25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Jewish Actors | Article | Culture.pl

25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Jewish Actors

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Simple in form, the production went beyond the usual boundaries of the discussion about the identity of the Jewish Theatre and revealed a complex picture of a Jewish minority that, in Polish society, functions more as a cultural phantasm than as a real community.

The title of this production refers to a specific group: the actors of the Jewish Theatre, an institution that has operated in various Warsaw locations since the 1950s. In the early years, the ensemble consisted of native Yiddish speakers (Polish was often their second language). Later generations, especially those joining after 1968, studied Yiddish in the theatre’s acting studio. Until 2001, performances in the Jewish Theatre were staged exclusively in Yiddish, which was a cornerstone of the institution’s identity (audience used headsets to listen to a Polish-language interpreters). Under the leadership of Ida Kamińska (actor, director, and translator) the Jewish Theatre had artistic ambitions, but this direction was abandoned after the antisemitic campaign of 1968, which forced Kamińska to leave Poland for the United States (and much of the ensemble left with her).

When Szymon Szurmiej became director, the theatre did not take part in public debate, instead trying to maintain a certain status quo as a place 'preserving the memory of the Jewish world'. Throughout more than forty years in this role, while also directing and acting, Szurmiej emphasised a repertoire consisting of Jewish classics, non-Yiddish texts dealing with Jewish themes, and revue, cabaret, and musical performances. Meanwhile, the theatre struggled with a severe decline in attendance, a lack of direction, and the absence of a clear idea of who its performances were intended for, though it also toured internationally, promoting an image of a 'tolerant, multicultural Poland' abroad.

After Szurmiej's death in 2014, actor and director Gołda Tencer, previously deputy director, took over. Although attempts to open the theatre to a new theatrical language had appeared at the end of Szurmiej's tenure, they were little more than isolated incidents, and Szurmiej met their results with considerable resistance. The institution was never part of the mainstream, and its work had long been seen as anachronistic, folkloric in form. Beginning her tenure in 2015, Tencer invited artists who had created successful productions across Poland to bring to the Jewish Theatre the artistic language, aesthetics, perspectives, and themes that had not been present on its stage before. This gesture briefly brought the theatre out of artistic obscurity, though over time its creative drive and sense of agency faded.

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Michał Buszewicz, 'Aktorzy żydowscy', dir. Anna Smolar, Teatr Żydowski, 2015, photo: M.Hueckel / Teatr Żydowski

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For decades the Jewish Theatre, perhaps unlike any other theatre in Poland, was continuously entangled in discussions concerning Polish-Jewish relations. Of course, it is difficult to capture such a dramatic and complex institutional history in a short summary (I address this topic in a book I co-authored with the acting ensemble, The Jewish Theatre of Esther Rachel and Ida Kamińska in Warsaw: The Actor’s Story. A Biography of the Institution). Nevertheless, in the context of Jewish Actors, this outline is essential, for the production’s script was built from questions and doubts concerning the Theatre's identity and status.

The Jewish Theatre, as a specific place, served here as a model for examining the dynamics of a minority and its relations with the surrounding majority. Simple in its structure and form, the production nevertheless went beyond institutional introspection, revealing a more complex picture of a Jewish minority that, in Polish society, exists more as a phantasm than as a real group. In 2015, dramaturg Michał Buszewicz and director Anna Smolar arrived with a series of questions: What is this place? Who are the actors of this theatre? For whom – and to what end – do they perform? Who, and how, should define the Jewish identity of this theatre? Does the audience's background matter? Are the actors themselves of Jewish descent? Whose voice do they represent? And finally, what meanings does the word 'Jewish' carry in Poland today?

Paradoxically, the performance offered no answers. The very act of creating a space for such questions to be asked was a political gesture. In constructing the script, the creators spent considerable time in conversation with the acting ensemble. The final cast included Ryszard Kluge, Mariola Kuźnik, Joanna Rzączyńska, Izabella Rzeszowska, Małgorzata Trybalska and Jerzy Walczak.

The audience sits on both sides of a rectangular, sand-covered table with carved-out seats for the actors and a percussionist, who throughout the performance sets the rhythm, tempo and character of the scenes. The opening scene is a Shabbat dinner lighting candles, sharing challah and wine. The cast gently invites the audience to participate, guiding them through the ritual. After this prologue, each performer introduces themselves and, starting from 2015, moves backward through significant dates – weddings, deaths, joining the theatre, changing high schools, childhood fights, births. They perform under their real names but in assigned roles: Jerzy plays the director, while the others appear both as the production’s cast and as members of the Jewish Theatre's ensemble.

Endless rehearsals for Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman form a dramaturgical axis of the narrative, leading to disputes: the actors argue over the validity of the director’s ideas, question the scene concepts, and voice their concerns. Who, today, would be the audience for folkloric depictions of pre-war Jewish life? Does anyone still care? These moments reflect the real dilemmas that have accompanied the Jewish Theatre for years. Cast members emphasise their deep bond with the Jewish Theatre – shared responsibility, sense of community, and the turbulent relationships that bind them, which they describe as familial.

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Michał Buszewicz, 'Aktorzy żydowscy', dir. Anna Smolar, Teatr Żydowski, 2015, photo: M.Hueckel / Teatr Żydowski

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At one point, a heated argument breaks out between Joanna Rzączyńska and Izabella Rzeszowska over the proper convention for staging Tevye:

Rzączyńska: We’re in a theatre; we're not here to perform a ritual.
Rzeszowska: Why not? Why shouldn’t rituals appear in the theatre?
Rzączyńska: Because we’re here to perform a scene.
Rzeszowska: Yes, but this is the Jewish Theatre, and in the Jewish Theatre we show ritual, culture, scenes.
Rzączyńska: But we already have, we've already shown that, and now we want to perform a scene. We are actors, and I want to build a scene from start to finish.
Rzeszowska: One doesn't exclude the other. Theatre exists to show tradition, ritual, culture.
Rzączyńska: But why, why? You can read about it on Wikipedia. Theatre is not about showing the past or tradition. Theatre is about showing here and now.
Rzeszowska: You must be joking. There is no future without the past.
Rzączyńska: And confronting the audience. You won’t confront anyone with a ritual.
Rzeszowska: If you don't know where you come from, you won't have a future, you understand?
Rzączyńska: No, because a theatre is there to show what is happening now. The reality of 2015.
Rzeszowska: But it does come from somewhere.
Rzączyńska: The audience doesn't care.
Rzeszowska: What are you talking about?

Tradition here is both indispensable and crippling: fundamental to identity, yet limiting the Theatre’s ability to engage with contemporary artistic currents. The ideal would be a third most difficult and perhaps not yet (or no longer) possible path: to retell cultural and religious tradition through a modern aesthetic, establishing a renewed conversation between stage and audience. In Smolar and Buszewicz’s production, the actors are torn between being uncompromising guardians of the past and revolutionaries seeking liberation from any convention. And neither role fits them.

But entanglement in the artistic, theatrical and professional strategies is only part of the the complications associated with the word 'Jewish'. Equally important is the presence of the audience that comes to the Jewish theatre, and more broadly the society in which Jewish Polish citizens live. This becomes clear in a daring monologue delivered by Jerzy Walczak. At first he speaks slowly and hesitantly, but with each moment he raises his voice, almost shouting his words in an accusatory tone, turning sharply towards the spectators seated on both sides of the table.

And the actors of the minority, sitting in their basement, played their little play, thinking no one outside remained.

But there was. Someone from the majority. And he watched. And he was curious. But he had a problem, because after all – what is this?

A group of actors of a national minority, in the country of a majority.

A group of actors of the national majority, representing a national minority, in a country of the majority. A group of actors of a national minority, in a theatre of national minority, facing the majority. A group of actors of a national minority who themselves are in the minority within the ensemble. A group of actors of a national majority who are at home with the majority and not at home with the minority. A group of representatives of the majority trying to help the minority to become a slightly larger minority.

But you have to be born into the minority. So, when the majority pretends to be the minority, then it is pretending, because this is a place built by the minority. This place belongs to the minority. And the country belongs to the majority.

A group of characters who could just as well be in the minority. A group of spectators who are always in the majority: in curiosity, benevolence, openness, and in the position of being able to open or close, to permit or forbid, to preserve or to leave things as they were, and not to interfere any further.

The divide between minority and majority does not, of course, run only between the stage and the audience, but in the moment of watching the performance, the audience inevitably identifies as 'viewers'. This way we temporarily lose a comfortable and transparent position: the decision to take a seat in this particular theatre is not free of meaning.

In another monologue, Kluge recounts a grotesquely comic incident: after a rehearsal he forgot to remove his kippah, and went into a grocery store wearing it, where he argued with a cashier who wanted to ‘owe him a penny’, because he dislikes when customers are not given back their full change. During the exchange he realised that, because of his costume, he was fitting into the stereotype of a ‘penny-counting Jew’, a ‘miser’ who argues over money. But Kluge shares with the audience the sense of split identity with which he left the shop: on the one hand he wanted to assure the woman that ‘he was not Jewish’, and on the other he did not want to ‘betray’ the community with which he feels connected in the theatre and outside it, and which is important to him. To admit that Jewishness is only a costume he forgets about once he leaves the stage.

Torn between denying Jewishness ('I'm not Jewish') and refusing to betray a community he feels attached to, he describes a moment of acute identity dissonance. Though not Jewish by descent, he wishes to speak on behalf of those who fear confronting the majority's prejudice. Kluge recalls the situation with great intensity, at times raising his voice and releasing emotions that clearly have not left him to this day.

These two perspectives form the structure of Jewish Actors, where reality mixes with fiction, desires with fears, and what is personal becomes public – and vice versa. Smolar and Buszewicz consistently avoid any thesis; they want to disorient the audience and prevent early conclusions.

In the finale, Yiddish appears, a language that remains one of the elements of the theatre's identity (each season includes at least one Yiddish-language premiere, such as Damian Josef Neć's The Tempest: Between/Der Szturem: Cwiszyn and The Book of Paradise, and Gołda Tencer's Ghetto Songs). The actors first stand side by side, and after a moment, more confidently and with a smile, they embrace like a team after a victorious match, and sing an a cappella Yiddish rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity. This perhaps somewhat sentimental but also moving gesture signals that tradition can be combined with the 'here and now', and that the Jewish Theatre is not to be locked within museum walls; although it certainly requires more reflection and constant updating of what, to whom, and how it wishes to speak through its performances.

Written by Marta Bryś

Jewish Theatre in Warsaw
'Jewish Actors'
Directed by Anna Smolar
Script and dramaturgy by Michał Buszewicz
Set design and costume design by Anna Met
Premiere: 29th May 2015

Language English

polish theatre directors

polish performance art