The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust by Grzegorz Niziolek;

Author:Grzegorz Niziolek;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

8

A crushed audience

1.

‘The actors, crammed into a wardrobe, suffocated there’ – this was how Zbigniew Warpechowski remembered Kantor’s staging of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play W małym dworku (Country House, 1921) in 1961.1 With the distance of time, the spectacle had become reduced to one image, a single effect. To a traumatic event.2

In the colloquial speech of this interview, it left an impressive trace, more impressive than any critical reaction to the spectacle. It is enough to erase the theatrical word ‘actors’ and replace it with ‘people’, shift the image from the sphere of art to the sphere of reality, for us to feel its menace. Among the reviewers of the performance, only Ludwik Flaszen accurately grasped the basic tension in Kantor’s work, when he wrote that ‘the thing is […] lined with scandal’.3 He therefore felt the presence of suppressed experience, denied, transposed, although he identified it above all with sexuality, and not with death and extermination.

Kantor himself admitted that his staging of Country House was a reminder, many years afterwards, of the abandoned idea of reality discovered in the wartime production of The Return of Odysseus. And although he had in mind only an artistic idea, the radical emergence of the idea of reality, after a significant period of oblivion, must also have referred to other areas of experience, if only the historical. Kantor often spoke of war as he did of art, comparing it to poetry: ‘It was a reality incredibly condensed and dangerous, a step from death.’4

Kantor was fascinated by uninterpretable situations that escape the needs of meaning, are elusive as a totality and do not allow themselves to be included in any ordered narrative structures or transparent rules of representation – which is not difficult to comprehend, if only because the horizon of reality in his work is ultimately defined by art alone and its negative, empty epiphanies (Kantor owed his understanding of reality and its traumatic foundation to psychoanalysis5 and to his personal experience of history). Where, however, the impossibility of interpreting meaning began to be exhausted or collapse, and some event with rather obvious connections to life or historical experience loomed on the horizon (and without this event, Kantor’s art would have simply been impossible), a categorical and even hysterical prohibition on understanding immediately appeared (let us indulge for a moment in a play of words, allowing us to perceive a potential cause and effect relationship between history and hysteria). Since such events shine almost continually through Kantor’s work, this prohibition has to be consistently and relentlessly renewed (in order to see that this is indeed the case, it suffices to read Kantor’s self-commentaries, especially from before The Dead Class).6 Only during the period of the Theatre of Death, does this prohibition gradually cease to be binding, just as Kantor’s theatre ceases to be governed by the hard law of reality, which traumatizes and condemns to unnameability every memory or image providing the merciless impulse for art.

Kantor’s prohibition was generally treated as the privilege

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