A scene from Nosferatu, photo: Stefan Okołowicz / Teatr Narodowy
In Nosferatu, the visionary director and head of TR Warszawa, Grzegorz Jarzyna, squeezes Bram Stoker’s gothic love story to its essence – to leave only a few ashes. The nostalgic characters of the play transgress social codes that shaped them, in an ultimate quest for identity. Jarzyna’s take on the popular legend is as visually stunning as it is disquieting.
Performed by his award-winning TR Warszawa company and set to a score by John Zorn, the production follows a dreamlike trope into the human psyche. In this seductive show that Time Out London called a "creepingly erotic, visually ravishing piece", Jarzyna turns the vampiric myth of life after death and the regenerative power of blood into a psychological and metaphysical thriller. Nosferatu explores the conflict between a fear of the unknown entrenched in human nature and our enduring fascination with dark secrets, obsessions and the need for transgression.
Inspired by Bram Stoker's late 19th-century novel Dracula, the TR production follows a long tradition of artistic revivals of the vampire theme that includes F.W. Murnau's expressionist film masterpiece Nosferatu from 1922 and Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979. Jarzyna's production premiered at the National Theatre in Warsaw in November 2011 to favourable reviews. In the Rzeczpospolita daily, critic Jacek Cieślak called Jarzyna's staging a "hypnotic film" in which the audience experiences "every bit of silence flowing through the consciousness". According to Cieślak the play depicts Poles as "producing a spiritual void. The scientist Reinfeld, performed by Lech Łotocki, with his hair up on its ends - a pathetic parody of Einstein - becomes hysterical as he attempts to speak of human mortality and the passing of all things. (...) Sandra Korzeniak’s Lucy is a woman who renounces the love of men arround her. She longs for an exciting adventure. And it is upon the wish of Reinfeld and Lucy that vampire Nosferatu appears".
Gazeta Wyborcza’s Joanna Derkaczew points out that Jarzyna makes no new discoveries with this play, choosing instead to "reconstruct the moment of Europe’s entry into modernity. He brings up the turn of the 19th century with all of its imminent kitsch, mysticism, nostalgia and fears. The backdrop of Nosferatu is a world that has really just began to accelarate. (...) For the time being, it is fascinated with a vague intuition of the future and it doesn’t determine any strict boundaries between science and folklore magic".
Nosferatu is performed at the Odeon between the 16th and 21st of November 2012, as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris (Paris Autumn Festival). The festival was founded in 1972 by Michel Guy, with support from president of the French Republic, Georges Pompidou, as an annual festival of contemporary arts, embracing and combining different forms, presenting works that stand as references and involving approaches of an experimental nature by commissioning original works. The festival features over forty events from September to December, attracting over 100,000 spectators.
Jarzyna’s production from 2009, T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T., is scheduled at Lille’s Théâtre du Nord on the 25th, 26th and 27th of November, as a highlight of this year’s NEXT Festival.
Based on Italian director, poet, activist and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teoremat from 1968, the TR Warszawa production is an emotionally charged flow of powerful tableaux. The affluent family of an authoritarian Milanese industrialist are joined by a charismatic stranger and fall into a spiral of lust, sexual awakening and mystical turmoil… Unraveling with the irrevocable pace of an intricate mystery, T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. follows five characters' inner journeys, from their lives of bourgeois hypocrisy and emotional emptiness to extremes of perdition and heightened awareness.
Following the play's premiere showings, Rzeczpospolita’s Janusz R. Kowalczyk wrote:
In the family of Paolo (Jan Englert) and Lucia (Danuta Stenka), the everyday ritual of the same activities continues anew. The man of the house starts the day with coffee and the papers, while the wife does her make-up. Their son (Jan Dravnel) and daughter (Katarzyna Warnke) comb their hair. The mood of the scene is emphasized by the loud accompaniment of church bells outside the window. The aesthetics of Jarzyna's theatre has us watching these thrice-repeated activities with great, even reverent concentration, as a form of tableaux that are intriguing through their cool beauty.
The play has travelled the globe with performances in Los Angeles, Belgrade, Moscow, Dublin, London and Wellington in New Zealand.
Peter Bisley from Lumiere Reading praised the Wellington performance as "a standout work of the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2010":
The subtlety of Jarzyna's production closely follows the near-wordless film, in which pure emotions and base human urges are rendered with a stunning visual palette. People familiar with Pasolini's work will appreciate the explicitly filmic quality of Jarzyna's play. Each gesture, each small movement, is captured by the uncannily cinematic lighting design, which gives an understated and riveting aesthetic. The costumes depict late-sixties European elegance; the music meshes evocatively minimal incidents".
Besley concludes that T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. is "stunningly coherent", and an instance of how "theatre speaks to us as strongly as ever in the age of Avatar".
Editor: SRS
Source: press release, TR Warszawa, Festival d’Automne, culture.pl