Israeli director Lilach Dekel-Avneri takes an uncanny look at Sylwia Chutnik’s play to unearth the living remains of a traumatic history, mingling horror and tragedy with farce
Muranooo is an non-existent land, cast in liminal time and space. Its realm is woven by the whispers and screams of ghostly figures which from time to time possess the bodies of people living in the old townhouses of Muranów. This land marks its presence subtly, underneath the surface of temporarily healed wounds of the past war, as ghosts which are imprisoned underneath the walls of the old Warsaw ghetto await an exorcism which could finally set them free.
An international team of Polish, Israeli and German artists set on a journey into this cacophonic world of ghostly images, words and sounds. By mingling different languages and contrasting contemporary times with the past, the artists attempt to question the limits of our memory. The play depicts the way in which each contemporary viewer creates their own story out of the collage of stimuli provided by the media, and it shows the potential that a common yet differing Polish-Jewish past can shape a cross-cultural dialogue.
In an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, Sylwia Chutnik explains
It is a comedy with elements of horror. I was watching a TV documentary which stated that the houses in Muranów are all haunted, some of my friends who live there say that somebody keeps walking around their kitchen at night. I thought to myself, oh, come on. But if you think about the fact that today’s Muranów is constructed with concrete that was grinded out of rubble and the remains of the victims’ bodies, it’s quite terrifying. The TV documentary tried to convince that the ghosts who live there require no exorcist. One just needs to ask them to leave. When you are haunted, you should ask: what do you need, perhaps you want me to live your life for you? The performance is an attempt to discern the thread that bonds us with these ghosts. The text itself is very particular, two Hebrew translators gave up working on it, because it so saturated with the grotesque, the kitsch and the tragic, all in one verse. There were people, who, upon reading the text, asked: Who is this against? Poles or Jews? Because it always has to be against someone. But, this isn’t the case with our production, Lilach entered the kitsch of a happy end with lots of courage.
Born in 1979 in Warsaw, Sylwia Chutnik is a writer, journalist, cultural studies scholar, graduate of the Department of Gender Studies of the Warsaw University. Her writing is deeply rooted in feminist theories and cultural gender concepts, and she frequently takes up the themes of various historic traumas pertinent to a contemporary Poland. Sylwia Chutnik knows the history of Warsaw’s Muranów thanks to the tour-guide course she completed. She also learned about the district during her academic research as part of the Cultural Studies programme at the Warsaw University, when studied the diary entries of women who lived in the ghetto. Recently, Chutnik’s texts inspire a growing number of theatre productions. Her Pocket Atlas of Women was staged by Śmigasiewicz, Marcin Liber based his award-winning III Furies on Chutnik’s novel called Dzidzia, and he is currently directing a production based on her novel Aleksandra. Rzecz o Piłsudskim.
The text written by Chutnik is adapted for the stage and directed by Lilach Dekel-Avneri. The young theatre director cooperates with Tel Aviv’s Tmuna Theatre, and in 2012, she has visited Warsaw’s Warszawa Centralna theatre festival with a performance entitled Adam Duch (Adam Ghost).
With Muranooo, Chutnik adds to the newly emerging voices of a different approach to Poland's war-time traumas. Another notable text to deal with the history of Warsaw's ghetto is Elżbieta Janicka's Festung Warschau, which uncovers an ongoing rivalry of national memories, and a clash of different policies of commemoration.
The performance of Muranooo was made possible thanks to the cooperation between Cameri Theater, Itim Theatre Ensemble, and it was supported by the Isreali Embassy in Poland, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Goethe-Institut in Warsaw.
The performance is staged at the Foyer of Teatr Dramatyczny’s Duża Scena (Major Stage). The premiere showing is scheduled on the 12th of April, 2012, with repeat performances on the 13th, 14th and 15th of May. All showings begin at 7 pm.
Muranooo had its preview showing in Warsaw as part of the Walka Czarnucha z Europą (A Nigger’s Battle with Europe) festival on the 17th of June, 2011
Editor: SRS
Source: teatrdramatyczny.pl, wyborcza.pl