed Schiller and his team.48 This arrangement also suited Horzyca, as he did not have to direct plays himself and could focus on formulating the theatre’s artistic direction. However, six years after his appointment, and with his tenure coming to an acrimonious end following a protracted run of unsuccessful productions, Horzyca chose to take the directorial helm for Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910), which was immediately followed by Mrs Warren’s Profession. Working on these two plays led Horzyca to write about the staging of Shaw in the programmes for all of Horzyca’s future productions of Mrs Warren’s Profession.49 For Horzyca, in so far as Shaw’s characters think and act within the parameters of a given problem or idea, Mrs Warren’s Profession depersonalizes the characters in order to serve a higher purpose. In this respect the director saw a link with morality plays, with Crofts, for example, as the embodiment of Vice, becoming for Horzyca a more authentic figure within the confines of the play’s reality. What is more, for Horzyca, Shaw had found a way of turning the world on its head by mixing congenial speech with weighty sermonizing, an approach which amounted to selling truths that, in turn, became part of public discourse.50

The play had its first performance on 17 April 1937 in Lwów’s Teatr Wielki [Great Theatre], and enjoyed a run of thirteen performances. One perspicacious review featured in Gazeta Lwowska51 declared that Mrs Warren’s Profession was different from many of Shaw’s other plays because it proposed heavy moralizing without the distraction of pleasant goings-on and beautiful ladies, and could only offer the distressing tragedy of a young girl who suffers the kind of earth-shattering shock that few could come to terms with. However, this opinion was clearly formed by the fact that the actress playing Vivie had become more and more visibly upset as the play’s action unfolded, and ultimately had been reduced to a nervous wreck by the time the curtain was brought down on the evening. That being said, the critic was left most affected by Mrs Warren’s cries of the heart: ‘we feel that from the stage there speaks a profound authority on the human soul’.

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