An alien from the future
Masłowska's second production was accompanied by international momentum. The premiere of No Matter How Hard We Tried, another drama commissioned by TR Warszawa, was a co-production of the Warsaw theatre and the Berlin Schaubühne. 'Digging Deep and Getting Dirty' was the title of the festival during which Jarzyna staged Masłowska's new text. The author did indeed dig deep: the result was a text that is dangerously funny, because it speaks above all of transgenerational trauma, but 'in Masłowska's way'.
This is the first thing I wrote – far from such statements as: what a terrible country we live in, how grey it is here! On the contrary, it is my affirmation of being Polish and of Polishness which is totally mocked today, mixed with mud and treated as a blemish, a slap in the face by fate, at least in my generation.
– the writer declared perversely, because in No Matter... it is difficult to find anything affirmative. Jarzyna did not try at all costs to 'pin' the drama to reality: he placed the action outside of any concrete space-time continuum, in a simple, sterile box reminiscent of a television studio, where isolated props and objects appear. The role of the mopish Old Woman was played by Danuta Szaflarska, who, nota bene, took part in the Warsaw Uprising as a Home Army liaison officer. After the death of this outstanding artist, she was played by Lech Łotocki, with whom Szaflarska remained friends. Jarzyna came up with the idea when he saw Łotocki in a white wig during preparations for a production of Two Swords in Beijing ('He looked like an incredible, androgynous creature, a figure from the future, an alien'). The premiere performance moved Berlin audiences, with rave reviews in the German press:
Jarzyna has captured the soul of the text and brought out its surrealistic core: he approaches the drama not only from its humorous side, but also lets it shine as a tragicomic farce devoid of realism [...]. The production oscillates between seriousness and humour in a wonderfully ambiguous way.
– wrote Dirk Pilz in the Berliner Zeitung.
But in the eyes of some critics, the mellowness of Jarzyna's staging weakened the tone of the drama. Marcin Koscielniak wrote in the magazine Tygodnik Powszechny that Jarzyna 'missed Masłowska' and that his production was 'round and polite'. Perhaps it was the director's focus on language and full surrender to it that made his adaptation feel superficial.
In order to broaden the audience for the production, the director decided to make a film adaptation of the play five years after its premiere. No Matter How Hard We Tried, a film presented, among others, at the international festival in Karlovy Vary, is a shortened and slightly changed version of the production: in the epilogue, instead of footage from the bombing of Warsaw in September of 1939, we see shots from backstage, and the Voice from the Radio transforms into a conservative character from television. When Jarzyna decided to transfer No Matter How Hard We Tried to the screen, he wanted to emphasize the characteristic features of the original medium: 'I wanted the theatricality of this project to be striking in the cinema,' he said. As a result, the film is somewhere in between – not quite theatre, not quite film; more like, a nightmarishly Polish clip in an attractive comic book setting, aseptic as a dentist's office, contrasting with a text brimming with disgusting smells, images and sounds.