When Krzysztof Warlikowski arrived in Edinburgh two days ago, he says there were soldiers with guns manning the airport. Regardless of security measures, for a theatre director from Poland whose production of Dybbuk opens at the King’s Theatre tonight, it still seemed pretty extreme.
“We recently played Israel,” Warlikowski says in the safety of his hotel restaurant, “and even there, there were no armed guards. I was shocked. I’ve never seen that before. Not in America either. But something like that is very telling. It’s not just about security. It’s about something else that’s much more deep rooted.”
Perhaps it’s something to so with what he says later, about how “Ireland is Britain’s dybbuk.”
In Jewish historical myth, a dybbuk is a malicious spirit who occupies a living body like some guilty secret. Ghosts are everywhere in Warlikowski’s Dybbuk, which melds together an adaptation of Szymon Anski’s text - one of the most performed Yiddish plays ever written and first performed in Warsaw in 1920 – with a short story by journalist Hanna Krall, also called Dybbuk, from her 1996 collection, Proofs Of Existence. Krall was a friend of film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who based the eighth part of his Decalogues series, about a Holocaust survivor and ethics professor who refuses to co-operate with a journalist, on some of Krall’s experiences. Her take on the Dybbuk investigates a man who believes another person is crying inside him. Anski’s original, about a young bride who is possessed the night before her wedding, combines the metaphorical and the metaphysical even more by addressing the ripping asunder of the entire Jewish population.
In the intervening 76 years between the two Dybbuks, the Jewish community, have had their world torn apart several times over, not just in Poland, but across the globe. Combining the contemporary and the classical in this way, Warlikowski brings home how generations have inherited a sense of never quite being able to let go.
“It raises some crucial questions about existence,” Warlikowski says. “Are we all possessed by dybbuks in our normal life? What is normal and what is mental? What is supposed to be treated by therapy? Are we obsessed with our parents and still doing the things they want us to do? Dybbuks are something you maybe think are bad, but today you could say we need those dybbuks in order to not forget our past and our roots, and to remember what is crucial for our identity. In sixty years of communism after the war, we really didn’t confront what war meant for us. After the war, borders moved, and until ’68 we had a big Jewish community who had survived the war, despite most of the concentration camps being in Poland. After ‘68, because of Soviet politics, our government became anti-semitic. So Jews still believe in Dybbuks.”
Originally commissioned by the Avignon Festival in 2003, Warlikowski’s Dybbuk has travelled the world prior to arriving in Edinburgh.
“In New York, it felt like this play was their universe,” Warlikowski says of America’s huge Jewish population. “They understood every irony in it. It was less a Holocaust story and more about going away and losing your identity. In Germany it was silent. Whenever you say the word Jew there it has so many connotations. Eventually went to Israel, which was like taking wood to a forest, but we did it anyway, and it became about our common past and our common dybbuks. Under Communism we couldn’t talk openly, and even after the Berlin wall came down and we could talk openly, it was still difficult to talk about what happened during the war. I don’t know if the healing ever ends. The question is, do we want to keep our dybbuks in? I think we should.”
Dybbuk, Edinburgh International Festival, King’s Theatre, Saturday 9 Aug-Mon n11 Aug, 7.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
The herald, August 9th 2008
ends
“We recently played Israel,” Warlikowski says in the safety of his hotel restaurant, “and even there, there were no armed guards. I was shocked. I’ve never seen that before. Not in America either. But something like that is very telling. It’s not just about security. It’s about something else that’s much more deep rooted.”
Perhaps it’s something to so with what he says later, about how “Ireland is Britain’s dybbuk.”
In Jewish historical myth, a dybbuk is a malicious spirit who occupies a living body like some guilty secret. Ghosts are everywhere in Warlikowski’s Dybbuk, which melds together an adaptation of Szymon Anski’s text - one of the most performed Yiddish plays ever written and first performed in Warsaw in 1920 – with a short story by journalist Hanna Krall, also called Dybbuk, from her 1996 collection, Proofs Of Existence. Krall was a friend of film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who based the eighth part of his Decalogues series, about a Holocaust survivor and ethics professor who refuses to co-operate with a journalist, on some of Krall’s experiences. Her take on the Dybbuk investigates a man who believes another person is crying inside him. Anski’s original, about a young bride who is possessed the night before her wedding, combines the metaphorical and the metaphysical even more by addressing the ripping asunder of the entire Jewish population.
In the intervening 76 years between the two Dybbuks, the Jewish community, have had their world torn apart several times over, not just in Poland, but across the globe. Combining the contemporary and the classical in this way, Warlikowski brings home how generations have inherited a sense of never quite being able to let go.
“It raises some crucial questions about existence,” Warlikowski says. “Are we all possessed by dybbuks in our normal life? What is normal and what is mental? What is supposed to be treated by therapy? Are we obsessed with our parents and still doing the things they want us to do? Dybbuks are something you maybe think are bad, but today you could say we need those dybbuks in order to not forget our past and our roots, and to remember what is crucial for our identity. In sixty years of communism after the war, we really didn’t confront what war meant for us. After the war, borders moved, and until ’68 we had a big Jewish community who had survived the war, despite most of the concentration camps being in Poland. After ‘68, because of Soviet politics, our government became anti-semitic. So Jews still believe in Dybbuks.”
Originally commissioned by the Avignon Festival in 2003, Warlikowski’s Dybbuk has travelled the world prior to arriving in Edinburgh.
“In New York, it felt like this play was their universe,” Warlikowski says of America’s huge Jewish population. “They understood every irony in it. It was less a Holocaust story and more about going away and losing your identity. In Germany it was silent. Whenever you say the word Jew there it has so many connotations. Eventually went to Israel, which was like taking wood to a forest, but we did it anyway, and it became about our common past and our common dybbuks. Under Communism we couldn’t talk openly, and even after the Berlin wall came down and we could talk openly, it was still difficult to talk about what happened during the war. I don’t know if the healing ever ends. The question is, do we want to keep our dybbuks in? I think we should.”
Dybbuk, Edinburgh International Festival, King’s Theatre, Saturday 9 Aug-Mon n11 Aug, 7.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
The herald, August 9th 2008
ends
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