ARTicles vol.4 i.2b: Who is Krystian Lupa?

Krystian Lupa is Poland’s most renowned and influential living director. Since 1989, his prestige has risen consistently both in Poland and abroad, and he has become one of continental Europe’s most honored and debated contemporary theatre artists. He has received the highest honors given in recognition of theatrical work by the governments of France, Austria, and Poland, in addition to international festival awards for specific productions. His many years as the head of the directing program of the Cracow State Drama School has also put his mark on a younger generation of loyal former students, most notably Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krzysztof Warlikowski (both primarily associated with TR-Warszawa, Warsaw’s most innovative and critically-acclaimed resident repertory company). Until Lupa’s production of Three Sistersat the A.R.T., his theatre has yet to find its audience and advocates in the English-speaking world.

Poland is perhaps Europe’s most paradoxical country, and its theatre provides both a mirror and a crucible for the complexities of Polish history and contemporary reality. Lupa was born in the darkest year of World War II in the Upper Silesian town of Jastrzebie Zdroj, located on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic and a short distance from Auschwitz/Oswiecim. If Poland is Europe’s most paradoxical country, then Upper Silesia is arguably Poland’s (and Europe’s) most tragic and complex region. Upper Silesia is the most urbanized, industrialized, and prosperous part of Poland, and the so-called Katowice complex of a dozen or more cities at its heart is the largest urban center in the country, with more than double the population of Warsaw. The region historically has been a stew of Polish, German, Czech, Jewish, and Austrian influences, as well as the home of a distinct Silesian ethnic group with its own dialect and folk culture, and was a much-contested economic prize between Poland and Germany between the wars. While Upper Silesia has suffered some of the world’s most severe environmental problems, the area immediately around Jastrebie Zdroj retains one of the most beautiful natural settings in Poland, and stands apart from the rest of the country in part because of the predominance of Protestants (though ethnically Polish) in the region. Silesia‘s Jews largely perished or fled in the wake of the Holocaust, and its German and ethnic Silesian populations were violently expelled after the war under the terms of the Yalta Treaty imposed on Poland by its allies the United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Russia. Millions of ethnic Poles displaced from lost territories in the East were in turn resettled in Silesia. This was part of one of the largest forced relocations of populations in the history of the world, and a little-discussed feature of the deep political tensions that still haunt Polish-German and Polish-Ukrainian relations to this day.

Upper Silesia has also been the birthplace or professional arena of many of Poland’s most significant modern theatre directors, including Jerzy Jarocki, Jerzy Grotowski, and the half-German Konrad Swinarski, who was Brecht’s most famous Polish student and Lupa’s early mentor at Cracow’s Teatr Stary. Many in Poland still consider Swinarski the single greatest Polish director of the twentieth century. His career curiously anticipated and paralleled that of Peter Brook in Great Britain. Swinarski, for example, directed the world premiere of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sadein West Berlin, along with landmark productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreamand Measure for Measurein Cracow in the early 1970s. In the midst of rehearsals for a major production of Hamletin Cracow in 1975, for which Lupa served as assistant director, Swinarski perished in an airplane crash in Syria while preparing a production in Israel. After assisting Swinarski, Lupa spent much of his early career working in relative obscurity, but also with considerable artistic freedom, as artistic director of his own theatre in Jelenia Gora in Lower Silesia, which was part of Germany through the end of World War II.

Lupa’s work is Polish insofar as it is itself profoundly paradoxical: his theatre is at once an unmistakable product of the Polish tradition, a strategic rejection of some of its salient qualities, and a highly original hybridization of foreign theatrical and literary influences. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Polish theatre since 1900 has been the unique degree to which prominent theatre artists (including playwrights such as Stanislaw Wyspianski, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Slawomir Mrozek) have started in the visual arts, particularly graphic design and painting. Poland was one of the early leaders in the development of performance art, happenings, and image theatre thanks to the work of artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jozef Szajna, and Leszek Madzik. The same holds true for Polish filmmakers such as Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda. Lupa’s theatre work was anticipated by his training in graphic design in Cracow’s Academy of Fine Arts, and he often designs the sets for his own productions. Here emerges a key paradox: while the work of Kantor, Szajna, and Madzik earned Polish theatre a reputation abroad for visual formalism delivered with great dramatic daring and panache, Lupa’s work is decidedly understated in visual terms, disowning and perhaps even embarrassed by the idea of providing a spectacular coup de théâtre, yet there is little doubt that a master of spatial and visual nuance is behind every choice on stage. With actors, Lupa also consciously distances himself from displays of the physical and vocal virtuousity developed by Grotowski and his followers.

The choice of Chekhov’s Three Sistersfor production in Cambridge reflects the ambiguities and complexity of Lupa‘s position as a contemporary Polish director on the world stage. The great Russian realistic tradition represented by Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and the Moscow Art Theatre was deeply and immediately absorbed into the Polish theatre as a result of much of the country being ruled by Russia before World War I. Polish actors were part of the Moscow Art Theatre company, Poles such as Richard Boleslavsky were instrumental in the introduction of Stanislavsky’s teaching in the United States, innovative and influential Polish directors such as Juliusz Osterwa and Jerzy Grotowski claimed Stanislavsky as an influence, and since World War II the psychological realistic Russian tradition has dominated the teaching of acting and directing in Poland’s drama schools. At the same time, Poles have always chaffed under the sense of Russian cultural domination of the country, with Stanislavsky’s work at times singled out as a fighting point, and have with good cause argued that the indigenous Polish theatre is historically not realistic in character. On this score, the Polish theatre proved fertile ground for the transplantation of the work of Meyerhold in the 1950s and 60s, when the great Russian experimental director’s work was still officially suppressed at home. Lupa has consistently turned to Russian drama and literature for material for his productions, directing plays by Chekhov and Gorky as well as stage adaptations of novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov. Lupa is ultimately perhaps the most “Russian” of contemporary Polish directors in that his work so rigorously focuses on the precise and profound creation of a character’s interior life, rather than in any systematic application of Stanislavsky’s acting “method.”

While Lupa has selectively embraced certain Polish playwrights outside the realistic tradition (Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz), he has done so in ways that have also illuminated recognizable psychological and existential realities carried within the outwardly grotesque or absurd situations and characters portrayed. He has also categorically disowned the Polish romantic dramatic canon (which carries a prestige in Poland much like the work of Goethe, Kleist, or Büchner in Germany or Pushkin in Russia) and the ever-popular founder of Polish theatrical modernism, the artist-turned-playwright/designer/director Stanislaw Wyspianski.

The most acclaimed of Lupa’s productions, however, have drawn on the work of Austrian playwrights and novelists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Thomas Bernhardt. Lupa’s epic adaptations of great Russian and Austrian novels such as Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazovor Musil’s The Man Without Qualitiescan run up to nine hours in performance, an experience of his theatre that American audiences have yet to share. One of Lupa’s students has described his use of time as pointedly anti-Brechtian in impulse: a desire to break down the audience’s resistance to the performance and to surrender to the collective dream provided by the director and his actors. A typical prompt to his directing students is to try adding ten minutes of silence to a scene. So this director so imbued with German-language writing and with as direct a lineage as possible in Poland to the work of the Berliner Ensemble has firmly rejected the principle of Brecht‘s theory of the alienation effect (verfremdungseffekt). Even more audaciously, he has successfully exported Polish-language stage adaptations of the canon of modern Austrian literature back to the German-speaking world. This is particularly striking given Germany and Austria’s historic roles as two of the three imperial powers that had partitioned and ruled Poland through World War I, much less in light of the later history of the Nazi occupation.

A key to Lupa’s deep immersion in Austrian literature and theatre can be found in his highly acclaimed production of Thomas Bernhardt’s play Ritter, Dene, Vossat Cracow’s Stary Teatr in 1996. Bernhardt’s play dramatizes the family life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the interwar period, and Lupa’s brilliant production of it perhaps crystallizes his own ultimate concern with contemporary philosophical issues, for which he has found apparently endless inspiration in the Austrian modernists. If the Russian theatre provides Lupa with the model for deep interior work on character with his actors, Austrian literature in turn provides him with an ethical and philosophical dimension that moves his work beyond the emotional subjectivity of the individual or the specificity of any given historical or cultural milieu. His theatre is no less philosophical than Brecht’s, but draws on modern philosophical lines of thought other than Marx. A third debt to the German-speaking intellectual world that Lupa openly acknowledges is to a source largely out of favor in Western Europe and North America: the work of psychologist Karl Jung.

One might also take Lupa’s work based on Austrian literature as a theatrical expression of the larger project of reclaiming the political and cultural ethos of Mittel Europa, or the lost world of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, that became a popular talking point in Eastern European intellectual circles in the 1980s in anticipation of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Musil’s A Man Without Qualities(which rivals Proust’s Remembrance of Things Pastin length) was indeed one of the most widely read books in Poland in the heady days of the Solidarity Movement and the subsequent period of martial law. One of the features of the political repression and economic decline of the martial law era in Poland that perhaps shaped Lupa’s approach to performance time was that people had a great of time on their hands to read, attend the theatre, or rehearse. Today this approach to time seems rather a radical challenge to the fast pace, stresses, and endless distractions of the new economy. Such an extended period of undivided attention is clearly too demanding for some audiences and actors, but can seem luxurious or even therapeutic to others.

The curious nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the part of its former colonies anticipated the current hopes in the region for the European Union: a move away from nationalist politics and identity formation and towards a pan-European democratic order (one of the virtues of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire was its embrace of democratic rule both in Vienna and in provincial capitals such as Cracow and Prague). Lupa’s theatre is an expression of a new European sensibility no less than a Polish one – a feature confirmed by the embrace of his work in Paris and Vienna no less than in Warsaw or Cracow. For Western Europe to embrace and endorse an Eastern European interpretation of its own literature and experience is a delicate balancing of subtle but historically implacable cultural hierarchies and lenses – what might a Viennese audience gain by attending a production of Robert Musil or Thomas Bernhardt in Polish, the language of an impoverished and politically star-crossed former colony? This exchange is also a profound and necessary test of the ultimate viability of the new “common European house” promised by the expansions of NATO and the E.U. This in combination with the Polish and Russian dimensions of Lupa’s body of work reveal the astonishing breadth of his theatrical, social, and philosophical field of vision. For the time being, the A.R.T.’s actors and audiences will be introduced to a comfortable first dose of the “Russian” Lupa, which is not a small thing. What this most European of Polish directors will ultimately bring to the American theatre remains an open and tantalizing question – and with this production at the A.R.T., now an immediate one.

Allen Kuharski is Chair of the Department of Theatre at Swarthmore College.

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