DOG MEAT: NOTES FROM POLAND
Lamont, Rosette C.
Last year, in May, I had occasion to revisit Warsaw, where I had stopped in 1974 on my way back from the Soviet Union. Detente, in 1974, was at its height, yet, when I reached Warsaw after...
...Since I had arrived with heavy luggage I had hoped for some assistance...
...That night I woke up more than once, listening to the silence...
...For this production, Jerzy Jarocki, the director of the play, had one-third of the orchestra seats removed in order to extend the proscenium...
...we'd stick in their throats...
...The flotsam and jetsam of an irretrievably fractured society seem to have drifted to this spot in the absurd hope of catching some passing train...
...It was rumored in Warsaw that Holoubek was moving to another theater, and that many of the company's leading actors were going to follow him...
...Sometimes you can buy a whole pig from an independent farmer, but then you must slaughter the animal and dress it...
...Skarouch brings to the fore the dramatist's doubts about the outcome of any revolution, however noble in its early planning stages...
...Although the theater is not beyond the pall of censorship—every new script must be submitted to the censor's office—this was one of the places where I felt among friends...
...As though to fulfill the public's frustrated expectation, Jerzy Jarocki, a director who has been labeled "an irreverent neonaturalist," treats us to an exalting final image: tiny Soviet fighter bombers travel in formation across wires strung high above our heads...
...The process of justice is ridiculed in the person of the Attorney General who is led on a leash by the grotesque aristocratic vamp, Irina Wsiewo)6downa Zbereznicka-Podberezka...
...For some reason there are plenty of eggs, but a chicken is a delicacy one can hardly afford...
...The subtext tends to become the text...
...Familiar texts can be made to address the audience in the coded vocabulary of a parable...
...Yet the entire performance was punctuated by an ironically defiant chuckle rising 360 from an extraordinarily comic actor, Bogdan Baer, who played the master shoemaker, Sajetan Tempe...
...In the morning I heard a yelp, but it turned out to be the sound of a healthy pet running through the yard...
...Until last spring, the Dramatyczny was directed by Gustaw Holoubek, one of Poland's best actors...
...No, not as pets...
...An old woman like me can manage with no meat at all or very little, but for a family with children it is very difficult...
...To laugh or applaud when a certain joke is made is a way of showing defiance, of entering into the friendship of a warm complicity with the audience...
...There are no spies in our midst...
...You know, of course, that meat is scarce, rationed...
...I had arranged, through Polish friends in New York, for a room in a private apartment...
...Krasowski conveyed the idea that a bygone era of noble values and ideals was inexorably vitiated by demonic cravings for power, arising in the nicest and simplest of people, transforming them into monstrous tyrants...
...On the stage, its phantom presence is reflected on the upturned faces of the stranded human beings...
...The Soviet Union cannot gulp us down...
...Gone is the traditional shoemakers' but in the center of a naive village...
...I embarked upon my return visit with a good deal of apprehension, thinking that the Warsaw I remembered would not be the one of today...
...Poland is in no need of martyrs, yet young people risk their lives every day...
...Of course, this presupposes a public educated in the fine art of deciphering messages that rely on inflection, mimicry, and the gestural aspects of production rather than on a careful rendition of the lines...
...Slowly they grasp their luck in having managed to slip through the iron spokes of the Nazi war machine...
...In secret many families make their own sausages, and ham...
...The final song of The Year 1961...
...People come here and purchase her dogs for stew...
...There may be no salvation, but we'll just keep on hoping...
...More often than not, the flowers in the bouquets are white and red, the national colors of Poland...
...Thus the script itself becomes a secret rallying sign...
...Prophetic words: ten days later the nineteen-year-old student Grzegorz Przemyk was arrested in the Old Town where he had stopped for a glass of wine with school friends...
...I would have dismissed my landlady's story had I not noticed her warmth, wit, and lucid intellect...
...The dramatis personae are an impoverished father and his son, a blase aristocrat and his mistress, two partisan fighters, a Mother Courage type of canteen woman with her pregnant daughter who is an innocent victim of a rape by a gang of German soldiers, a professor of mathematics, and a mysterious, symbolic figure, the incarnation of Death on a rampage...
...Witold Skarouch's production of the same play for Stettin's Teatr Wspolozesny turned it into a terrifyingly contemporary tableau of political struggle for power...
...One day at lunchtime, I was talking with a stage director at the Writers' Club on the corner of Miodowa Street...
...They are policemen in civilian clothes...
...One of the government's policies is to keep the independent theater community on tenterhooks...
...Officially, it is simply a 359 circle of friends out on the town, but one always knows by the quality of the applause...
...Never mind," said my companion, "we're in no danger, you and I. The police are bent on clubbing the young...
...The present regime replaced Holoubek with Jan Pawel Gavlik, the former administrator of Cracow's Stary Teatr...
...Most of us don't think of slaughter houses when we eat a piece of steak, but then we don't happen to live above one either...
...moreover, the spectacle was bathed in an all-pervasive aura of gross sexuality...
...This was no Gothic novel I had stepped into but a bit of Polish quotidian reality...
...Yet Mrozek and his director avoid the easy optimism of "socialist realism...
...Yet my hostess's story revealed something to me about today's Poland...
...ONE IS ALWAYS AWARE of the psychic energy released when like-minded members of a theater audience come together to watch a show...
...The thunderous applause of this Third of May audience demonstrated the public's identification with the plight of the Polish common man unawed by the technological prowess of a superpower, albeit, allegedly, a liberating one...
...Solidarity has been suppressed, but the spirit of solidarity is still very strong...
...So my concierge has found a way of making ends meet...
...After a while my hostess ventured: "I feel funny about this woman...
...My hostess was a lady in her seventies, a widow, retired from her own professional activities as one of the city's leading architects...
...None was in evidence...
...He left his country 20 years ago and lives in Paris, but his plays are now performed all over Poland...
...This past spring two shows were the focus of lively interest: Andrzej Strzelecki's Clowni ("Clowns") on the small stage of Htibner's Teatr Powszechny, and Andrzej Jarecki's The Unforgettable Year 1961 at the Teatr Popularny...
...You see she raises dogs...
...For food...
...For the audience, the Auschwitz train is all the more real for having remained invisible...
...I registered some surprise...
...Mrozek's Pieszo is a powerful, disturbing drama that presents a cross section of Polish society cast adrift by the Second World War...
...At the end of the play we see his head being lopped off by his erstwhile associates who hope to rule in his place...
...Even the flowing script adapted for some program covers is an echo of the one that was developed for Solidarndsc posters and banners...
...Przemyk's funeral was attended by some 50,000 people who had come from all over Poland—the most impressive demonstration since the imposition of martial law...
...People still speak of his brilliant speeches delivered during those months when "words could be used" (an eloquent phrase from an irreverent show written that same spring, Clowni...
...Solidarity has remained a moral force...
...The surface style, however, was being undermined, or derided, by the uncanny intrusion of vaudeville gags...
...Holoubek, a liberal, served as a member of the Parliament during the time of Solidarity's official existence...
...Glances are exchanged, and applause and laughter become an act of defiance...
...There is a woman downstairs," my landlady answered with a bit of hesitation, "but I avoid asking her for anything...
...Both plays are musical revues, and both have casts made up of the finest students of the Warsaw Drama School...
...Holoubek is not the only theatrical director to have been summarily replaced...
...You will also invariably see—as you did in my theater tonight— a couple of men who sit in stony silence...
...This vast stage shows a desolate, barren field traversed by train tracks...
...Listeners are not passive...
...The audience hears the train coming and passing...
...The whole theater resounds with the grating noise of sliding metal gates, the pounding of feet marching on suspended prison walkways...
...Chickens are sold in the market with their feathers...
...In the afternoon, there had been numerous street demonstrations and clashes with the police...
...Even the traditional tossing of flowers onto the stage at the end of performance becomes a demonstration...
...For example, a group, perhaps former members of Solidarity, will buy a block of seats for a certain performance...
...For the past three years his Pieszo has been part of the regular repertory of Warsaw's Teatr Dramatyczny, the Polish equivalent of the Odeon in Paris, or London's Aldwych...
...We discussed the heavy presence of the zomos, in front of the nearby Royal Castle...
...Taken to the police station, the young man was beaten to death...
...The air was palpably free...
...IT IS ALWAYS POIGNANT to see Warsaw's young people, for they are the victims of the police and the special shock troops, the zomos...
...Almost at once the characters find themselves trapped inside the iron mesh of a prison cell...
...A theater director explained to me: "Sometimes we realize that we are dealing with a special kind of audience...
...Detente, in 1974, was at its height, yet, when I reached Warsaw after a month in Russia, I felt as though I had crossed a time zone...
...The closing lines spoken by the father to his son are full of both resentment and weary acceptance: "They fly...
...Poland's theater does not confine itself to a restaging of the classics, even such modern classics as the works of Witkiewicz and Mrozek...
...Mrozek is a kind of resistance hero in Poland...
...A painter I met in Warsaw said to me: "Here, unlike in the Soviet Union, we never fear betrayal by our friends...
...The lady went on in her quiet voice: "For meat...
...The play ends with the shuffling appearance of faceless, ashen doubles, Comrade Abramowski and Comrade X, the new leaders of a bureaucratic state...
...Soon after my arrival I realized that there are two places in Poland where people find solace and feel relatively free: churches and theaters...
...Although the Writers' Union had been suspended, the club's dining room and cafe were still open...
...Within the enclosed space of a theater a special spirit reigns as well...
...It is not legal...
...The audience was in a special mood that night...
...I suppose my face showed dismay...
...We go on, on foot...
...Last May's season was dominated by two productions of Witkiewicz's masterpiece Szewcy ("The Shoemakers...
...I remember being taken to see Slawomir Mrozek's Pieszo ("On Foot") on the evening of May 3, the anniversary of the 1791 Polish Constitution...
...As directed by Jerzy Krasowski for Warsaw's Teatr Polski, Witkiewicz's expressionist drama assumed the trappings of a good-natured folk operetta...
...I had come here to study the Polish theater and to see how much could get by the censor...
...When a train comes at last, it does not stop: it is one of the cattle trains that carries prisoners to Auschwitz...
...If they look like the toy planes they are, the illusion of height is all the more complete...
...This proved to be not entirely correct...
...One of the devices most commonly used lies in the presentation of well-known classics in novel, unexpected, even jarring ways...
...The churches are always full, throughout the day, and many of the parishioners are young...
...I inquired whether the house had a janitor...
...The screams of the tortured are matched by the shouts of their executioners...
...It was not for us," comments one of the characters...
...The youthful spirit of these two productions did much to strengthen their message of defiance...
...The Poles may be forced to feed on dog meat, but they will never swallow their pride...
...A secret, unspoken alliance connects the audience, the actors, and the director...
...In the role of Sajetan Tempe, Tadeusz Zapagnik looked like a caricatural amalgam of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin...
...Sometimes I hear the dogs howl, and it gives me a creepy feeling...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
