Founded in 1993 at Delphi (Greece) at the initiative of the Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos, the Theater Olympics is one of the most prestigious theatrical festivals in Europe.
This year’s Olympic’s motto “The World as a Place of Truth” is a paraphrase of a famous speech by Jerzy Grotowski, the founder of the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater and a brilliant reformer of the drama art: “We enter the world to pass through it. We are tested by the world, and the world is a place of truth. In any case, the world should be a place of truth.”
The performances which were shown in the first days of the festival gave a fairly accurate picture of the scale of the whole event.
The host country was represented by Krystian Lupa who staged Robert Musil’s short story The Temptation of Quiet Veronica. The title character Veronica (played by Ewa Skibinska) is a young girl restricted by cultural standards and at the same time wary of nature. She is convinced that her feelings for the man she loves will never be anything other than platonic. Meanwhile, a lustful and impassive seducer bursts into her life. Actors played selflessly, going as far as to appear naked on stage; disturbing music by Jacek Ostaszewski made a convincing impression and created the play’s atmosphere, while its scenography was designed with due professionalism. However, it appears that the production failed to attain the veracity of passion which the director aimed for. The internal rhythm of The Temptation... was broken time and again due to numerous psychological errors and perfunctorily thought-out details.
The show Life between Heaven and Earth, produced by 63-year-old Chinese director Liu Libin, is also an adaptation of a short story, namely The True Story of Ah Q, authored by the renowned Chinese writer Lu Xun.
This solo play uses minimalist scenery, limited to a dark empty stage and dozens of colored banners with the same image of a bald bowing man. On the left edge of the proscenium, one can see a white-masked doll sitting on a chair; actor Su Xiaogang, also masked, delivers a funny and bitter monolog of his character.
More precisely, the latter is a ghost. All the show is actually a confession of the executed protagonist, who, being unable to understand what happened to him, and most importantly, why it happened, wanders a limbo of sorts between Heaven and Earth, asking the same questions of himself and everyone around him.
The farmer named Ah Q is a classic loser who always gets beaten and keeps seeking his share of happiness, but when he finds it, he still loses it at once. He switches from learning to teaching, from performing “strange tasks” to stealing, and from stealing to making a revolution. Like everyone, he dreams of love. While outraged with violations of traditions, he easily joins the revolution. He is terribly stupid and very funny, but his somersaults harm only himself. In the end, the fate throws him onto the scaffold, and suddenly, this voluntary fool grows into a tragic figure. Su conveys this transformation perfectly, using not just voice, but his entire body. And his last question which he throws to the audience, “Who am I? And who the hell are you?” – that question sends shivers down everyone’s spine. What started as a joke becomes a high tragicomedy. The final scene, which has the actor removing his mask, silently looking at the doll, bowing to the audience with it, and exiting to the dull sound of Buddhist chanting, is worth dozens of loud and pathetic performances which are very far from the scenic truth attained by this play.
And there can be no doubt that the key event of the Olympic’s early days was the performance of The Trojan Women, directed by 77-year-old patriarch of the Japanese theater Tadashi Suzuki. This performance is in itself the most convincing realization of the Olympic’s concept which calls for combination of tradition and experiment, since it has Euripides’s tragedy performed using Kabuki aesthetics.
Suzuki’s The Trojan Women marks one of the high points of world theater. Having premiered in 1976, it has been seen by thousands of viewers all over the world, and won a lot of awards. The action is built around Hecuba’s monolog, delivered by the widow of the Trojan king Priam on the day after the fall of Troy. In fact, The Trojan Women is a lament for those killed in the war as well as those who are destined to become slaves of the victors. Yasuhiro Fujimoto, who was cast as Hecuba, performs a tremendous amount of work, not only combining expressive style of Kabuki with psychological nuances, but also reincarnating as Cassandra, a powerless prophetess and the daughter of Hecuba, and then as a half-crazy woman who has lost everything during World War Two and now raves and wanders the world. The Trojan Women ends completely paradoxically and on a deceptively frivolous note, but it is precisely this terrible frivolity that causes a true classic catharsis.
Yes, the world should be a place of truth; but of course, every time when really valuable productions come on stage, theater becomes such a place as well.
A more detailed analysis of The Trojan Women production and an interview with Suzuki will be published in the upcoming issues of this newspaper.
