Jerzy Jarocki, photo: Stefan Maszewski / Reporter / East News
Jerzy Jarocki, one of the most prominent Polish theatre directors passed away on the 10th of October, 2012, at the age of 83. Jarocki was connected with the Helena Modrzejewska Stary Theatre in Kraków and the Teatr Narodowy in Warsaw
Jerzy Jarocki studied acting in Kraków, and like another great Polish figure of the theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, he graduated with a degree in directing from the GITiS in Moscow. But unlike Grotowski, Jarocki never broke with repertoire theatre. A degree obtained at this school right after the events of October 1956 was not the best recommendation. The directors of Polish theatres expected that the graduates of GITiS were only ever taught to repeat the work of their Soviet professors, and stage Russian and Soviet classics, and they frequently sent away the young and unrecognised theatre director.
Although Jarocki struggled to make his debut with the Bal manekinów (Ball of the Mannequins) by Bruno Jasieński, and he was able to do so only upon the recommendation from Erwin Axer at the Teatr Śląski in Katowice, he also quickly garnered acclaim of the critics and was also recognised by his coworkers. This success allowed him to stage plays that were very new at the time. In Katowice, Jarocki directed John Osborne’s Miłość i gniew / Look Back in Anger, A View From a Bridge from Arthur Miller and Wieża samotności / Thunder Rock by Robert Ardrey. He also staged Eugene O’Neill’s Po długim dniu zapada noc / A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through this production Jarocki acquainted Polish actors with the American Method approach to acting, which was a new version of the method developed by Stanislavsky.
Jarocki always staged contemporary texts. He is known to have said "The object of my interest in the theatre are contemporary people. What happens with them and inside them."
His legendary productions are among the best achievements of Polish theatre. Some of the memorable and much awarded performances he directed include Tango, Garbus (Hunchback), Portret Mrożka (Mrożek’s Portrait), Fizycy (The Physicians) by Dürrenmatt, Matka (Mother), Szewcy (The Shoemakers) by Witkacy, Wyszedł z domu (He Has Left the House), Moja córeczka (My Little Daughter) by Różewicz, Zmierzch (Dusk) by Babel, Shakerspeare’s Cymbelin (Cymbeline), The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters by Tchekhov, Kafka’s The Trail, Rewizor (The Government Inspector) by Nikolai Gogol, Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca, Sen srebrny Salomei (Salome’s Silver Dream) by Słowacki, and Ślub (The Wedding) by Witold Gombrowicz – have made a permanent mark in the history of Polish theatre.
In 2010 Alan Lockwood interviewed Jarocki about his 1960 production of Gombrowicz's The Marriage. the world premiere of the play, with set design by Krystyna Zachwatowicz. As Lockwood recalls,
Mr. Jarocki talked about premiering the play with a student company in Gliwice - three years before The Marriage began to gain fame outside Poland - while forbidden to use the author's name and only permitted a few performances. But first he asked "Don't you have other questions? That topic had been thoroughly covered in writing about my work." I suggested that audiences in the English-language world deserved to know when his work on Gombrowicz began, then he gave an hour of sharp recollections, serious and amused, and discussed his subsequent "meetings" with Gombrowicz's work. Afterward, for a documentary on those works, we located a piece in the New York Times from 1972, when he and the Warsaw State Theater Academy took Akty, Jarocki's piece from Mrożek, Gombrowicz, Witkacy, and Wyspianski, to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. And at the Boska Komedia Festival in 2010, his new staging of Mrozek's Tango with Teatr Narodowy was a vivid display of intelligent, dramatic intensity.
In a difficult time of the Polish Martial Law, Jarocki created an extraordinary play entitled Mord w katedrze (Murder in the Cathedral) based on the work by T.S. Eliot, and performed in the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. The artist also staged performances for which he wrote the score himself. Together with Józef Opalski he created the Sen o bezgrzesznej (Dream of the Sinless Woman) and Grzebanie (The Burial), based on the writings of Witkacy. In 1997, together with Adreas Wirther he prepared a monumental staging of the first part of Goethe’s Faust. In 2002, he returned to Witkacy’s Szewcy and made his own adaptation of the text, rendering it a contemporary and cutting-edge performance.
Jarocki was recognised with many significant awards. He was a laureate of the Swiniarski Prize awarded by the Teatr monthly and the Golden Medal Gloria Artis Medal of the Arts.
He never stopped working in the theatre and was most recently in the process of working on his play entitled Węzłowisko at the Teatr Narodowy.
Editor: SRS
Source: culture.pl, e-teatr.pl