25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: ‘Extinction’ | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: ‘Extinction’

wymazywanie_piotr_skiba_marcin_tronski_2001_fot_grazyna_jaworska_wyborcza_lupa2-gj-s.jpg, default

In 'Extinction' suffocating stuffiness recurs as an image of entrapment – being locked inside a conservative, authoritarian mould. The thickening atmosphere around the family table translates directly into the tightening of the action. For 'Extinction' lacked Krystian Lupa’s distinctive celebration of slow action development. Although the production ran long, it pulsed with an intense rhythm.

‘I hate it!, I hate it!’ screams a child, running across the stage. The boy is the childhood version of the main character, Franz Joseph Murau, played by Piotr Skiba. “I don’t want them alive,” adult Franz Joseph says about his parents.

The opening of Krystian Lupa's Extinction (Wymazywanie) sets the tone for the entire performance. The clash between the childish resentment of the main character and narrator of Thomas Bernhard's last novel takes on a very literal form in Lupa's work – who is more childish than a child?

“Your parents and your brother Johannes are dead. They died in an accident.” This the contents of the telegram that Franz Joseph Murau, an intellectual living in Rome, receives from his ancestral home in Wolfsegg, Austria. It arrives at the very moment the action begins, immediately after the childish screams. “Nothing. Absolute calm,” Murau claims to feel upon hearing of their deaths. Yet everything happening on stage contradicts him. Murau is writing a reckoning – Extinction – to, once and for all, annihilate the place he came from.

Bernhard’s ironic coldness, manically looping analysis and the narrator’s furious drilling voice take on corporeal form in Piotr Skiba’s Franz: his jittery, emotionally fraught body stretches across a startling emotional register. “My whole life they gagged me in their pious, utterly brainless way (…). They pretended to love me when in fact they hated me all ,” sobs the stage Murau, a writer of rather limited success, as he stands before his student, Gambetti (Andrzej Szeremeta). Gambetti sits silently, eyes fixed on the desk before him.

This is a recurring motif in Extinction: a middle-aged man monologuing at a younger one. In the novel, the narrator keeps on repeating the words, “I said to Gambetti.” He recalls his childhood nightmare as an heir to landed gentry: cruelty, emotional frigidity, and contempt of his family for matters of the spirit and for more refined culture. The family quickly reveals itself as a stand-in for Austria itself, pitched against Franz’s beloved Mediterranean world. This opposition structures the production’s two-part form: Rome first, then Wolfsegg.

However, beneath the familial grievances and the distaste for ossified aristocratic form lies something far more grave: their Nazi past. Franz’s family not only supported Hitler but, even after the war they sheltered NSDAP’s gauleiters and SS officers in a children’s villa behind the estate. Their entanglement in totalitarian crimes is rendered with a mix of menace and grotesque absurdity. The mother – played by Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak, the production’s magnetic centre of Austrian darkness and childhood trauma – injures her neck ripping down the swastika flag just hours before the Allies arrived; an injury she still suffers from today. Murau repeats the tale like a macabre joke, but he also recounts genuine Nazi crimes and victims. In the production’s finale, Franz bequeaths the entire Wolfsegg estate to Vienna’s Jewish community.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Picture image

wymazywanie piotr skiba malgorzata niemirska 2001 fot maciej zienkiewiccz wyborcza-s.jpg

Extinction premiered at the Dramatyczny Theatre during the heated national debate over Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, on the 1941 massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne. Four months after the premiere at Dramatyczny Theatre, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski on behalf of the Polish nation. Reviewing Lupa’s production, Beata Guczalska wrote that the spectre of past horrors were resurfacing “in our own country, too”, breaking through Poland’s veneer of self-satisfied present-day complacency.

During his ongoing monologue, Lupa often shows Franz Joseph Murau in the act of writing. Lupa adapted Murau’s story, this grand retrospective monologue, into a story of many voices. “Bernhard creates incredibly powerful situations, but does not write them out in the form of dialogues,” Lupa explained to Didaskalia magazine at the premiere. In keeping Bernhard’s concept, the performance is in the form of a monologue, however, a monologue that spills onto the entire stage and over the entire cast.

Thus, only characters mentioned in Franz’s tirades come alive. For example, a voice is given to Franz’s faintly sketched, disliked and scorned brother-in-law, the Weinflaschenstöpselfabrikant — the wine-cork manufacturer (Marcin Troński). The stage Murau had to talk with him, not just tell stories about him.

Most importantly, Uncle Georg makes an appearance: Franz’s childhood idol, a free-thinker who despises life at Wolfsegg just as much as Franz does – “the family’s prodigal son and fugitive”. At the premiere he was played by Zygmunt Malanowicz, and in the televised version by Miłogost Reczek. “While they were out slaughtering deer, I sat in the library with the shutters sealed tight so I wouldn’t hear their shots, reading Dostoevsky!” he would shout, entering the stage, peering through a window at the family members. Extinction is full of desperate, uncertain speeches in defense of art, but also flashes of comedy. Uncle Georg not only shouts passionately; he is also teased his relatives: he clowns around, sonorously and long-windedly pronouncing words that represent the great, big world: “London, Paris, New York, Callas, Rousseau, Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot”. The rhythm of the syllables accelerate until the phrase ends with a complaint: “I can’t even see my food! Open the window, I beg you!”

In Extinction suffocating stuffiness recurred as an image of entrapment — being locked inside a conservative, authoritarian mould. The thickening atmosphere around the family table translated directly into the tightening of the action. For Extinction lacked Krystian Lupa’s characteristic celebration of slow action development. Although the production ran long, it pulsed with an intense rhythm. Cuts were lightning fast, and time frames shift in the blink of an eye.

If Lupa’s signature slow, slightly mystical aesthetic exists in Extinction at all, it’s in protagonist’s visits to his Roman friend, the poet Maria, played by Maja Komorowska. The character is somewhat otherworldly, luminous, almost angelic. Her room, visited by Franz and the young philosopher Alexander (Waldemar Barwiński), feels like another planet: bright and so distant from the Austrian gloom. Lupa emphasises this motif – an analogue to his enduring fascination with small communities of sensitive individuals who seek protection from the outside world in one way or another, a motif which later recurred in works like Factory 2 and Imagine.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Picture image

wymazywanie_piotr_skiba_maja_komorowska_2001_fot_maciej_zienkiewiccz_wyborcza_tea-mz-s.jpg

The second part of the play, Wolfsegg, is striking with its sense of emptiness, at least in comparison to the first part, which largely played out in Franz’s memory, teeming with distinct, intense figures. During preparations for a funeral, Franz’s rage gradually gives way to melancholy, and the tone shifts to a minor key. “I searched for childhood in my childhood home, but found none […], childhood is as ruined as this house, not by them but by me,” Murau whispers, his throat tight, calling the space where childhood once was “the famous yawning void”. When Maria accuses him of exaggeration, he replied helplessly: “I must exaggerate. I am a poet of exaggeration,” he answers, repeating the phrase yet again.

Lupa’s adaptation of Extinction (translated by Lupa himself), reached the Warsaw stage before Bernhard’s most well-known novel was even published in Polish(2005, translated by Sława Lisiecka). The Dramatyczny Theatre’s production was neither the triumphant beginning of Bernhard’s “nest-fouling” conquest of major Polish stages nor its end. Erwin Axer had staged Histrionics at the Współczesny Theatre in Warsaw in 1990, and Lupa himself directed Bernhard before and after Extinction – including Woodcutters in Wrocław (2014) and Heroes’ Square in Vilnius (2015). However, Extinction became arguably his most famous production and marked a turning point in his career. The director was, of course, already a legend, having staged, among other productions, Bernhard’s The Lime Works (1992) and Ritter, Dene, Voss (1996), but after Extinction he shifted from being adored by theatre enthusiasts to a prominent figure in Polish public life.

The slightly more conservative section of critics mocked the “pope of Polish theatre” cult — a term coined by Janusz Majcherek in the monthly Teatr. The months-long delays of the premiere prompted sceptical remarks: Tomasz Mościcki wrote in Życie, “The theatre’s nonchalance and the creator’s unreliability are astonishing. A premiere date is sacred.” He then extracted broader, not particularly original, historical-philosophical conclusions: “The socialist mentality – a disregard for one’s profession – runs incredibly deep within us.”

But the results of the repeatedly-postponed premiere yielded what Polish public opinion values most: foreign acclaim. “Twelve minutes of applause. Eight curtain calls,’ reported El Periodico. ‘The audience, standing, rewarded the actors from Warsaw and the director with long ovations – and it was not masochism,’ assured La Vanguardia. ‘The actors returned to the stage again and again. A total success,’ added El País. Polish outlets faithfully recorded Western critics’ enthusiasm as Extinction toured Barcelona. After the Paris run, Le Monde declared it ‘a seven-hour miracle’.

Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaaw
'Auslöschung' / 'Wymazywanie' / 'Extinction' by Thomas Bernhard
Translation and apocrypha, script, direction and set design by Krystian Lupa
Music by Jacek Ostaszewski
Premiere: 10^th March 2001

^{Written by Witold Mrozek}

Language English