The Death of a Decadent

Łukasz Drewniak, PRZEKRóJ

"Giovanni" - Mozart fraught with Molier; an excellent anti-opera by Jarzyna

We should state one thing clearly: the latest Jarzyna's production is not an opera. The TR boss intersperses Mozart's masterpiece with external motives; he picks out legendary parts and catchy fragments from the script the way one does with musical samples. He makes actors recite the libretto as in some "normal" play. There is no orchestra, in few scenes only a string quartet appears. No doubt opera audience will find the TR production eccentric; connoisseurs on the other hand should grasp the director's alusions, jokes and other musical ornaments at once. Theater goers should be less surprised: they will recognize all the familiar motives of Jarzyna's stage art. By the way: don't expect a comprehensive reinterpretation of Don Juan myth. The director is interested only in the final hours of his decadent character's life.
The story is set in a top floor apartment of a five-star hotel. Andrzej Chyra's Giovanni reminds of a faceless mannequin from a shop with luxurious men's clothes; on his head he wears a fluorescent, glinting mirror ball - a disgusting jerk frozen in some kind of rotten indolence. True, he is very popular and rich - so what? Instead of passionate excitement he is consumed by boredom: his affair with every woman felt the same. But he, too, was always the same. Angry, empty, distant. And not one in diverse collection of surrounding women can change him: neither Danuta Stenka's vamp buzzing with sex (Anna), nor Roma Gąsiorowska's intriguingly vulgar beauty from projcect houses (Zerlina), nor Maja Ostaszewska's emotionally fragile 30-year-old (Elvira). The aftermath of every perverse act is despair. This new incarnation of Don Juan is left only with meaningless, cheap gestures.
The Rozmaitości troupe "cheats" the audience pretending to sing opera aries. They mouth the words, but its the voices of professional opera singers that flow from loudspeakers hidden cannily overhead. The trick, however, is not intended to deceive the audience. Jarzyna's aim was what he calls a "sygnalised imposture" which emphasizes the actors' struggle with unauthentic opera convention. And helps interprete "Giovanni" as a story about life as a lie. Love is an imposture, bliss is an imposture - and death as well. The falsehood of words and singing; masks and poses struck by characters are counterpointed by true gestures and bursts of real emotions. Anna lures Giovanni tearing her stockings. Young bride Zerlina, ashamed in the presence of her seducer, nervously picks at a wedding cake. Dying Giovanni grabs at the hand of the dead Commendatore.
The death of Giovanni repeats in a sense the death of Gombrowicz's Iwona, who in one of Jarzyna's former plays in Stary Teatr commited suicide during the feast. To choke to death in order to become a saint. What, therefore, is the meaning of this last scene? Well - that even the sin is not a final act. Self-destruction of the main character can not save his aimless life. In the last minutes of the play Giovanni's voice, answering the corpse of Commendatore from a cracking LP, quietens. All those who suffered harm from the hands of Don Juan-Giovanni gather in the hotel suite. But he is not there - and therefore the world that created him ceases to exist, too.
Someone switches the lights off.