On The Other Side Of The Conundrum – A New Drama Inspired By “Picnic At Hanging Rock” In The National Theater Of Warsaw Poland [Part III]

To read PART I of this interview, go to this link. For Part II, click here. 

All the bad ones are afraid of sleep

The biblical metaphor, commonly known in Poland, about evil that fears the light in Maciejewska’s drama is reworked into an image of evil people for whom danger lurks in sleep, which in our experience is rather coupled with night. However, when the trivial opposition of the biblical image is dissected into dramatic events, it turns out that our experience is much deeper than trivial parables. In the drama depicting the Picnic at the Hanging Rock, the characters are characterized by a whole range of different psychological shades and life attitudes. Ultimately, however, all the participants in the picnic are bad in some way. After all, Australia is stereotypically associated with a country where convicts were deported. So everyone has something on their conscience, because if not a “villain then at least a colonizer.” This stereotypical association with Australia fills in a much broader metaphor for the world in which we have all spread out on an endless picnic, treating the earth we live on as colonial prey.

Returning to our micro-world of the theatrical production, it’s worth looking at how evil is revealed through successive characters and often their struggles with sleep. At the top of the pyramid of evil stand Wife of Colonel and Pastor. Their scheming over local elections and poorly feigned kindness toward others are all too apparent to the viewer. Slightly more human reflexes are found in the Colonel. He gently draws his wife’s attention to her overtly chauvinistic enunciations, escorts a naked, terrified Irma to her room. He seems calm and quite wise in life. However, he is the one who financially supports his wife in her foolish and often despicable ventures. Finally, it is he who devastates the land by trading on an unheard-of scale in diamonds and coal. When life requires the Colonel to step outside his comfort zone of business, he escapes into sleep, taking a nap. The Wife of Colonel is afraid to fall asleep.

Collective scene. Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

Evil also resides in Mrs. Appleyard’s young boarders. When they furiously attack Irma, who has found herself on the slopes of Hanging Rock, the scene turns into a space of oppression reminiscent of the events of The Crucible. The source of this behavior is, of course, the fear of the young women, from whom everything is kept secret – “it’s not for the ears of girls,” and yet the young boarders are, after all, rich heiresses, future “wives of Colonels” who will furnish our world in the 20th century.

The generator that triggers the girls’ fear and aggressive behavior is, of course, the incident that occurred at the Hanging Rock. However, before their friends disappear, time stops and all the characters fall asleep. Sleep is thus the criterion for the value of our lives. The mature achieve epiphany through it, those who are still deluded by false prophets and false goals get lost in it and suffer. For dreams are not to be understood, to which Sigmund Freud’s “Explanations of Dreams” read by one of the teachers, Miss Greta, is a clear allusion. Miss Greta is a math teacher who trusts calculus more than people. However, Freud’s scientific theses will not explain the mystery of the dream to which the mountain calls. The punishment for the arrogance of Western civilization, which seeks to lock others into a cage of classifications and hierarchies that are logical in its view, will be the madness of Miss Greta. It is she who Edith will see as she rushes without a skirt down the mountainside.

Perhaps the least unambiguous character remains Albert Fitzhubert. A character added to the story known from the novel. It performs an important structural function, providing a framework for the new order of the plot that Maciejewska’s drama sets against the novel. Thus, the logic of change flows from the perspective of the young heir who has decided to solve the mystery, so that the dramaturgical development of the story gains autonomy in relation to the literary and film plot. The rewriting of previous texts (literary, cinematic, cultural, life), which is popular in contemporary drama, always prompts the search for meaning in the changes, additions, or deletions made. The perspective of a character who guides the narrative and organizes the flow of events frees us from such considerations.

Albert Fitzhubert, however, appears on stage in a dual role, the quasi-author of the play (not all of it, by the way; in the ending it escapes his authority) and the heir to the Colonel’s fortune. Thus, he is overshadowed by his very descent from an obscenely wealthy family of colonizers. Admittedly, he is hobbled by an anxiety that will push him deeper into the mystery of his family’s past, but before that he was developing a plan for destructive exploitation of the land. We don’t have to guess that. In the monologues that begin the play, he proudly admits:

Anna Grycewicz (Ms. Greta), Gabriela Musała (Wife of Colonel Fitzhubert), Michalina Łabacz (Miranda), Adam Szczyszczaj (Pastor), Małgorzata Kożuchowska (Mademoiselle), Marta Wągrocka (Marion), Piotr Kramer (Michel Fitzhubert). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

“After my father died, I did what a good son should do: I multiplied his fortune. I tripled the number of mines, built oil wells, formed lucrative alliances of international trade with my subsidiary companies. In a word, I honored the memory of this great man with dignity.”

Albert Fitzhubert appears as a proud ruler, not only through his past presumed by the audience. The entire performance is a grand reconstruction of past events, aimed at satisfying his curiosity. Thus, at the very beginning, he conducts the boarders and throws Sarah, who reads aloud a passage from Joseph Conrad’s book “Heart of Darkness,” shouting “Get out, this is not your scene.”

For Albert Fitzhubert is not only the heir to a fortune, but also a fellow heir to an uppish Enlightenment culture that believes in the superiority of its rational orders. Unlike Miss Greta, however, he reaches not directly for the findings of knowledge, but uses narrative patterns well established in Western culture. In doing so, he exposes the understatements of Joan Lindsay’s novel, but more importantly, our biases and beliefs in the superiority of culture, which order the world through narrative and dramatization. After all, everyone knows that when starting to watch a story based on a detective scheme, they will live to see the final solution or at least confront an exciting mystery. So when, at the end of the show, both canonical rhetorical tricks are replaced by the unveiling of the truth about our present human condition in the context of an impending catastrophe, our arrogance of intellectual world conquerors can arouse disappointment and even frustration. Therefore, Fitzhubert will not make it to the end of the story (about which, in a moment); with an uncomfortable finale we will be left alone.

Albert Fitzhubert is also the character who most extensively reveals sleep problems to us in a short monologue:

Anna Lobedan (Ms. Lumley), Anna Bieżyńska (Lily), Paulina Szostak (Edyta), Katarzyna Pośpiech (Rosamunda), Michalina Łabacz (Miranda), Bonnie Sucharska (Sara), Justyna Kowalska (Blanche), Zuzanna Saporznikow (Irma), Marta Wągrocka (Marion). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

“Ever since I have been haunted by this thought; the thought of my father I have stopped sleeping.

As soon as dusk falls, I lie down in my bed, close my eyes,

I turn from side to side, slide the quilt over my face….

and I can’t fall asleep.

So I wander around with my eyes always open wide

like a bedroom window, praying that the darkness

from behind it pours into my bloodshot eyes giving them solace at last.

Nothing of the sort happens, however. It’s been so many years that I’ve already forgotten

the taste of sleep. Tell me, what does sleep taste like? I feel as if I

long dead. One who doesn’t dream is dead, it seems to me….

I hate those who can dream.

What they dream, that is, they wake up on the other side…”

The above passage framed in the form of poetic language seems familiar. It makes it possible to link Albert Fitzhubert’s insomnia with today’s experience of people living under a series of regimes of work, health, social responsibility that leave no room for sleep. On the other hand, he diagnoses the causes of hatred for those for whom life has a broader horizon than consciously improving and ordering it. Eyes wide open is, of course, a clear metonymy for rationalism.

On the other side of the conundrum

Albert Fitzhubert fails in his inquiries not only because of our limited rationalism, which is the subject of criticism in the drama, but also because he is a character standing on the border between two worlds, the rational and the emotional. It is, after all, his emotional nature that pushed him to take action to uncover the mystery behind his father’s successful life, and consequently his own. The highly sensitive persons, however, do not get to the truth. They only point the way to it for others.

Anna Grycewicz (Ms. Greta), Paulina Szostak (Edyta), Michalina Łabacz (Miranda), Marta Wągrocka (Marion), Małgorzata Kożuchowska (Mademoiselle), Anna Lobedan (Ms. Lumley), Zuzanna Saporznikow (Irma), Justyna Kowalska (Blanche), Anna Bieżyńska (Lily), Katarzyna Pośpiech (Rosamunda). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

In one of the most beautiful and deeply moving scenes of the play, Albert Fitzhubert meets his late father, Michel, who shares his experience with his son with parental concern. As a seasoned hunter, he tells him what it means to “kill beautifully.” A frightening concept when one discovers the depths of its falsity. After all, it’s not about a good death, or even the beauty of hunting. The brutal killing of another being, necessary for our survival, is portrayed as a kind of deep understanding between man and animal, who, with full awareness, derives from his own death a pleasure equal to that of the hunter. The language with which Father Alberta tells his story is devoid of dramatic eruptions or solemn phrases. The father mystifies us with his calmness and the maturity of a confident narrator. The scene about “beautiful killing” is at the same time the quintessence of the entire style of the drama, the beauty of which grows from the extremely smoothly flowing language of the characters, which, however, hides under its surface disturbing reflections and recognitions of contemporary reality.

Listening to the father’s colloquial words, the audience simultaneously observes the immobile face of his son Albert, to whom it is probably beginning to occur that the abyss of mystery that troubled him is not in the mystery of the disappearance of the girls from the boarding school, but is the very essence of his father’s life, of himself, of all humanity. However, he will not find enough strength to continue his journey to the source of the truth. The investigation will be taken over by the surrounding community, headed by the Colonel, his wife and the Pastor. They, too, will fail to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the girls on the Rock. When the exhausted fall asleep in their seats, four women summoned by the rock enter the scene. They do not wake the sleepers, but in accordance with the logic of the Australian idea of sleep, they wake up on their side to complete the investigation, to discover the truth.

The finale of the play is filled with interweaving monologues of the female characters, which reveal to us the image of the progressive destruction, which we do not notice, because we are so accustomed to life. After all, even if something bothers us we are able to dress it up in the form of a literary story or anecdotes, which effectively hide from us what is unsavory or frightening. After all, life is an endless picnic, where humanity is able to have fun against all odds and even symptoms of disaster. “We will party ourselves to death,” jokes the Colonel in response to his wife’s words. Except that death “has nothing romantic about it.” We learn what death is from one of Miranda’s monologues, who describes it in an overly truthful way, as a “physiological fear” of our rueful body.

Oskar Hamerski (Albert Fitzhubert), Paulina Szostak (Edyta), Wiesłau Cichy (Colonel Fitzhubert). Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

“Can you feel it yet?

The end has nothing romantic about it:

the physiological dread of an aching stomach

The noise of boiling blood in the ears

the sudden blinding

disobedience of the sphincters

eyes turned to the center of the skull

to admire forever more

inner landscapes

The Word became flesh and Fear dwelt among us”

Subsequent monologues expose further elements of our unshakeable convictions and beliefs that lead us to believe that things will always be as they are today. “Today is the first day of your new life,” but what if tomorrow doesn’t happen? “Don’t yawn,” Sara addresses the audience:

 “Tell me better what your plans are for tomorrow.

How nice to have

tomorrow

So easy to get used to.”

Fantastic irony contained in a poetic short. Has anyone ever thought how much we have become accustomed to the fact that after today comes some tomorrow? No, it’s not about the uncertainty of tomorrow. It’s not about the fact that perhaps overnight some cosmic catastrophe will end the fate of this world. The coming (or rather, already underway) change is better illustrated by the difference between the generation of people around retirement and the youth. Paradoxically, it is the older ones who carelessly lay out their plans for tomorrow, their catastrophe will still pass them by, but what kind of tomorrow do you have when in your twenties your consciousness is filled with an almost inevitable catastrophe? Climate, economic, social, moral, etc. When you know that even if you manage to live to a ripe old age it will never get better. Your children’s generation will not be compensated for the hardships of your life. There are many more such philosophical enlightenments in the text of the theatrical finale of Picnic at Hanging Rock. However, the difference in the time perspective of the generations remains crucial. Leaning over the sleeping conquerors of the earth, the young women see what is beyond the horizon of cognition of the kings of this world, for whom rationality has turned from a tool of cognition into a dictatorship of confusing dead ends. We still manage to amuse ourselves by solving ever more intricate puzzles. We still derive pleasure from reaching into the depths of meaning, threading the other side of our reality, or critically uncovering the sources of the regimes that imprison us. In our complacency, however, we are as blind as Shakespeare’s Prospero, whom Sarah addresses in her last words.

Collective scene. Foto: Magda Hueckel/Arkiwum Artystyczne Teatru.

How much more time do you have left, my kind Prospero

Before your kingdom is forever turned to dust

How much more time can you spare?

For favorable arrangements, court intrigues, small and large revenges.

For stroking with your finger the delicate pages

Of calfskin full of secret knowledge,

Which will probably be of no use to anyone anymore.