25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: No Matter How Hard We Tried
After years spent exploring the darker corners of metropolitan life, Grzegorz Jarzyna found himself drawn to questions of generational identity and the inheritance of trauma — questions raised by a much younger author, who, like him, had previously shown no such interests.
Born in 1968, Grzegorz Jarzyna spent the first decade of his career steering clear of contemporary Polish writing. Even within the TR/PL project, dedicated to new Polish plays (2005/06 season), at his home institution (Teatr Rozmaitości in Warsaw, which became TR Warszawa in 2003) he handed the world premiere of A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians to another director – despite having persuaded its author, Dorota Masłowska, to try her hand at drama for the first time. Conversely, he decided to stage her second drama, No Matter How Hard We Tried, instantly (commissioned by the director of Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz for the festival ‘digging deep and getting dirty’).
Jarzyna studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, and directing at the PWST in Kraków. He came of age intellectually at the ‘end of history’. Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay with that title appeared in 1989, the book in 1992, and in Poland in 1996. The year 1989 – the hinge on which the essay turned – seemed, locally, to mark the end of Poland’s Romantic paradigm: the duty of a Pole, especially an artist, to his captive homeland. Poles began to aspire to be citizens of the world. Full of complexes, unfulfilled ambitions, and prejudices, they chased the free market and capitalism, yearning to be like others. It quickly became clear that shedding the traumas of communism was not simple; the untreated wounds of the Second World War, passed down through generations, began to resonate.
Questions of history and national identity were largely absent for a long time from the theatre Jarzyna directed starting in 1998. ‘We weren’t thinking in general categories — what to change in Poland’, he said at the time, ‘but in street terms: what hurts us. A group of people who felt like outsiders gathered here’. The first to return to more traditionally intellectual identity-driven themes was Krzysztof Warlikowski with The Dybbuk (2003), a production based on a play by An-sky and Hanna Krall’s reportage on the Holocaust.
Fukuyama was uncertain whether ‘apparent social peace represented true satisfaction of human longings, rather than the work of a particularly efficient police apparatus, or merely the calm before a revolutionary storm’. In Poland, by 2009, that storm was brewing. The pre-war ideological division between liberals and nationalists was reasserting itself – a division that today, with almost revolutionary force, is tearing the country apart.
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In the picture: Adam Woronowicz and Aleksandra Popławska, fot. Kuba Dąbrowski/TR Warszawa
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After years spent exploring the darker corners of metropolitan life – with its associated ambivalence of insatiability and satiety in a highly developed society – Grzegorz Jarzyna found himself drawn to questions of generational identity and the inheritance of trauma. These questions were raised by an author fifteen years younger, who, like him, had not previously shown similar interests. Jarzyna from Chorzów, and Masłowska from Wejherowo, found themselves rooted in Warsaw, yet they were surprised to hear World War II knocking at their door (a phrase repeated multiple times in No Matter How Hard We Tried). Whatever one might think of the two of them, they were celebrities. They recognized Warsaw as a city that had risen from ruins, where their private histories suddenly resonated differently. Jarzyna’s, concerning his Silesian family, torn between Germany and Poland; Masłowska’s, concerning her grandmother who had tormented her with recollections of Nazi occupation.
Just weeks before staging No Matter How Hard We Tried, Jarzyna staged Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem at TR Warszawa. Its characters – a family focused on accumulating and consuming goods, convinced they lived in a contradiction-free society – with a visitor who showed them they were dead long before death. In the final scene, the director created an image of the Last Judgement – the end of history from the Christian perspective. Yet, it was a judgement without God, featuring only human victims and a simple woman’s naïve faith in transcendence. In the finale of No Matter How Hard We Tried Jarzyna sets the dialogue against the backdrop of the photographs of bombed-out Warsaw, with some sequences shown in reverse. House walls do not collapse like gigantic curtains in clouds of dust, but rise from the ruins. Against this canvas, the panorama of Warsaw, a ghost-city, was drawn by invisible hand.
The play opens with a curtain lifting at the back of the stage to reveal an openwork annex resembling a brick rubbish enclosure in a housing estate. Against this backdrop, Masłowska’s characters stand in a single line, motionless and upright as if before a firing squad. The Little Metal Girl (Aleksandra Popławska) on a bicycle and the Gloomy Old Biddy in a Wheelchair (Danuta Szaflarska) in her wheelchair break formation and ride towards the audience. The Girl gives the signal with the clinking of her bicycle bell; the march proceeds to the rhythm of drums, as if at a roll call for the fallen. A man with a laptop (Adam Woronowicz) reads Masłowska’s stage directions, which soon reveal him to be a director shooting a film about a contemporary Polish family.
The solemn beat mixed with the roar of an airplane and the rock guitar; merging past with present. Hand-drawn outlines of a cramped, three-generation flat are projected onto the surrounding walls: a fantasy of reality, yet full of everyday detail. Here, the oldest generation – once prepared to die for their country – confronts the youngest, who could barely grasp such a premise. Suspended between them was the mother’s generation, crushed by communism and by the post-89 reality. For everyone, the simplest words mean different things.
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The Little Metal Girl and the Gloomy Old Biddy deliver monologues, but stuck in misunderstanding, they draw attention to themselves – no matter how hard they try. In the final sequence, echoing the opening group scene in front of the wall, they are dressed alike. The Girl (no longer on her bicycle) holds the Gloomy Old Biddy’s hand; the Gloomy Old Biddy (no longer in her wheelchair) clings to her like a younger sister. Or perhaps the Gloomy Old Biddy clings to the Girl like a dybbuk? She had died in the bombing of Warsaw as a young woman. Had Halina (Magdalena Kuta) never given birth to the Little Metal Girl? Was the whole thing a hallucination? Together, through a large peephole, they spy on the apartment-world hidden behind it. They recognise fragments of a shared past as their energy and hope diminish.
The pairing of these two generational martyrdoms might have seemed iconoclastic, yet Masłowska constructed it on layers of contradiction, absurdist humour and unique Polish language. Moreover, she titled a drama built on negation with an affirmative phrase – the irony amplified by a fact that it’s a line from a grimly apocalyptic punk song by the Polish band Siekiera: Między Nami Dobrze Jest (All's Good Between Us).
The writer did not lack self-irony, either. Masłowska framed the collective portrait in a media-celebrity context, mocking both socially engaged art, and its audience, as well as the artists’ blindness to real life. The story of the three-generation family and their neighbour, Bożena (Maria Maj), develops in the mind of the director, who attempts to 'civilise' the interiors of the “old multi-storey human building” into a “relatively elegant multi-storey building” with the help of IKEA design. Simultaneously he concocted a film, The Horse Who Rode a Horse (Koń, który jeździł konno), about a family ‘from Łódź or Wałbrzych or a Silesian miners’ block’, embodying every imaginable social pathology. The film became famous before it existed; celebrities shuddered with empathy at its premise; well-known creators, who before they have even finished their works, haunted TV studios to discuss their process — and themselves. Life and fiction blurred, aided by drugs and wine. Ultimately, everyone ended up on the same ‘IKEA RIKKA sofa’, watching the same television. And under the same rubbish enclosure.
In the final moments, the Little Metal Girl cries out repeatedly: ‘Bread! Bread!’ No longer was it merely teasing her grandmother with ‘And what is “bread”, anyway?’ No one took her seriously or understood it. Jarzyna let the cry resonate in several registers – neither a call for revolution, nor a slogan for leaving the homeland ‘in search of bread’ as they say in Polish, but a piercing plea for something essential, some core meaning surviving in a world that seems to be a ruin of values, a scrapyard of history.
When the drama was published in print in autumn 2008, a fierce media debate erupted. Had Masłowska – darling of liberal salons – converted to conservatism? Right-wing outlets saw the play as a ‘carefully planned marketing intrigue’, a conspiracy by liberal elites hoping to appropriate values they mocked in their opponents.
The production did little to change the perception of the work. Its success owed much to superb ensemble acting, especially Danuta Szaflarska as the Gloomy Old Biddy. When she said, ‘Ah, I remember the day the war broke out’, she meant it – she had lived through it. Her slight frame and quiet presence carried the force of unmistakable truth. The show won numerous awards, toured internationally, and in 2014 was adapted for film.
Jarzyna remained loyal to Masłowska; he has not staged other living Polish playwrights. In 2019 he directed her Other People, though without repeating their earlier success — it was a repetition of diagnoses already made about big-city residents.
TR Warszawa
No Matter How Hard We Tried by Dorota Masłowska
Directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna
Set design by Magdalena Maciejewska
Costumes by Magdalena Musiał
Lighting by Jacqueline Sobiszewski.
World premiere at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, 26th March 2009;
Polish premiere 5th April 2009