Stage directions

Joanna Targoń, DIDASKALIA

There is madness in this production. Not only because madness was one of Macbeth's themes. Jarzyna clashes various elements, languages and poetics in the hope that they will merge within his rushing on, greater than life dramatic machine and collapse on the audience not as much inspiring intellectual reflection, as enabling it to experience - physically, with all senses - the evil which infects everyone in Macbeth, even if it takes on various masks and forms, and changes its intensity. Evil's daughter, horror, drifts in the air, seeps into every corner, leaves no place free. "O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart/Cannot conceive nor name thee!" - words of Macduff when he discovers Duncans' corpse serve as a motto to Jarzyna's production. The production is monothematic, what in the case of Macbeth seems quite understandable: the Shakespeare's tragedy is in fact monothematic as well. However, it has more hues, subtlety and depth.

One has to say that this merging of elements was not quite a successful one; the hybrid entitled 2007: Macbeth arouses various reservations. With Shakespeare one is tempted to modify and actualize, but he is a powerful partner/opponent and he does not give up easily. Even so I am left with the impression that he would not disapprove of this difficult love affair with Jarzyna.

To get to "Waryński" works you have to go along a sloppy side-street, then across a dark yard and through an equally dark hall with heaps of rubble and abandoned machine fragments. The plant is vast and dilapidated. First thing you see is the backside of the house - a huge openwork of metal scaffolding. If you are afraid of heights you are lost; rows of seats begin on the second-floor level and rise steeply to the ceiling. The house faces a scene - a real one, because Jarzyna found in the works a ready-made theater, part ancient, part Elizabethan. The scene is immense, multipartite and multistory. On its right side there are two open rooms, one above another. At the beginning red lights shimmer in darkness in the upper one. Soon it will turn out these are the LED-s of six TV monitors. On the left and a little back you can see a concrete bunker: action can take place either on its flat roof, or in a small space with a transparent foil curtain and a row of big washing machines, or in front of it, at the wall with a white grocery refrigerator glowing with cold light and a heater glimmering with red fire next to it as if for greater contrast. All levels are connected by steep metal stairs, which lead also to the gallery high up on the left-hand wall.

The space, though vast, seems strangely claustrophobic and repulsive. Jarzyna brings out all possibilities contained in it; he cuts his production like a film fluently moving the action from place to place, changing moods and locations, and even suggesting close-ups. Though the illusion of being in the cinema becomes in some moments complete, he does not let us forget that in this strange theater we are trapped together with actors in a huge dilapidated concrete bunker. Outer world does exist somewhere, but all we can see are its infrequent manifestations. Shafts of sunlight squeeze through the barred window in the ground-floor room when Macbeth kills the rebels and after that, together with Lady Macbeth, connives the killing of Duncan. In the finale a ghastly, surreal orange glow seeps in when Seyton, high up in the gallery, opens and closes one after another small windows and announces the approaching of Birnham wood.

What goes on outside, in the world overcome with war, is shown on the six monitors in the command center on the right of the upper level. It is there that the first scene takes place: the staff with general Duncan in command mounts a complex operation during which major Macbeth bravely - and against his orders - takes the enemy's position. On the upper level we can see the command center with its openwork metal floor lit in cold light, with the aura of advanced technology. Professional commands and military messages are dramatized by music - an excessive symphony reminding of some film, profound and even pompous. We can watch Major Macbeth's action in two versions: the digitally transformed, on monitors pulsing with cryptic graphs, and the real one, on the ground level, one story down; in virtual reality and in real life.

RL looks different: one dramatic cut (that is: moving audience's attention to the other location) changes everything. Instead of technology, professionalism and cleanliness, what we see now is a lazy afternoon with the sun setting outside, and a room with a concrete floor and a sloppily tiled wall. We can hear quiet oriental music, low exchanges in Arabic. The rebels, in Shakespeare's play supported by Norway, in Jarzyna's production come from the East - the contemporary East of pious terrorists. Without putting down their guns they rinse their feet under the tap on the tiled wall and enter the mosque. Major Macbeth, after a spectacular action with a commando sliding down the rope from the upper floor and real-fire explosions, kills the praying men. Then he laboriously beheads one of them with a knife and raises the barbaric trophy high in the air. A bloody pool will stay on the floor until the end of the play; it will swell with the blood of the murdered Duncan and - in finale - Macbeth. Lady Macbeth will try to rinse it with water from a hose, but it will only spill further. On this bloody spot a table will be set for the feast haunted by the ghost of Banquo.

In the opening sequence of 2007: Macbeth Jarzyna contains all themes he found interesting in Shakespeare's play and those he added while transferring the action to the modern times (or rather, as the title suggests, to near future), simultaneously demonstrating what dramatic language he is going to use.

The play demonstrates in the first place evils resulting from the war. Setting up Macbeth as a bloody nightmare is in a sense a classical interpretation (cf. that of Jan Kott for example). What Jarzyna adds is war with other civilization. The nightmare turns into a kind of tropical craze transforming characters from within, ridding them of the varnish of civilized behaviors. Significantly, the Witch (later in the play personalized by other characters) initially is an Arab woman in a chador. First murder in 2007: Macbeth ends with beheading; in the finale Macduff slowly and laboriously cuts Macbeth's head off, then maddened with anguish, in a strange euphoria rolls for a long while in bloody pool embracing the head. Finally he hands it, kneeling, to Malcolm, who raises it triumphantly and laughs loudly as if he could not believe what happened. Shakespeare, too, shows Macbeth's cut-off head in the finale, Jarzyna's aim, however, is rather to demonstrate an unpleasant, physiological side of death and murder, of struggling with a dead body; to inspire revulsion and help us realize what it means to keep a dead head in the hands.

War triggers off physiological response; after a ritual decoration of Macbeth and Banquo, performed with military stiffness to the sounds of pompous music, soldiers turn to primitive pastimes: they smoke shishas and strip-dance to a song delivered by a kitsch Elvis Presley's double. On the night of the murder (Duncan will be killed in the ground-level room) nobody finds rest: flashes in darkness reveal half-naked bodies tormented by nightmares on the upper level. After the murder Macbeth for a long while brutally copulates with his wife who leans against the ghastly glowing refrigerator. The transferring of action to modern times adds another interpretational level: it helps create tension between reality and fiction; between events on the scene and their electronically re-mastered equivalents on monitors in the command center - like in the opening sequence which demonstrates the difference between an operation converted into electronic graphs and the real one bathed in blood of people who talked peacefully just a moment ago. When Macbeth is left alone in the castle - accompanied by his mad wife, a doctor and Seyton only - the monitors display war pictures supplied by an obedient computer speaking in woman's voice; the last appears a fragment from another Macbeth, the film by Orson Welles - a story which had already happened, had been told and finished by someone else. The fragment is fateful, it seems to close the lot of Jarzyna's Macbeth within the inescapable destiny of the Shakespeare's character. Standing at the second-level railing like a dictator on the balcony, to the deafening roar of a stadium-like crowd Macbeth delivers the monologue about life being a tale told by an idiot - one of the few longer Shakespeare's fragments Jarzyna retained.

Jarzyna unfolds for his audience an impressive drama, dynamic and ever-changing. He borrows ideas, moods and conventions from every possible place; from A and B movies and plays (A movies mostly). The beginning - a boom of a helicopter taking off, a propeller's shadow on the wall - was copied from Apocalypse Now, as well as a travel into the jungle symbolizing a travel into one's own ego, and the cut-off heads; an absurd show of an illusionist in an American-flag jacket preceding the feast and even more absurd rabbit trying to jump into the wall - from Lynch; the speaking computer - from Kubrick's 2001: The space odyssey; a Cucurrucucu song ending the play - from Almodóvar; a roaring stadium crowd and Macduff holding Macbeth's head - from The Bacchantes by Warlikowski; the theme and atmosphere of the Tropical Craze - from Horst d'Albertis and so on. Perhaps every single thing was borrowed. This, however, is unimportant. Jarzyna's aim was not meticulous merging of quotes; he does not want to entertain the audience with his erudition and riddles. Anyway, guessing the answers serves no purpose, and there is not much time for that. What is important in these fragments is intense emotions, their atmosphere transferred onto the scene - however, it does not happen mechanically, but only when the director can revive quotes, supply them with new dynamics, use their emotional potential to tell his own story. And Jarzyna is very good at it.

Most impressive are the moments when we are faced with pictures, with pure performance, with emotions. I do not mean spectacular fight scenes with commandos, explosions and fires (these will always remain primitive, less impressive than on the screen because of the lack of montage), but scenes revealing the relations between characters, emotional states, incursions of the irrational. Drinking tea before they murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth stand far away from each other, separated by the bloody pool. Lady Macbeth breaks the cups and walks away. During the feast Banquo's ghost sits at the table and suddenly, to the deafening engines' scream, goes into convulsion like a pilot of a shot-down jet. Macbeth starts to shake, too, with blood trickling from his mouth; white napkins fall from the table. The guests and Lady Macbeth sit motionless.

The finale in Macbeth's castle, which suddenly seems immense because it comprises now all the locations: Macbeth bounces a ball on the wall time after time; the sound echoes in the empty space. Lady Macbeth sits on a couch upstairs, legs stretched out like a child, eating an apple and playing with a mirror. Seyton and Rosse cross vast spaces of metal stairs and galleries. Macbeth has no soldiers anymore; he drills his wife who turns and marches clumsily. Several times she tries to enter a rectangle of light on the wall, finally she finds the door, descends on lower level, slowly crosses the room with the blood pool and disappears behind the wall. She reaches the room with washing machines, where Hekate awaits her, and in the witch's presence she commits a suicide.

2007: Macbeth is an inconsistent production. One can say that the scale of the inconsistencies, embarrassments and false notes equals the scale of the production itself. The first problem is unmatched styles: the actors speak partly in Shakespeare's, partly in their own words. Unfortunately, Shakespeare was not only a much better writer than Jarzyna, but also created quite a different universe. And though Jarzyna did not want to build a "small realism", such is the effect when the actors speak in their own voice. Never mind military commands - these seem justified - though "rebels' base" does provoke laughter in the seats; but when Lady Macbeth, prevailing upon Macbeth to murder Duncan, explains that the king, too, acquired power by a murder; that Macbeth promised it to her; that in fact she deserves it - it simply sounds flat and uninteresting. There are no undertones, no suspense.

Another weakness, and a serious one, is Macbeth's nondescriptness. The idea of him being no more than a puppet driven by events seems quite interesting.Cezary Kosiński, however, does not render it in an interesting way and not just because it is difficult (though it really is) for an actor to find the right tone in such adaptation. Kosiński melts into the shadow of Aleksandra Konieczna who creates a Lady Macbeth both fascinating and annoying. Even her appearance and movements are intriguing: a black bun of a wig, an inseparable handbag, modest dresses and jackets, high heels. She crosses the immense space stiffly but resolutely, in small steps. She keeps a good form but under impeccable, a little caricatured appearance of a first lady we can discern traces of madness. Konieczna is an unpredictable (but always sticking to the subject) improviser and this perhaps makes her Lady Macbeth so expressive in demonstrating gradual degradation of personality - from careful rinsing of bloody pool (in rubber gloves); through immersing into her own world on the couch, apple in hand; through drilling; until committing of suicide: repeatedly, manically trying to hang herself on a sheet taken out from a huge washing machine. There is no scene of madness in this Macbeth; Lady Macbeth is mad right from the beginning. What is annoying is her lines - we have an impression that she delivers a so-called inner monologue of the character, which should remain hidden under the surface of words.

And one more thing: it is impossible to sustain the controlled madness Jarzyna unleashes in his cinema/theater for three hours. Changing of rhythms and emotions is inherent to the performance, dramatic reality however can not absorb everything; it simply rejects some more risky ideas. Hekate (there is only one witch in this adaptation) appears first as an Arab woman, then as Banquo's son and in final sequence as a bald doctor with his face painted white. But even though the witch/doctor is rendered by such excellent actresses as Danuta Stenka and Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik (former incarnations of Hekate speak in their voices), it remains no more than a personification of fear from some cheap thriller. Equally cheap (and tautological) is the incarnation of irrationality and the omen of Lady Macbeth's madness - an actor dressed up as a rabbit, attempting to enter the light rectangle on the wall just like she will do in a moment.

After three hours spent in "Waryński" works we leave with mixed feelings. Jarzyna performs his massive attack on the audience's senses in a skilful if sometimes imprecise manner. He writes Shakespeare's tragedy anew, crossing out many famous scenes (Lady Macbeth's madness; subplot of Lady Macduff; witches' Sabbath) and adding some other. His is not as much an interpretation of Macbeth as variations on its theme; an attempt to bring out and demonstrate its deep, dark undercurrent and find how it corresponds to modern times. Shakespeare's Hekate magically distilled demons and specters for Macbeth - Jarzyna does the same for his audience.