„Moralność pani Dulskiej”

Some thoughts after seeing Dulska at Teatr Narodowy. There was stillness at the beginning — the cast became the set — and yet it wasn't stillness at all, because within it there was this concentrated focus on lips and eyes, half-lights and half-shadows. That continued throughout, in lighting that was strange, at odd angles and depths, full of shadow. There was a moment at the beginning where I couldn't tell whether the tenant was a projection on one of the screens or an actor standing there — and it turned out there was an actor standing there. She was like a sylph: an aggressive, serpentine sexuality that she turned on Dulska, white-faced, long black hair — but also very comic, jerky and sporadic in her movements, zombie-like. There were raindrops behind Zbyszko at the beginning, which then moved to the other side and seemed to blend with him — rolling fat and greasy down the wall behind where he sat, like amoeba. The stage, though small and wedge-shaped, seemed vast — because of how the screens were used. They doubled as projector screens, on which there was dance, and strange shapes cast again, so that you felt you were looking at the dream of a dream: the dancing girls on the table with their alter egos projected onto them as they danced, seeming to dance with their own electronic shadows. Dulski: a tennis-playing flirt. It was an incredibly sexual production, completely unashamed to touch those areas — in particular the sexuality of the daughters, and their relationship with Zbyszko, who was like a sort of demon: a quiet, soft demon. The movement throughout was balletic and angular, uncertain and strange, and the shadows were as important as the actors. And throughout, quite incredible sound effects — strange sounds of things breaking, whirring, cracking, running right through it. I found myself thinking about using something like that myself. The end was breathtaking — Dulska whirling in her own dance, and it seemed almost as if she had, in some strange way, been liberated. So those are my first impressions: being caught up in this whirlwind of theatre that was precise and imaginative and unbounded, and yet very tightly constrained — archaic, simple, elegant, dangerous, frightening. Theatre let loose. A real moment of a door opening onto a whole set of new meanings about the relations between those who feel themselves to be trapped and constrained. Trapped into what? There's a lot to think about there, and I want to let it settle. Sometimes I think theatre has a sort of primeval function, played out in front of us against the sharp light of a Neolithic fire: what it is to be human, how to solve problems, what it is to be alive, what it is to not have — not have language adequate to our experience. Theatre allows us to enter more easily through a doorway marked myth and legend, and once we're in there, we're in a kind of dream world. Perhaps that's one of the things theatre straddles — the present and the future, a rational state within an irrational, mood-driven one — something very deep, and very sour, and sweet, which the moment it's touched by language stops being that other thing and becomes language instead. Theatre lives, I think, somewhere in between those two things. And with this superb production, I think that's exactly what we have.