Berlin Success of Masłowska’s Play
Łukasz Drewniak, DZIENNIK
NO MATTER HOW HARD WE TRIED, a play by Dorota Masłowska, presented in Berlin is not a game of misunderstanding and nationalist repartees. Grzegorz Jarzyna directed it as a surreal farce on inexistence and inability and showed it as a story about hatred towards those who we could never become.
The latest Jarzyna’s performance is a Polish-German co-production of Dorota Masłowska’s play NO MATTER HOW HARD WE TRIED which was ordered for the International Festival of Playwrights “Digging Deep and Getting Dirty” whose key words were Identity and History. Masłowska found herself in a good company of Marius von Mayenburg, Mark Ravenhill, and Yel Ronen. In the play, the actors of TR spoke Polish; the subtitles in German were projected on an overhead electronic board. The play itself hit the bull's eye of the main idea of the festival. While mocking the Poles it also opens European and German complexes which makes it absolutely understandable for international audiences.
It seems that this is the first time that Jarzyna’s premiere performance has been so successful in a German speaking country. The Germans laughed at jokes on exploitation of Lidl employees and on the Pope who instead of becoming a man, remained German. Polish-born Berliners vividly reacted to war-time obsessions of the protagonists as well as to jokes about the sperm of Hungarian spacemen. It would seem that Masłowska'a play skillfully utilizes national stereotypes and antagonizes the viewers against each other. Meanwhile, NO MATTER HOW HARD WE TRIED is a surreal farce about inexistence and indolence. It is a story about hatred towards those who we could never become.
Verbal boxing
Masłowska was unlucky with her previous premiere at TR , A COUPLE OF POOR, POLISH SPEAKING ROMANIANS which Przemysław Wojcieszek wanted to turn into a brand-new play. Jarzyna decided to act differently; he simply let the author speak. He did not push to appear in the foreground, he found space where all the author’s strong points could be materialized. Instead of a cluttered room in an old Warsaw tenant house he introduced a black and white studio enclosed with three walls which fulfilled the role of screens. The play is set in a house which is not there. The fragile world appears for a short while between the pages of a ridiculous script of a film called “A Horse Riding Horse”. While skimming the script all words, characters, logic and situations get mixed. The cynical script writer played by Adam Woronowicz, might be the demiurge of this world, but he too might have been created by an unknown writer. Almost all of the other props are shown as animations projected on the walls of the room. The protagonists enter this space as if they entered a zoo enclosure or a TV repartee show. Jarzyna does not clean up the play and does not improve the somewhat inconsistent characters. His role is only limited to arranging the scenic world, adding an appropriate beat, and welding on several ornaments. He evidently aims at creating an almost translucent theater – a bit of gadgets, a touch of video effects, the not exactly soothing chill out music which seems to be detached from the absurd world.
The World a la Polonaise
This premiere is only apparently a light, easy going and humorous play. Jarzyna defines darkness through light. Some strange tension is constantly in the air, the actors’ roles as well as the space and the bon mots are being constantly changed and altered. The inhabitants of the house that is not there are Halina, an hypermarket employee (Magdalena Kuta), her daughter Little Metal Girl (Aleksnadra Popławska), the spoiled dumb blond with pigtails, the little dumpling on Polish roads of nonsense as well as the Granny, stuck in her wheelchair (Danuta Szaflarska). They are visited by the "fat as a swine" Bożena, a brand ambassador of “Old Hag” fragrance (Maria Maj). Then follow the other characters taken from somewhere, maybe from TV or from tabloids. The women from the house that is not there do not experience anything, nothing ever happens to them, they keep on tittle-tattling. And in fact the language they use soaked with absurdities and phraseologically broken is the true hero in the play. Masłowska’s paradoxes and puns are not there just to show off the wonderful flexibility of the Polish language. The linguistic mockery of the author of "The Queen’s Technicolor Yawn" is not there to merely unmask the protagonists, their self-awareness and their vision of the reality. It also attempts to define the nature of the world Polish style. Little Metal Girl shuts herself in her no-room, Halina, her mother buys for free a magazine called "Not For You". The Grandmother is not taken for a walk and therefore the things that happened do not really take place. In this absurd manner Masłowska grasps the real meaning of being Polish, the whole sense of living in Poland. “I owe a lot to nonexistence and non-being; on one hand I am NOT nobody, but on the other I am no Polish , for instance. “, declares one of the characters. For we mostly imagine ourselves as we are not. We are Polish because we are not German. We are here and not elsewhere, for everything that was ever good, has been taken away from us. In the great radio soliloquy sounding as a fairy tale from Radio Mary, the voice of Lech Łotocki soothes the listeners with a vision of paradise lost: ”When the world was governed by the laws of God, all the people in the world were Polish. The Germans were Polish, the Spanish were Polish… the whole world was nothing else but Poland; and America, Asia and Australia too. And nowadays only in Poland there is Poland”.
Poland that is not there
At the beginning it seems that the negative aspect of the characters’ reality, the "no-room", the fact that again they will not go on holiday, they will not eat or buy something again is a typically Polish masking of material and emotional emptiness. It is only the finale which puts this style of speaking in a new perspective. Danuta Szaflarska and Aleksandra Popławska, the granny and her granddaughter, are standing on stage wearing identical colorful dresses. In the background, on the screens, there are houses being demolished in one of Warsaw war-time air raids. It is suddenly disclosed that that grandma was killed on the first day of the war, so her daughter was never born, nor was the Lillte Metal Girl. The world which we have just seen never existed or rather has always been in absolute negation. The war destroyed one world and the one that was built afterwards was fake from day one. People who were killed or were not even born, who did not have any chance to mark their existence, keep living in negated Poland. There are so many of them that the phantom of Poland veils the true Poland which does not exist anyway. It is no more than a shelter for phantasmas, deception, illusions, mirages, lies and pose.
Masłowska says that everything around us is not true, that Poland was built on lies, “ I am European, and I have learned Polish from records and tapes which were left behind by our Polish maid” , says the Little Metal Girl. Are you embarrassed to speak Polish, does it really hurt? Well, how can it hurt if it is not there? Still, the amputated leg keeps on hurting.