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Ethnic Identity and Anti-Semitism Tadeusz Słobodzianek Stages the Polish Taboo Bryce Lease

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Ethnic Identity and Anti-Semitism Tadeusz Słobodzianek Stages the Polish Taboo Bryce Lease Ethnic Identity and Anti-Semitism Tadeusz Słobodzianek Stages the Polish Taboo Bryce Lease On 10 July 1941, in a small village in the northeast of Poland, up to 1,600 local Jews were rounded up by their neighbors, locked inside a small barn, and burned to death. Traditional Polish historiography attributed the guilt for the now infamous pogrom to the Nazis. But Jan T. Gross’s 2001 study, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, places the responsibility for the massacre firmly with the local community. The publi- cation of Gross’s monograph caused mass outrage, provoking Joanna Michlic to identify the debate around the pogrom as the most important and long-standing in post-Communist Poland Figure 1. The children, dancing in their classroom. Michael Gould, Lee Ingleby, Rhys Rusbatch, Tamzin Griffin, Justin Salinger, Sinead Matthews, Jason Watkins, Amanda Hale, Edward Hogg, and Paul Hickey in the Royal National Theatre production of Our Class, September 2009. (Photo by Robert Workman) Bryce Lease is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, UK. His research interests include contemporary European theatre directors, migration, queer and feminist theory, and non-Western alternative sexuality. Having published extensively on Polish theatre, Bryce is currently completing a monograph, Contemporary Polish Theatre. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 56:2 (T214) Summer 2012. ©2012 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00168 by guest on 02 October 2021 (2002:1). As Leonard Neuger notes, “Many Poles have felt deeply wounded by the Jedwabne case” (2009). This included journalists; historians; the Institute of National Remembrance’s Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation; the Catholic Church, for what has been portrayed as their culpability in Jedwabne and surrounding areas; the national- ists, for what they have seen as a lack of emphasis placed on Polish heroism; and the inhabitants of the village itself, who have felt persecuted. In September 2009, the Royal National Theatre in London produced Tadeusz Słobodzi - anek’s polemical text Nasza klasa — Our Class — as part of the “Polska! Year” organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, intended to acquaint the UK with Polish culture. Słobodzianek, who is the head of the Laboratorium Dramatu in Warsaw, which, like the Royal Court in London, promotes the work of new writers, has insisted that the play is pure fiction. Neverthe - less, in the acknowledgment notes to the printed script, Słobodzianek indicates that he relied on a number of historical accounts of the Jedwabne pogrom (2009a:5). Ryan Craig, the adap- tor working from Catherine Grosvenor’s translation, confirmed that the play mixes fact and fic- tion and functions as a survey of 20th-century Polish history (2010). The playwright pointedly leaves out any mention of either Jedwabne or nearby Radziłów, so that the diegetic village is not isolated to one geographical position, but rather functions as “somewhere in Poland.” In pro- duction, the assortment of regional British and Irish accents used heightened this impression. Nevertheless, the audience is given one pointed reference to Jedwabne, which means silk in Polish, when a local villager dons a white silk scarf. Even if one fails to identify this stage sign, the story bears a striking resemblance to the Jedwabne narrative.1 The material for the play derives from divergent sources. Though Słobodzianek read Gross’s book in 2000, he cites a school photograph from Jedwabne, showing both victims and perpetra- tors of the massacre, as the original inspiration for the play, which was later used as publicity for the UK production and the cover image for the English translation (Słobodzianek 2009a). Other significant inspirations include Agnieszka Arnold’s filmSa siedziç (Neighbors; 2001), and Anna Bikont’s book My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne; 2004), the most thorough, well- documented, and balanced study of the village. The play’s subject matter remains confrontational and traumatic in Poland even today. Jewish-Polish relations have been uneasy since the end of World War II, strained by the anti- Semitic attitudes prevalent among both Catholic nationalists and Communists alike.2 A nation- wide survey of public opinion in the popular newspaper Wprost, published as recently as 2004, showed that 40 percent of Poles believed “the country is still being governed by Jews” (Weiss 2004). A survey carried out by the Center for Public Opinion Research (Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej, CBOS) found that 45 percent felt antipathy towards Jews (CBOS 2005:2), though this percentage decreased to 27 percent in 2010 (CBOS 2010:2). Michlic maintains that coming to terms with an anti-Semitic past is a key element in “the process of democratiza- tion of Poland’s political and social life after 1989” (2002:32). Critics in the UK agree. Michael Billington wrote in his review of Our Class for The Guardian that the play is a forceful depiction of communal guilt (2009). The story of the Jedwabne massacre has been suppressed for so long because it did not fit into the dominant heroic narrative that locates Poles as victims and under- ground freedom fighters (Gross 2006:250). In the trial against some of the villagers that imme- diately followed World War II, testimonies were confused and witnesses only briefly questioned. The allegations were reduced to the assembling of Jews in the town square; the fact that they 1. Słobodzianek also brings the story up to date within the play. The characters discuss how “books and TV docu- mentaries have revealed the bitter truth about the responsibility of the townsfolk” (Billington 2009). 2. The term “Jewish-Polish relations” might seem awkward in this debate, referring as it does to a distinction between Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles, but this is standard in Poland, where Jews are considered non- ethnic Poles. In response, Słobodzianek commented after the Israeli production that this story is not about a Polish- Jewish conflict but a Polish-Polish conflict in which Jews are included (Słobodzianek in Pawłowski 2008). Bryce Lease 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00168 by guest on 02 October 2021 were then forced into a barn and burned to death was left out of the hearing. It became a sham trial with no victims (56). The narrative of Our Class follows the lives of 10 classmates, born between 1918 and 1920. Catholics are firmly identified as Poles, though this national status is less stable for the Jewish students. The Jews’ costumes are more expensive, tailored and colorful, made of linen and other fine materials, while the ethnic Poles wear simple, agrarian clothing. From the outset, the Jews are shown as liberal, flirting ostentatiously and discussing Hollywood cinema at the back of the classroom while the Poles are praying at the front. One Jewish classmate openly announces his atheism. The language used to describe the separate communities was a central issue that arose during the rehearsal process. Craig observed that in the UK, where the play was staged, citizens tend for the most part to see themselves as British first, and within that identity there are differ- ent races and religions (2010). The Poles and Jews in this play, on the other hand, identify them- selves in terms of ethnicity and religion rather than nationality. These identities unfold through autobiography with specific emphasis placed on the distant location of each event. As each char- acter relates key personal events in the past tense, the action shifts from past to present. Often characters have to strain to recall the details of each memory they relate, but moments later they become immersed in the memory as if it were “live,” speaking in the present tense. Bijan Sheibani, former artistic director of the London-based Actors Touring Company and winner of the Olivier Award, directed Our Class for the Royal National Theatre. Sheibani first came across the play via a phone call from Nick Hytner, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre (RNT). Hytner initially received the play from Habima, the Israeli National Theatre in Tel Aviv and asked Sheibani if he would consider staging it. The production style and adap- tation of the literal translation emerged simultaneously through a series of workshops at the National Theatre studio. Sheibani commented that Our Class is mainly a memory play (2009a). The characters have to recall what happened up to 70 years before, and “then you snap into the memory. You go from someone trying to come to terms with what happened and trying to understand what happened, which is in itself an incredibly dramatic thing to watch, and then you go into the actual scene” (2009a). The production required a design that would allow the actors to change location quickly. One moment the action is on a kibbutz in Israel and the next moment, a Polish pigsty or a New York apartment. This continual shift in time and space, between past and present, presented the first major question about staging for Sheibani: How does one design a show that moves so quickly, at the speed of thought? Joanna Derkaczew remarked in Gazeta Wyborcza that the acting style of the British per- formers was an effective form of reportage in which the actors directly addressed the audience (2009). In an interview with Dan Rebellato, Sheibani ruminated over the challenges facing the actors in switching from past to present tense. Rebellato asked how these dead people could speak to an audience about their lives (2009b). Sheibani observed that flashbacks are always a problem in contemporary staging. While there is a forensic quality to the present tense, detailed but undemonstrative, the flashbacks use highly emotive language.
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