A Polish/Irish theatrical exchange sees a challenging, provocative play visit Dublin from Wroclaw. Its creator, Bartosz Porczyk, talks to Peter Crawleyabout changing attitudes.
The morning scenes in Wroclaw airport have a poignancy that will not be diminished by their regularity. A group of burly men in their 20s hug each other fiercely before some of them detach and board the early flight for London. A young woman bound for Dublin moves slowly through the queue towards security, avoiding her mother's eyes, as she pinches back her tears.
These are the young émigrés of one of the largest cities in Poland, an increasingly prosperous place attracting overseas investment - Hewlett Packard and Google have both set up headquarters here - but which cannot hold onto its younger generation.
Wroclaw is also and home to the Teatr Polski (the National Theatre of Poland), a grand, frayed institution with three stages which would host a visiting production later that night about one of the émigrés' destinations.
Presented by Axis Arts Centre, Dermot Bolger's The Townlands of Brazil, directed by Ray Yeats and supported in its international endeavours by Culture Ireland, lays the foundation stone for a collaborative relationship between the two theatres.
The Townlands of Brazil, which portrays the history of Ballymun together with its multicultural regeneration, is emblematic not only of Ireland at a particular moment of transition, but also representative of the work of that theatre.
It is hard to tell what performance could be representative of Teatr Polski, which also has independent bases in three other Polish cities. In Wroclaw, the theatre retains a full-time ensemble of 60 performers, stages several productions, from classic texts to experimental work in repertory, and recently staged a production of Don Juan Returns from the Warso large it necessitated one-and-a-half tons of artificial snow imported from Germany.
The morning I see the theatre, staff members are still sweeping it up from the auditorium.
The show that now arrives to Axis Arts Centre is Smycz, an infinitely more manageable affair written and performed by Bartosz Porczyk (who also goes by the name Bartek). A one-man show that owes much to the episodic form and subversive thrust of cabaret, it uses monologue, music and song to deal with the issues of globalisation, the deadening hand of consumerism and fighting for personal freedom in an intolerant world. It also seems to allude, however discretely, to the currently fractious state of Polish politics.
LAST MONTH THEconservative and staunchly Catholic ruling coalition collapsed when the president, Lech Kaczynski, sacked four ministers from parliament, leaving the prime minister, his identical twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leading a government without majority support. A snap election is to be held next month, and the political compass may swing the other way.
On the enormous stage of the Teatr Polski's main auditorium, where rehearsals for Smyczwere continuing, Bartek explains the title of his show, which translates as The Leash.
"The title for Smyczcomes from the work of the very famous Polish band Maanam," he says, his words translated by Malgorzata Lubelska, the theatre's international projects co-ordinator. "And that song is the most important one used in the show. 'Smycz', in the mind of humans, is addiction: addiction to money, power, love, loneliness."
Bartek, a softly spoken, physically comfortable actor, frequently rises from his chair to illustrate his point, taking position at the lip of the stage or donning an item of costume before briefly enacting a scene. In the show, he plays several characters, from a quasi-fascistic priest to an addled prostitute in nine-inch stilettos.
Those whose only reference to Polish theatre are the dry theories of Grotowski and Kantor may be surprised by its hip sensibility, media-savvy design and fluid, scabrous wit. In one monologue Bartek tells the story of a child who, asked what he wants to be when he grows up, replies "a laptop".
"If he does," says the boy's father, "maybe I'll be able to spend more time with him." Bartek retakes his seat and continues in Polish: "The target [ audience] are the people who want to listen, who want to change anything in their lives. If they open their hearts and their minds they can do it."
He switches with a seductive softness into English: "If you want for a second, for a minute, to think about your life, only this, you can watch this spectacle. That's all. Nothing more."
SMYCZ, WHICH WASperformed in Teatr Polski's experimental space, has sold out at every performance, attracting, I was told, a motley attendance made up of the Wroclaw gay community (the city is a liberal stronghold within a religious, conservative nation) and committed old ladies - "not to mention," the theatre's artistic director Kryzstof Mieszkowski adds, only partly facetiously, "the young girls fascinated by Bartek."
What either of these constituencies would have made of Bartek's response to a question about the form of the performance, during which he again leaves his chair, casually removes his jeans and carefully steps into a pair of black high-heels, I can only guess.
"In the age of Big Brother," he says, unbuckling his belt, "people like to watch other people. Here we give them that; they can see everything." He struts across the performing space.
"He's Margaret," whispers Lubelska between translations, as though the character were an old friend. "I never leave the stage for one second," Bartek continues. "I change everything on the stage. This is the full exhibition they want to watch. Because they can look at this on the television. We can't change the picture [on stage]. But we can change Bartek." Lubelska stops translating for a moment and looks approvingly at Bartek.
"Nice legs," she says.
With his text divided between speech and song, his original words spliced with liberal quotations from Beckett, Sarah Kane, Aristotle and Bernard Marie-Koltès, Bartek's play has a distinctly contemporary sensibility, as at home in Wroclaw, one feels, as it would be in Dublin, or, for that matter, London or New York. Later, in Mieszkowski's office, I wonder if Smyczwas representative of the new direction of young Polish theatre makers.
"One should remember that for many years Poland was a communist country," says Mieszkowski, "and this past determines our thinking about the present and the future as well. But one thing is constant and this gives the hope for the future.
"This is the pace of art and theatre in Poland. During the oppression of communism, theatre was a place of freedom. Theatre was a place where one could drink a glass of vodka without any consequence. Smycz, directed by a very young director [ Natalia Korczakowska], is a story about freedom and the search for freedom and one's own identity: erotic identity, human identity, philosophical identity, everything which forms the condition of the human being, one can find in the Smycz production."
DOES MIESZKOWSKI, WHO, like many artistic directors in Poland, was once a critic, recognise a shift in the concerns of the new generation of Polish theatre artists? "This is the fundamental difference" he replies. "I'm sure the system of values of human being has not changed. It is always the same. The young generation are just using different tools to describe the world in which they are living. I wonder if you know the texts which are sung by Bartek on the stage? In my opinion these texts reflect all the instability going on in Poland. I think that democracy, not only in Poland, is somehow threatened. And I think that theatre artists enlarge the space for democracy. One of the most important things in contemporary Polish theatre is provocation."
It is a notion seconded by Piotr Borys, deputy chief of the local government in Wroclaw, which is run by the liberal conservative Civic Platform, independent of the national government. "For sure," he says, "Smycz is a good production to show, because we want to show how the money changes our lives, the globalisation, the terrorism, how they connect; because they are the same here as they are in Ireland and Smycz shows that."
Local government is a significant funder for Teatr Polski, and Borys describes their input as that of "good parents".
"We give them financial help," he says, "but we do not tell them how they should spend this money." Nonetheless, he admits that there are political benefits to a rigorous engagement with supporting culture and facilitating international exchanges such as this one. "We know that so many Polish people are in Ireland. But we know that, when they come back, they will be completely different people and they will share the style of life they take from Ireland."
The 250,000 young Poles in Ireland are also entitled to vote in next month's election. "It's very important for us that they vote," concedes Borys, "because they can change the future of this country."
It is an optimistic view of the participative democracy present in the theatre, one shared as much by Teatr Polski as the Axis Arts Centre. The traffic in Wroclaw airport, they know, can flow both ways.
•Smycz runs from 20-22 Sept in Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun.
