A theatre blockbuster straight from Poland!

Jacek Cieślak, RZECZPOSPOLITA

TR WARSZAWA IN BERLIN. The world premiere of No matter how hard we tried by Dorota Masłowska, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, amazed the Schaubuehne audience.

In the most powerful scene of the performance, the German audience in the Charlottenburg Theatre - which is based in the most beautiful, secessionist district of Berlin - watches archive footage showing the Nazis bombing Warsaw: building by building.

And they listen to Danuta Szaflarska, a Polish Home Army messenger during the Warsaw Uprising. An elderly, but still beautiful and strong actress utters the monologue of the Old Woman about her relatives, family furniture heirlooms and library – all obliterated in the Uprising. Everybody around her was dead. One has a sense of both the absurdity and the miracle of Polish survival.

And when the Old Woman and her granddaughter peek through a giant peephole at the audience – they peek into all the rich German flats and houses and picture their own life if it hadn’t been for the war - opulent and tranquil.

Grzegorz Jarzyna emphasises many paradoxes governing the lives of the families of German executioners and their Polish victims. Perversely, he directs scenes showing that Poles are good for nothing, they eat the worst food, they dress tastelessly and talk gibberish. On the one hand he autoironically presents Polish complexes and martyrdom, on the other he mocks German stereotypes about Poles.
When from the stage we hear a voice saying that in the 70s there was no Internet in Poland –the director deals the final blow to those who still perceive Poland only through the lense of the “Polnishe Wirtschaft” cliché. This made the Berlin audience feel embarrassed. They laughed again when they heard a speaker from Radio Maryja, nonchalantly announcing that once the whole world belonged to Poland, but, unfortunately, we fell victim to bad Germans and Russians.

Squaring up to our reality, Masłowska also mocks another extremity represented by young people who want to forget they are Polish and be solely European. The authoress stresses problems connected with national identity, its excess and imbalance.
The TR performance also squares up to the 20 years of free Poland. The lies of communism, the rubbish and faults of the Polish People’s Republic era were replaced by aggressive turbo-capitalism. Instead of prosperity it offers virtual life and dreams on credit, idiotic promotions, paper stars in hopeless talk-shows and TV series.

Masłowska describes this in absurd language, continuing the tradition of Różewicz, Mrożek, Tym and Bareja. She portrays the young as if they were living in a Photoshop cyberspace, where with one mouseclick anything can be changed into the ideal of beauty. Besides, what is striking is the lack of hope for the elderly: they go on holiday to… nowhere. They ask for a text message… to a mobile they don’t have. They cannot afford anything.
Apart from being rich and brilliant, the performance at times overwhelms us with thoughts and associations. Jarzyna, however, remains in control of everything, using the abbreviation effect, paratelevision scene editing and also changeable lighting. He projects animations onto three wall-screens , thus giving a comic touch to the sketch-like text, and emphasises it with the music.
Magdalena Kuta, Maria Maj, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Katarzyna Warnke, Rafał Maćkowiak and Adam Woronowicz felt at ease with such conventions. Aleksandra Popławska and Roma Gąsiorowska should play their parts more convincingly. They will have a chance to do so on the 5th of April at the Polish premiere.

Those of us who think we are the most wronged nation in the world, should consider the last seconds of the performance, as the Poles, wallowing in self-pity, slam the door in the face of the homeless from the South who came begging for bread.