Warsaw in February, and the bright young things at the Polish Cultural Institute are showing off their wares prior to a summer trip west. The productions of 4.48 Psychosis and Dybbuk that will go on to play at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival feature some of the brightest stars of Polish stage and screen. Prior to a year long UK-wide showcase of Polish culture in 2009, these two unflinching pieces of work will also show off exactly how up to the minute contemporary Polish theatre has become. Already, though, other cultural exchanges are on the agenda. A new play is being created, visiting Scottish media are told, with Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in association with Polish company, Teatr Polski.
Director Lorne Campbell, then still an associate at The Traverse following his brilliant production of Alan Wilkins’ ancient Rome-based play, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, has already visited Warsaw on several reconnaissance expeditions. Accompanying him is playwright Catherine Grosvenor, who scored a mini hit at The Traverse with her play, One Day All This Will Come To Nothing. Also on board are Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner of 59 Productions, whose international portfolio has most recently added audio-visual weight to Matthew Bourne’s production of Dorian Gray.
Two Polish actors are needed for the Traverse project, which is to be about the experience of Polish émigrés in Scotland, a country in which the influx of economic migrants is clearly visible. With Campbell and co’s presence alongside assorted mandarins checking out the Warsaw theatre scene, however, for now at least, the traffic is clearly a two-way thing.
Seven months on, and Campbell is back in Edinburgh, ensconced in rehearsals for a play that’s now called Cherry Blossom. The script may be credited to Grosvenor, but with creative input from all parties, including Polish dramaturg Lukasz Chotkowski, this is no standard new writing project. It features a bi-lingual cast of two Poles and two Scots, the latter with very different experiences of Poland. It also has an almost unheard of three weeks rehearsal on the Traverse’s main stage rather than in some draughty church hall. All of which makes for a decidedly un-Scottish theatrical experience.
“It was fascinating watching the impact on Scotland of the huge Polish migration here,” Campbell says of Cherry Blossom’s roots. “Scotland is such a predominantly white, mono-cultural society, that you travel around the rest of the UK, and everywhere is more multi-cultural than Scotland, both rurally and in the two big cities. There’s an interesting thing in Polish migration, though, both in terms of sheer numbers, and in the partial invisibility of it. As you become sensitised to it, your Pol-dar kicks in a little bit, but there’s not a skin colour thing or an immediate dress thing that you notice.”
Developed over two years, Cherry Blossom began with an extensive series of interviews with Polish emigrants, without any specific story in mind. Campbell and Grosvenor not only looked at the current crop of migrants, with the welter of Polish bars and delicatessens that have sprung up around this wave. They also examined the two previous generations who’d left Poland, either because of the Second World War or else in the years following martial law in the early 1980s.
“There’s always been a tension between the macro and micro forces which have fuelled these emigrations right from the start,” Campbell observes. The war generation never intended to leave home, and even in 1945 were very focussed on returning but found they were unable to. The generation of intellectuals, academics and political activists who left during martial law were given one-way visas and told they weren’t coming back. This generation o the other hand, were given the illusion that it was choice, but in actual fact macro forces are shaping it every bit as much. It’s the iron fist of Communism against the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Capitalism and the free market moves you around in a much more subtle way than any other political system.”
Out of all this has developed a story of a middle-aged woman who leaves her husband and teenage children to come to Scotland to work. Her primary motive is to fund her daughter’s education in one of the private universities that have grown out of the encroaching supply and demand culture. Rather than be ploughed through a state machine that frequently failed its citizens, if you can pay for it, these new institutions will invent a course for every need required.
“When you’re looking for dramatic stories,” Grosvenor says, “more often than not they’re in the negative. But in the world we were looking at there’s honestly not a lot out there. The vast majority of people we spoke to had stories that ran along the lines of them not having the chances they wanted in Poland, so they’ve come over to earn some money, and everything’s fine. But people often end up doing jobs in this country that are very different to what they’ve left back home. Often they’re leaving very high status jobs in Poland and earning much more here working behind a bar.
“In the play I became interested in what that does to your sense of identity, and in our story this woman leaves Poland as a housewife with nothing, and ends up working here in a meat factory, which is a job a Polish housewife would never imagine herself doing. What I noticed about the Polish people we talked to was that they would find themselves in situations that I would find inordinately difficult to deal with, but have just done it without ever complaining. There’s something about the way they soldier on through things that makes the drama.”
“It’s not one big truth that we’ve discovered,” Campbell concurs, “but an accretion of all these little things that make up the Polish psyche and how that’s defined. Like the way some Poles living here refuse to call themselves migrants. Language is crucial to that make-up, and that’s one of the things that I hope comes through in the play.”
Campbell and co have been careful in their casting for Cherry Blossom in both countries. While John Kazek and Sandy Grierson provide the Scottish input, both men are intimately connected with Poland. Kazek’s father is Polish, and he gifted the play its title, derived from playground taunts about being ‘polish,’ as in shoe polish. Grierson, meanwhile, was exposed to the work of legendary Polish theatre guru Tadeusz Kantor while at an impressionable age, and has developed his own practice both with Kantor’s disciple Zofia Kalinska, and with the Grotowski-influenced Lazzi Experimental Arts Unit.
For actresses Marta Scislowicz and Malgorzata Trofimiuk, coming to Scotland, even on a short-term basis, has already proved something of an eye-opener.
“I’ve never left Poland before,” Trofimiuk, a full time actress with Teatr Polski says, with Grosvenor translating. “I’d never flown before, and I’d not had any contact with English speakers for twenty years. In that way it’s very similar to the play. But you can meet a Pole in any bar or any shop or on the street in Edinburgh, and the worst thing about hearing them talk is that they only talk about work. That’s become the most important thing for them, but in Poland it’s totally different. There we can still talk about love or the Sun. Not just about work.”
Things, however, are changing. Economically, the days of Poles making an agonising trek west on the cheapest transport available are long gone. On a recent flight from London to Warsaw, Campbell met a man who was returning home for the day to fix his mother’s fridge. Even these boom years however, won’t last.
“It’s a fluid, fast-moving situation,” Campbell says. “You come, you acclimatise, you assimilate and to some extent you settle. But when the economic imperative changes, is that really the place you want to be? That’s the real drama that will be played out over the next two years.”
Cherry Blossom Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews, September 24-26, then runs from September 27-October 11. Cherry Blossom then transfers to Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, October 16-19 and Warsaw, October 26-27. To accompany Cherry Blossom, The Traverse will be hosting The Krzystof Dydo Collection, Polish Theatre Posters From The Last Two Decades.
www.traverse.co.uk
www.teatrpolski.pl
www.teatr-polski.art.pl
The Herald, September 20th 2008
ends
Director Lorne Campbell, then still an associate at The Traverse following his brilliant production of Alan Wilkins’ ancient Rome-based play, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, has already visited Warsaw on several reconnaissance expeditions. Accompanying him is playwright Catherine Grosvenor, who scored a mini hit at The Traverse with her play, One Day All This Will Come To Nothing. Also on board are Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner of 59 Productions, whose international portfolio has most recently added audio-visual weight to Matthew Bourne’s production of Dorian Gray.
Two Polish actors are needed for the Traverse project, which is to be about the experience of Polish émigrés in Scotland, a country in which the influx of economic migrants is clearly visible. With Campbell and co’s presence alongside assorted mandarins checking out the Warsaw theatre scene, however, for now at least, the traffic is clearly a two-way thing.
Seven months on, and Campbell is back in Edinburgh, ensconced in rehearsals for a play that’s now called Cherry Blossom. The script may be credited to Grosvenor, but with creative input from all parties, including Polish dramaturg Lukasz Chotkowski, this is no standard new writing project. It features a bi-lingual cast of two Poles and two Scots, the latter with very different experiences of Poland. It also has an almost unheard of three weeks rehearsal on the Traverse’s main stage rather than in some draughty church hall. All of which makes for a decidedly un-Scottish theatrical experience.
“It was fascinating watching the impact on Scotland of the huge Polish migration here,” Campbell says of Cherry Blossom’s roots. “Scotland is such a predominantly white, mono-cultural society, that you travel around the rest of the UK, and everywhere is more multi-cultural than Scotland, both rurally and in the two big cities. There’s an interesting thing in Polish migration, though, both in terms of sheer numbers, and in the partial invisibility of it. As you become sensitised to it, your Pol-dar kicks in a little bit, but there’s not a skin colour thing or an immediate dress thing that you notice.”
Developed over two years, Cherry Blossom began with an extensive series of interviews with Polish emigrants, without any specific story in mind. Campbell and Grosvenor not only looked at the current crop of migrants, with the welter of Polish bars and delicatessens that have sprung up around this wave. They also examined the two previous generations who’d left Poland, either because of the Second World War or else in the years following martial law in the early 1980s.
“There’s always been a tension between the macro and micro forces which have fuelled these emigrations right from the start,” Campbell observes. The war generation never intended to leave home, and even in 1945 were very focussed on returning but found they were unable to. The generation of intellectuals, academics and political activists who left during martial law were given one-way visas and told they weren’t coming back. This generation o the other hand, were given the illusion that it was choice, but in actual fact macro forces are shaping it every bit as much. It’s the iron fist of Communism against the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Capitalism and the free market moves you around in a much more subtle way than any other political system.”
Out of all this has developed a story of a middle-aged woman who leaves her husband and teenage children to come to Scotland to work. Her primary motive is to fund her daughter’s education in one of the private universities that have grown out of the encroaching supply and demand culture. Rather than be ploughed through a state machine that frequently failed its citizens, if you can pay for it, these new institutions will invent a course for every need required.
“When you’re looking for dramatic stories,” Grosvenor says, “more often than not they’re in the negative. But in the world we were looking at there’s honestly not a lot out there. The vast majority of people we spoke to had stories that ran along the lines of them not having the chances they wanted in Poland, so they’ve come over to earn some money, and everything’s fine. But people often end up doing jobs in this country that are very different to what they’ve left back home. Often they’re leaving very high status jobs in Poland and earning much more here working behind a bar.
“In the play I became interested in what that does to your sense of identity, and in our story this woman leaves Poland as a housewife with nothing, and ends up working here in a meat factory, which is a job a Polish housewife would never imagine herself doing. What I noticed about the Polish people we talked to was that they would find themselves in situations that I would find inordinately difficult to deal with, but have just done it without ever complaining. There’s something about the way they soldier on through things that makes the drama.”
“It’s not one big truth that we’ve discovered,” Campbell concurs, “but an accretion of all these little things that make up the Polish psyche and how that’s defined. Like the way some Poles living here refuse to call themselves migrants. Language is crucial to that make-up, and that’s one of the things that I hope comes through in the play.”
Campbell and co have been careful in their casting for Cherry Blossom in both countries. While John Kazek and Sandy Grierson provide the Scottish input, both men are intimately connected with Poland. Kazek’s father is Polish, and he gifted the play its title, derived from playground taunts about being ‘polish,’ as in shoe polish. Grierson, meanwhile, was exposed to the work of legendary Polish theatre guru Tadeusz Kantor while at an impressionable age, and has developed his own practice both with Kantor’s disciple Zofia Kalinska, and with the Grotowski-influenced Lazzi Experimental Arts Unit.
For actresses Marta Scislowicz and Malgorzata Trofimiuk, coming to Scotland, even on a short-term basis, has already proved something of an eye-opener.
“I’ve never left Poland before,” Trofimiuk, a full time actress with Teatr Polski says, with Grosvenor translating. “I’d never flown before, and I’d not had any contact with English speakers for twenty years. In that way it’s very similar to the play. But you can meet a Pole in any bar or any shop or on the street in Edinburgh, and the worst thing about hearing them talk is that they only talk about work. That’s become the most important thing for them, but in Poland it’s totally different. There we can still talk about love or the Sun. Not just about work.”
Things, however, are changing. Economically, the days of Poles making an agonising trek west on the cheapest transport available are long gone. On a recent flight from London to Warsaw, Campbell met a man who was returning home for the day to fix his mother’s fridge. Even these boom years however, won’t last.
“It’s a fluid, fast-moving situation,” Campbell says. “You come, you acclimatise, you assimilate and to some extent you settle. But when the economic imperative changes, is that really the place you want to be? That’s the real drama that will be played out over the next two years.”
Cherry Blossom Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews, September 24-26, then runs from September 27-October 11. Cherry Blossom then transfers to Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, October 16-19 and Warsaw, October 26-27. To accompany Cherry Blossom, The Traverse will be hosting The Krzystof Dydo Collection, Polish Theatre Posters From The Last Two Decades.
www.traverse.co.uk
www.teatrpolski.pl
www.teatr-polski.art.pl
The Herald, September 20th 2008
ends
Comments