25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Babel | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Babel

bs_bl_06-s.jpg, default, "Babel", dir. Maja Kleczewska, Teatr Polski im. Hieronima Konieczki, Bydgoszcz, 2010, photo: Bartłomiej Sowa / Teatr Polski w Bydgoszczy

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This Bydgoszcz production provoked some extreme reactions. In this staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s text, kitsch collided with outright obscenity. Babel became a pivotal work for the Austrian Nobel laureate’s reception in Polish theatre – and one of the defining moments of Maja Kleczewska’s career.

When Babel premiered at the Polski Theatre in Bydgoszcz, Kleczewska’s directorial career was gathering dramatic momentum. Its premiere took place shortly after her spectacular and hotly debated Marat/Sade at Warsaw’s National Theatre. Her coreteam was largely unchanged and it included dramaturg Łukasz Chotkowski, designer Katarzyna Borkowska with her trademark visual opulence, and composer Agata Zubel. The production also continued Bydgoszcz’s growing relationship with Jelinek’s work – following Chotkowski’s staging of On the Animals and preceding Shadows: Eurydice Speaks and Winter Journey, both directed by Kleczewska, the Polish Theatre turned into a genuine “House of Jelinek”, the most important Polish stage for her writing.

Like much of Jelinek’s oeuvre, Babel is a dense web of intersecting voices and motifs that stubbornly resist categorisation. Certain themes can be discerned – the media’s fascination with violence, fuelled by images from the Iraq war, and the story of the German cannibal Armin Meiwes – but the text drifts freely and unpredictably through the iconography of contemporary culture.

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"Babel", dir. Maja Kleczewska, Teatr Polski im. Hieronima Konieczki, Bydgoszcz, 2010, photo: Bartłomiej Sowa / Teatr Polski w Bydgoszczy

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Putting it on stage required radical selection and reorganisation. In Bydgoszcz, the voices became embodied figures wandering the banks of a long, shallow pool stretching across the entire width of the stage. To address the audience they had to wade through the water, sending ripples across the surface and reflected light dancing across the ceiling. When they fell silent, they retreated into the half-darkness in the back. Kleczewska would return to this idea in Shadows: Eurydice Speaks, where Jelinek’s voices belonged to the dead gathered by the Styx, trying in vain to attract the attention of the living.

This seemingly chaotic chain of monologues gradually coalesced into something like a structure. From the outset, the motif behind it was the human body – often nonnormative, disabled or socially rejected. In one early scene, a vigorous woman (Karolina Adamczyk) bullies a corpulent man (Michał Jarmicki) into doing aerobics. Soon after, bodies gave way to corpses: the stage became a military mortuary, with three male bodies (Michał Czachor, Sebastian Pawlak and Jarmicki) and a plush toy laid out on metal gurneys. This bleak site was visited by mothers (Małgorzata Witkowska, Dominika Biernat, Marta Nieradkiewicz, and Adamczyk), mourning their lost sons. Yet these images of maternal grief, initially echoing the traditional mater dolorosa (mother of sorrows), quickly mutated in unpredictable directions

The first mother (Witkowska) goes through a range of emotions – from anger at her son for daring to die, to self-loathing, and an infantile tenderness that treats his corpse as a helpless newborn – ending in a barren, Oedipal attempt at copulation with the body. The second (Nieradkiewicz) stumbles into the mortuary drunk and tries to throw a party over her son’s body (Czachor). Decorated with balloons, the “corpse” rises and begins a bizarre game, first flirting and then mistreating his mother, forcing her to drink alcohol and humiliating her. The third mother (Biernat) stood over an empty gurney – save for a stuffed toy, the only trace of her son “of whom nothing remains”. She begins with a solemn reading of Auden’s Funeral Blues, then launches into stories about her career and frantic comparisons with mothers whose sons had survived. Her grief spirals into theology: the lost son becomes a pawn in her struggle with God, an imperfect Christ-substitute. The final mother (Adamczyk) openly acknowledges that she was “playing” the mother of a war hero and began dismantling the clichés of maternal mourning – from ostentatious wailing into a microphone to a tremulous rendition of The Mother Who Understands Everything. Even her son’s heroism is thrown into doubt as she invoked the torture scenes of Abu Ghraib.

This thought map built around the Pietà may have seemed erratic, but it leads to a stark conclusion: the mothers were vying for whose dead son would emerge as Jesus. When Sebastian Pawlak finally climbed onto one of the mortuary tables, towering above the others, the lights dim and a grotesque pendulum descends from above – the giant legs of a crucified Christ. Pawlak’s monologue presents a vision of religiosity steeped in violence, from God’s absolute domination to the cannibalistic imagery embedded in the Eucharist.

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"Babel", dir. Maja Kleczewska, Teatr Polski im. Hieronima Konieczki, Bydgoszcz, 2010, photo: Bartłomiej Sowa / Teatr Polski w Bydgoszczy

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The Son of Man is then led away by a child dressed as an angel, and the remaining figures embark on a strange ritual – first a brutal, drill-like sequence combining religious and sexual gestures, then a joyous splash in the Styx. As the lights fade and the characters disperse, everything suggests a curtain call. The audience, preparing to applaud, is entirely unprepared for what comes next.

Pawlak’s Son of Man strolls onto the stage again, now wearing a fur coat and a beret. He then launches into a cabaret-style recital of Jelinek’s most abrasive lines set to Daniel Pigoński’s jaunty, upbeat music (the composer accompanies him wearing a hat with pink rabbit ears). During the performance Pawlak gradually strips, revealing a large red heart hanging from his neck, then finally removing his nappy and smearing its contents on his head. Jelinek’s text gets mixed up with kitsch and obscenity. It is at once a radical coda to the production’s obsession with the human body and a brazen act of sabotage against the previous two and a half hours of meticulously crafted, often exquisite images emphasised by Zubel’s music.

The production provoked fierce responses. A delighted Jacek Wakar wrote that “without understanding Bydgoszcz’s shattering Babel by Maja Kleczewska, it’s impossible to draw a complete picture of contemporary Polish theatre.” Paweł Sztarbowski hailed it as “the most outstanding production of her career”, one that “makes an astounding impression”. Joanna Derkaczew, in contrast, found it “dragging, hypnotic, numbing”, an unruly statement on the cult of martyrdom that was “not interesting in the slightest”, and “embarrassing” as a collection of “the best of other people’s performance art”. Dorota Masłowska accused Kleczewska of mere imitation (“the doors the director kicks down here have long stood wide open”), and wrote of Pawlak’s recital: “I hereby ban him from performing in any room, city, country, world or galaxy I inhabit.”

What remains of Babel, fifteen years on? Its blasphemous riffs on Christianity have faded into the shadows of later controversies – the 2014 scandal over Rodrigo García’s Golgotha Picnic at the Malta Festival, and the uproar around Oliver Frljić’s The Curse in 2017, which have become the main reference points for debates on offending religious feelings in Polish theatre. The scenes involving disabled bodies have not aged well – which, unlike other characters, were denied voice and agency, reduced to striking but objectified props. The European perspective on war has also shifted: when the conflict was happening far away, it was easier to fixate on mediated images and cultural representations while marginalising the lived experiences of victims. With war now unfolding just across the border, and its survivors living among us, such detachment feels far less tenable.

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"Babel", dir. Maja Kleczewska, Teatr Polski im. Hieronima Konieczki, Bydgoszcz, 2010, photo: Bartłomiej Sowa / Teatr Polski w Bydgoszczy

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Even so, Babel remains a milestone in Kleczewska’s career and a turning point in Poland’s engagement with Jelinek. After this production, a whole wave of bold and often brilliant stagings swept through Bydgoszcz and beyond. The magnificent performances by Małgorzata Witkowska and Marta Nieradkiewicz foreshadowed the trajectories their careers would later take. And one memory endures above all: the succession of haunting images by the scenic Styx, and the spectacular destruction of that aesthetic order by Pawlak’s brazen, anarchic finale. Kleczewska has attempted endings like this since, but never again with such ruthlessly destructive power.

Polski Theatre in Bydgoszcz
Babel by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Karolina Bikont
Directed by Maja Kleczewska
Adaptation by Łukasz Chotkowski and Maja Kleczewska
Design, costumes & lighting by Katarzyna Borkowska
Music by Agata Zubel
Movement by Dominika Knapik
Premiere: 5 March 2010

Language English

polish theatre

polish theatre directors

performing arts