•"e Balie theater instituut nederland

The Dissident Muse

Critical Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe 1945-1989

Reports from the former German Democratic Republic; Hungary; Poland; Romania; former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia

Articles on Dutch and Flemish Critical Theatre

Amsterdam, September 1995

Not for publication Het dissidente theater in Centraal- en Oost-Europa 1945-1989.

Projectomschrijving (Herzien april 1995)

1. Omschrijving

Een onderzoeksproject naar het kritische vermogen en de subversieve impact van de podiumkunsten in Centraal- en Oost-Europa tussen 1945 en 1989, uitgevoerd door lokale onderzoekers, resulterend in een symposium en een weekend met activiteiten in De Balie te Amsterdam. Deskundigen en kunstenaars uit de regio en uit Nederland en West-Europa worden samengebracht. De resultaten worden naar buiten gebracht middels een videopresentatie en een publicatie.

2. Doelen

O De essentiële prestaties van de podiumkunsten in Centraal- en Oost-Europa behoeden voor het voortschrijdende collectieve geheugenverlies en het simplistisch historisch revisionisme van vandaag, oftewel een rehabilitatie van de podiumkunsten.

O De nieuwe generatie theatermakers in de regio stimuleren om ook onder de huidige omstandigheden en met de huidige beperkingen geëngageerd en maatschappelijk theater te maken, en ze daarbij te laten profiteren van de ervaringen van de vorige generatie.

O Een stimulans bieden aan de nieuwe generatie Nederlandse theatermakers om te reflecteren op de rol van het theater binnen de huidige samenleving, door ze te wijzen op toonaangevende voorbeelden van burgermoed en professionele integriteit. En op die manier hen te leren hoe de grenzen van de invloed van het theater op de samenleving en de politiek kunnen worden verruimd.

O Het stimuleren van de overdracht van kermis aan jongere onderzoekers in hun regio en hun betrokkenheid bij internationale onderzoeksnetwerken.

O Jonge theatermakers uit Nederland in contact brengen met hun collega's in de desbetreffende regio.

O De publieke aandacht in Nederland vestigen (via de activiteiten) op de maatschappelijke reikwijdte en vermogens van het theater.

3. Voortgang

Dit project kan worden gezien worden als de eerste fase van een groter en langduriger project over de botsing tussen theater en politiek en het vermogen van het theater om een collectieve verbeelding op te roepen, en de ide®l©gische dogma's en politieke ©rde ter discussie te stellen. I

In deze eerste fase ligt de nadruk op de specifieke condities en de opmerkelijke prestaties van de podiumkunsten in Centraal- en Oost-Europa. Het project ging in 1994 van start en gaat in 1995 verder, met daarbij eventuele na-produkties in 1996.

A) Onderzoek

Het onderzoek (januari-juni 1995) wordt uitgevoerd door lokale onderzoekers in zes landen, waarvan er drie inmiddels niet meer bestaan: de Sovjet-Unie, Polen, Tsjechoslowakije, Hongarije, Roemenië en Joegoslavië. Naar onze mening heeft het theater in die landen de grootste impact op de politiek gehad. Daarnaast is een onderzoeker in Berlijn aangetrokken om de geschiedenis van het dissidente theater in de voormalige DDR in kaart te brengen. In elk voornoemd land is een onderzoeker gedurende enkele maanden bezig met de volgende werkzaamheden: het inventariseren van het bestaande onderzoek op dit onderwerp; het achterhalen en verzamelen van documentatie; het vaststellen van de specifieke conflictsituaties, onderzoeken van de acties en reacties van de theatermakers en de politieke machten, het onderzoeken van de rol van de critici en de intelligentia, de pers en de media en het algemene publiek en zijn specifieke segmenten. De onderzoekers zijn geselecteerd uit een groep deskundigen op advies van relaties van het Theater Instituut Nederland. De deskundigen hebben elkaar aan het begin van het proces ontmoet om gezamenlijk de prioriteiten en de methodologische problemen vast te stellen en de doelen en de samenstelling van de rapporten re definiëren (Boedapest 1994). Naar aanleiding van deze bijeenkomst zijn de richtlijnen voor de onderzoekers ontwikkeld. De rapporten zullen in het Engels worden geschreven en daarna geredigeerd. Lengte: 50 pagina's A4 (12.500 woorden), plus een documentatie-gedeelte en een bibliografie. Dit geheel wordt aangeleverd op diskette en uitdraai voor 30 juni 1995.

B) Symposium

De onderzoekers zullen in Amsterdam samenkomen voor een symposium (29 nov.-l dec. 1995), samen met ca. twintig genodigde Nederlandse en Oost- en West-Europese theaterwetenschappers, critici, historici, sociologen en kunstenaars. Iedereen krijgt de teksten van tevoren toegestuurd. Aan het symposium zouden ook de veteranen van het dissidente theater kunnen deelnemen, samen met jonge theatermakers die vandaag de . dag proberen politiek geëngageerd en controversieel theater te maken.

C) Weekend-activiteiten

Het symposium wordt direct gevolgd door en weekend met activiteiten (1-3 december 1995) in De Balie, Amsterdams centrum voor cultuur en politiek. Er zal een speciaal krantenkatern komen met alle noodzakelijke achtergrondinformatie. Bovendien zal er worden samengewerkt met het Kunstkanaal, het lokale kunstprogramma op de kabeltelevisie (zondag 26 november 1995) en met het Alfa Filmhuis. M F) Spin-off

Het programma zou kunnen op diverse manieren en in diverse samenstellingen worden voortgezet in andere Europese steden in 1996 en 1997, in zoverre het materiaal bruikbaar en interessant is voor andere partners.

4. Doelgroepen

Huidige en toekomstige professionele theatermakers. Het intellectuele en cultureel geïnteresseerde publiek, voornamelijk die groep met sterke interesse voor mensenrechten en de bescherming van artistieke vrijheid.

5. Samenwerking

Het programma is ontstaan in het Theater Instituut Nederland, dat de onderzoeksfase heeft voorbereid en geïnstigeerd en dat de eindverantwoordelijkheid houdt voor het onderzoek en de resultaten daarvan. Het symposium, de weekend-activiteiten en de publicaties zijn een co- produktie van het Theater Instituut en De Balie. De instellingen hebben in januari 1995 een gezamenlijke projectgroep geïnstalleerd die het gehele project zal uitvoeren.

6. Documentatie

Tot dusver is de ontwikkeling van het project als volgt gedocumenteerd:

O Voorbereidende projectschets (maart/april/oktober 1995) O Rapport van de deskundigen-bijeenkomst in Boedapest (december 1994) ° Richtlijnen voor de onderzoekers (januari 1995) ° Eerste bibliografie (januari 1995) O Opdracht projectgroep (30 januari 1995) O Projectmap van kranteknipsels, artikelen, brieven, etc.

(dissdesc. A95)

) 3>

Enkele voorbereidende programma's zouden in het Theater Instituut kunnen plaatsvinden, in het Oost-Europa Instituut van de Universiteit van Amsterdam en in De Balie. De volgende programma's worden op dit moment voorbereid:

O Voorbereidende lezingen door de Duitse toneelschrijver Tankred Dorst en de Roemeense acteur/regisseur Ion Caramitru ("Dissidence Then and Now Again"). O Een uitvoering van het speciaal hiervoor geschreven korte stuk "There Was Once a Theatre", geschreven en geregisseerd door de Sloveen Dusan Jovanovic, met medewerking van Nederlandse acteurs. O Peter Halasz: "My Life Story", een uitvoering met videoverslag door de Hongaarse dissidente theatermaker en latere oprichter van het "Squat Theatre" en "Love Theatre". O Reisverhalen: Gesprekken met kunstenaars die tijdens de Koude Oorlog van Oost naar West en van West naar Oost reisden, om te leven, te werken, te vluchten, te verkennen. O "The Empty Space Behind The Wall": veteranen en nieuwkomers uit Oost en West spreken over generatieverschillen en -conflicten en over de problemen met de autoriteiten en de creatieve ruimte. O Case studies: Onderzoekers presenteren controversiële produkties die in hun land een zware confrontatie tussen kunst en politiek hebben veroorzaakt. O Geheimtaal: Een discussie met jonge Nederlandse theatermakers over het gebruik van metafoor en dubbele bodem in toneelstuk en regie, en het gebruik van de klassieke stukken als camouflage voor contemporaine maatschappijkritiek. O Een installatie in de foyer van De Balie. O Een fototentoonstelling over het dagelijks leven in Oost-Europa voor 1989: de officiële en ongeautoriseerde versie. O Films en video's.

Deze activiteiten worden op video vastgelegd.

D) Video

Er zal een videopakket worden samengesteld over theater in Centraal- en Oost-Europa tussen 1945 en 1989. Dit pakket kan worden gebruikt voor televisie-uitzending en distributie.

E) Publicaties

Een boek met essays en reportages zou kunnen worden samengesteld op basis van het materiaal dat door de onderzoekers is verzameld en de rapporten die door zijn geschreven, aangevuld met de bijdragen van het symposium. Dit boek zou in het Engels en/of het Nederlands kunnen worden gepubliceerd, enkele maanden na het symposium. Enkele bijdragen kunnen eerder worden gepubliceerd in Index on Censorship en andere tijdschriften. ; icjx; Joy; /ƒ2; c a.)'.CH^y.C hvj)./.• /, //y;,. .. ,

96-112

PREFACE

In 1994 Theater Instituut Nederland and De Balie, center for culture and politics, both from Amsterdam, initiated the project The Dissident Muse: Critica! Theater in Central and Eastern Europe 1945-1989. Researchers were engaged in several countries and assigned a task to conduct research about the dissident theater in their own country between 1945 and 1989, according to common guidelines that allowed nevertheless for the treatment of specific developments in each theater culture. The reports assembled here are the result of this research to which two articles about the Dutch and Flemish developments have been added as complementary material.

The whole package is intended for the participants of the symposium The Dissident Muse that will take place in Amsterdam from 29 November to 1 December 1995 and to which some 45 participants have been invited - theater makers and experts from Eastern, Central and Western Europe, the veterans of dissidence and the young forces. They will discuss on the assembled reports in 3 thematic sessions.

The symposium will be immediately followed by a series of events in de Balie on 1, 2 and 3 December 1995, encompassing lectures, panels, discussions, stage readings, productions, video projections and an installation.

It is expected that this project will generate different spin-offs in different European cities in 1996 and 1997.

Only after the events in Amsterdam this December a decision will be made about the format and manner of publication of these reports. Thus for the time being they are strictly for internal use among the symposium participants.

The Editor

Amsterdam, October 19, 1995 Former German Democratic Republic THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC 1945-1989

4

Research by Carena Schlewitt

1 "(...) as if humanism could always have just one result; capitulation!" (Wolfgang Hilbig, zwischen den paradiesen, Leipzig 1992, S.168)*

Any attempt to describe theatre and its consequences in public, social and political life after 1945, first in the Soviet occupied zone, then in the German Democratic Republic, can only result in a sketch whose contours and colours will change again with the times. The picture is simultaneously both gaining and losing in sharpness. Especially after the events of 1989 in Europe it seems to me to be necessary to write and re-write the history of theatre if one tries to situate one's own position with respect to processes of art and society. In writing history we look 'back' on past events and gain a distance we call 'history', but its perspectives are changing continuously thanks to shifting starting and ending points. By re-writing history we are able to compare different stories in constant remaking; and this comparison is a small but practicable equivalent to the most different forms taken by theatrical events, with all their typical and often quoted characteristics of process, spatial effects, uniqueness of event, 'immediate' communication, and so on. That is, we deal with a description of theatre as a discontinuous movement in space and time and with a 'reappraisal' of a life situation that produced a different knowledge, a knowledge moreover that can only be presented in a distorted picture as it is 'reproduced' today, in an altogether different life situation. That which is left is a memorial space which can of course be filled with facts but which however remains an individual one forever.

In his work journal Bertolt Brecht writes: "9th December 1948 (...) everywhere the new German misery becomes noticeable that nothing is done when almost everything is already out of order. (...) there are only few who take the view that an ordered socialism is better than none at all." (Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 1 977, p. 460) If one relates this remark to the events, movements and disruptions of this century in Europe, that is to the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia and the two World Wars (1914-1918 and 1 939-1 945), it becomes evident that there could not be a zero hour in 1945. The so-called reconstruction was based on 'basements which were not cleared out'. In 1987 Heiner Muller directed at the Deutsche Theater, Berlin, his play Der Lohndrücker (The Wage Lowerer) which was written in 1956. It deals with the difficulties in production in the reconstruction years 1948/49 in the GDR. The centre of attention is a man called Baike, an innovator, an activist. In the play and in the production Muller brings out the contradictory role of Balke, as an example of the main problem of the new beginning after 1945: the same discipline of the working class that was used by fascism for arms production, and then in war, was used after 1945 for the construction of socialism. What would have been necessary was the contrary, that is a transformation of that energy. To use this 'traditional' discipline of the working class for reconstruction, however, was an inevitable consequence of the economic pressure from which the socialist experiment constantly suffered right from the beginning. It should be mentioned in this context that the government of the GDR since the beginning of its regime attached great importance to culture as a factor that not only stabilized power constellation but economic developments as well. The most obvious example here is the Bitterfelder Weg (1958-1964) (named after the industrial city of Bitterfeld). The way of Bitterfeld was a 'top down' initiative of cultural policies which was related to the seven year plan of economic policy devised in 1958 for the chemical industry in Leuna. In 1959 the first Conference of Bitterfeld took place in the Palace of Culture of the Electrochemical combine Bitterfeld. We will come back to the consequences of this conference later.

This quote and all the following ones are translated by the researcher.

2 A far-reaching problem in a junior version consisted in the continuation or 're-edition' of the conflict the Russian avant-garde experienced. This is not the place to discuss in detail positions, development and destruction of the Russian avant-garde; nor is it possible to describe and analyse in detail the consequences of Stalinism in the Soviet occupied zone after 1945. Let me just give as a reference Boris Groys' book on the Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988) in which he analyses the relation between avant-garde and Russian realism. Groys views the Stalin era as the realisation of the dream of the Russian avant-garde to organise social life following an artists' overall plan: the Soviet empire as a national work of art, socialist realism as the unity of culture and power, and Stalin as the artist-tyrant in control. There were traces of this synthesis of the arts called Stalin to be found in the GDR as well, especially under the regime of Walter Ulbricht.

The years from 1945 to 1948 were marked by a broad popular front movement and the smallest (or greatest) common denominator: anti-fascism, both supported by the Soviet occupation regime. The intelligentsia, artists, and scientists were gathered in a broad bloc of 'progressive forces' to further the reconstruction of Germany. At the same time it became ever more evident that despite early attempts at a unified Germany, every power of occupation wanted its own ideology to be carried through in this 'no man's land. Many Germans exiled in the Soviet Union and in the 'other', the Western world, came back to the part of Germany occupied by the Soviets. The individual horizons of intellectuals and artists which were developed as a consequence of the differing forms of exile played a role which should not be underestimated in the early years of the debate about art and society. They were motivated differently, but most of them hoped for a real new beginning of German history, even if people put forward different opinions concerning this beginning as shown by the Brecht quotation above. Soon strong contrasts appeared as to how the 'new' society was to be designed.

"25th March 1951 (...) sometimes (...) the usual forms are desired because the new contents are in no way generally established within the class that seized the power; there is the incorrect opinion that it is more difficult to carry through new content and new form than only one of these" (Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 1977, p. 493).

Thus, if it is at all possible to speak of a new situation after 1945, there would be visible right from the beginning essential conflicts between culture and policies, 'Geist' and power which would reappear persistently throughout the different phases of development of GDR society. However, one should view these conflicts as forms inherent to the system and which stabilise the system. I consider the notions of 'dissidence' and 'opposition' inappropriate for the description of these conflict situations and of the behaviour of individuals or even groups towards these situations. These notions are used in an inflationary and much too reduced manner especially when it comes to a 'reappraisal' of the history of the years following 1989. In most cases there is to be seen a fundamentally positive attitude towards this new societal experiment in building a socialist German nation. The conflict emerged out of an abundance of energies to better the system which were considered by the men in power as unwanted lectures. The deviance, or the contradiction if one likes, consisted in an affirmation which overshot the mark or in an excess of a will to change. They did not want to destroy the system but to develop it further. This field of discussion was marked by an intellectual competition whose positive intentions constantly and paradoxically initiated a political consolidation of power; much the same as what the economic competition of the West (a West moreover that nursed the intellectual competition to the bitter end) did on the other side. The slogans used to brand artists, intellectuals and scientists as people who are today considered to be dissident or in opposition are well known especially from their 'heyday' in the Soviet Union of the thirties: Decadence / Formalism / Cosmopolitism / Nihilism / Destruction / Anarchism etc. The enumeration could be continued as you like.

3 Add to that a specific German theme, which is the discussion of German history as a history of German plight. An example may be the rigor and inexorable condemnation of Hanns Eisler's libretto Johann Faustus in 1953, well before the events of 17th June. In defence of the libretto Ernst Fischer wrote about Eisler that "he connected in a brilliant conception the Faust theme to the Münzer theme, that he deduced the problematic of Faust from his posture towards the Peasant War and that he reproduced Faust as a central figure of the German plight: the German humanist who recoils from the revolution, who welcomes Münzer's ideas, but who, as soon as the great decision in the class war matures, wants to 'keep himself out' at any price, and thus turns renegade by the logic of events. The German humanist as renegade {...)" (Ernst Fischer, Sinn und Form, 6/1952). Precisely this statement of Eisler's Faust aroused fierce dissent. The reproach was that the proper 'Faustian' element had disappeared. The relation between the Faust and Münzer themes would not deliver authentic historical concreteness; Goethe's Faust would have been completely ignored. Eisler, or so the dissent runs, would have ignored the variety and importance of humanistic traditions amongst the German people. At stake was the following line of argument: the German history was to be presented as the history of the fight against the plight, in order to be able to describe the victory of the Soviet army in 1 945 as joining in the 'real, existent, long since fighting liberal forces amongst the German people'. There were downright public campaigns against Eisler; the Academy of Arts staged three Mit- twochsgesellschaften (Society of Wednesday) that discussed only that theme. With few exceptions (Brecht, Felsenstein) the participants in the discussions aggressively branded him as a criminal in cultural policies and as a traitor to the Fatherland. Eisler suffered a long crisis of creativity; he never wrote the score for the libretto.

In the years between 1949 (foundation of the GDR), the death of Stalin and the workers' uprising on 1 7 June 1953, important foundations in cultural policies with respect to an ideologisation in the sense of Stalin's cultural policies were laid: the Third Party Convention 1950; the foundation of the State Commission of Arts 1951; the Second and Third Writers' Congress 1951; foundation of the Office for Literature and Publishing; the Stanislawski Conference 1953, and so on. The main matter of concern was the fight against formalism and the establishment of socialist realism. Again Stalin's description of the writer as an "engineer of human soul" was quoted.

4 II

"Perhaps it was exactly the unreality of the state organisation GDR which attracted artists and intellectuals." (Heiner Müiler, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 1992, S.363)

The democratic or, as it was renamed later, socialist cultural revolution was to receive the 'new' German theatre essentially from the classical humanistic German inheritance. "The new beginning of the theatre in these years did not primarily link to the positions of proletarian-revolutionary theatre reached until 1933. Instead the ideologico-artistical reference point for the anti-fascist theatre of these years was the tradition of the classical period. (...) The primary orientation for the theatre after 1945 and its important strategic decision for realism was the classic tradition which was explicitly contrasted with late bourgeois modernism" (Theater in der Zeitenwende, Berlin 1972, vol 1 , p.30).

Right from the beginning the plebeian cult and 'all kinds of bourgeois modernity' were considered the two trends which had to be excluded, problematised and put into the center of critical attention. Even Brecht, whom after his death the GDR successively wanted all to itself and was made ineffective, was made to feel the effects of this policy. Top functionaries attacked at the Fifth Conference of the Central Committee his play Die Mutter (The Mother): "In my opinion that is not theatre but somehow a crossing or synthesis of Meyerhold and plebeian cult" (Fred OelBner, Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED, quoted by Jager, Kultur und Politik in der DDR, Köln 1982). In drama and in theatre there were repeated attempts to realise the original intentions of Brecht to build a theatre which was able to intervene in society. For instance as early as 1956, well before the officially decreed Way of Bitterfeld, Peter Hacks asked for a political dramaturgy. "The socialist theatre does not exist. And Brecht already is dead again" (Theater der Zeit, 11/1956). It was Hacks too who proposed to blow open the rigid structures of the town theatre system by the formation of flexible 'drama brigades'. The Way of Bitterfeld, however, was just a channeling of a movement by an economic campaign. Stipulations like 'Künstler in die Betriebe' (Artists into the factories) and 'Greif zur Feder, Kumpel' (Take up your pen, pal) were to link intellectuals to the people, to better the image of artists and to pedagogically lead the workers to culture and art. The expectation was a 'predictable' socialist temporary art which 'kept pace' with economic and political demands. One could call this a propagation of simultaneity with respect to the solution of all problems and contradictions (as they pop up); whereas the proposal of Hacks meant the very opposite: to use flexible forms to make productive everything which is not up to simultaneity.

Due to official stipulations almost all literary concepts and theatrical events of modernity after 1945 went past the GDR; that of course made the unofficial reception all the more important. As it was said in the 'text book' of GDR theatre, the number of late bourgeois authors' plays on Eastern German stages was small; no specific line of repertory with respect to late bourgeois modernity could take form. The reproaches are well known: "Jean Giraudoux's pessimism of history, Thornton Wilder's ideology of catastrophe, the societal impotence of the individual in Jean Anouilh and the absolute lack of ties in a freedom which was understood to be anarchic in Jean-Paul Sartre's Les mouches (Theater in der Zeitenwende, p. 62). All of these examples were variants on one theme which was the ahistoric model of alienation in late bourgeois philosophy. Especially Sartre's Les mouches (The flies) stood in the center of a grand ideologico-artistical debate. Leading critics like Paul Rilla and Fritz Erpenbeck or the Soviet officer Alexander Dymschiz and the writer Anna Seghers rejected Sartrian existentialism as the 'high point of idealistic subjectivism'. With respect to this background solitary attempts of writers, literary critics, dramaturges and directors in the late forties and early fifties to speak openly for a reception of these trends of modernity seem to have been hopeless endeavours. People like

5 Wolfgang Langhoff, theatre-manager at the Deutsche Theater Berlin, and Heinar Kipphardt, chief dramaturge at the same place, were called to account: "Why do you bar your stage to theatre- experienced socialist authors? Why do you constrain the artistic shaping of the variety of our life by a programme selection which follows aestheticising principles? Why are you more concerned about Remarque, Sartre, Orff than about Wangenheim, Hauser, Tschesno-Hell, Gorrish and others?" (Neues Deutschland, 17th February 1959, quoted after Jager, Kultur und Politik, 1982, p. 87). Langhoff, a veteran communist and Resistance fighter whose productions of classic plays (among others Faust 1949/50 and Egmont 1951) had been officially acclaimed and were considered examples of a reception of Stanislawski, criticised himself. He soon entered difficulties again, this time for his engagement of contemporary drama (among others Die Sorgen und die Macht, or The Worries and the Power, Peter Hacks, 1959/62). With respect to modernity or to the turning to Western German/Western European drama there emerged a theatre which succeeded in staging a broad range of international drama. However, in aesthetic conversions like those entertained by Hanns Anselm Perten, director and theatre-manager at the Volkstheater Rostock, dramatic subjects which sometimes were rather explosive could not but lose their power. He guaranteed 100 percent partiality, at any time following the official line. He maintained with Peter Weiss and Rolf Hochhuth an especially intense working relation; other authors were Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Tennessee Williams, Martin Walser, Peter Turini...

A last remark concerning the key word 'modernity': Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Genet's The Lady's Maids were to be experienced by the GDR public only in the late eighties in the Dresdner Staatsschauspiel. Until then the modern Polish drama (Rozewicz, Mrozek, Iredynski...) increasingly had to 'stand for' the theatre of the absurd and was to be found on programmes ever more often. Jürgen Gosch's 1979 production of Leonce und Lena at the Volksbühne, Berlin, which became a legend in GDR theatre, established in its way of playing an affinity for the theatre of the absurd.

Plebeian cult or modernity, in no way was there to be any questioning of society or of the individual. The aim after 1945 was to reattain secure ground by referring back to the classical period, to the humanistic ideal. It was easy to accomplish this. Lenin's theory of the two cultures in any antagonistic society distinguished the culture of reactionary forces from the culture encompassing all progressive forces. Since the assumption was that with communism the highest grade of society was reached, one could deliberately search the great fund of world culture and determine with respect to the 'laws of history' the socialist inheritance. But even the dealings with the classical period proved to be highly contradictory and difficult in the course of the GDR history of theatre. There was to be found rather a false bottom. The drama of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Büchner, Lenz and Kleist featured a lot of material which was suitable for a problematisation of the present time, since nothing, as Brecht wrote, was done. Starting with the debate already mentioned concerning Johann Faustus, and not ending with the production of the Urfaust at the Berliner Ensemble in 1953, different interpretations of Faust again and again triggered conflicts in cultural policy concerning the 'right appropriation of the inheritance of the tradition of the classical period of German national culture'. After Walter Ulbricht in the sixties had voiced the demand of contemporary GDR drama for the writing of a Faust no. Ill as the accomplishment of realistic socialism in the GDR, Adolf Dresen's production of the Faust at the Deutsche Theater Berlin in 1968 caused the next great stir. Apart from the historical events of 1968 evoked by the names of Dutschke and Dubcek which were the context of this production, it was "the old fear of an art which strongly questioned the bourgeois tradition one claimed to have completed, and its certainties" (Alexander Weigel in Theater der Zeit, 11/1990). Fritz Erpenbeck, a leading critic who was loyal to the party line and who was chief editor of the journal Theater der Zeit which was founded in 1946, in posing the following question in a review of Kleist summarised the problem of the appropriation of the inheritance: "How does drama affect the consciousness of the spectators?" (Theater der Zeit, 1/1956). The answer to this question

6 helped him to make Kleist inappropriate for GDR stages for the time being. In his plays the figures would lack general validity, the typical, which was essential for socialist realism.

Apart from the classical period which proved to be rather unwieldy in different productions, it was contemporary drama which produced the biggest headache right from the beginning. Of course there was the everyday drama, plays studying the locals, which today may be compared with respect to their dramatic construction to most light entertainment movies, sitcoms, and so on. Especially the sixties were marked by debates concerning how drama should shape societal contradictions. Two remarks may be made here: the first conference of Bitterfeld in 1959, despite its campaign-like character, was considered by many artists to be an attempt at rapprochement between working class and intelligentsia. The other remark concerns the building of the wall in 1961 which let most artists hope for a freer handling of the constellation of intellect and power in the state. Among these people, the societal problems of the construction of the state of the GDR were taken very seriously; they looked for appropriate aesthetic possibilities for translation. These however bumped up against the limits of what was officially considered allowable, as shown by the debates concerning the two plays Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler Woman) by Heiner Muller and Die Sorgen und die Macht (The Worries and the Power) by Peter Hacks. "The specific difficulty with this play (i.e.. Die Sorgen und die Macht, C.S.) was that, in 1958, it attempted for the first time to mirror in some grand form our industrial reality. Its errors were the errors all literature commits when it tries to cope artistically with new material. Unknown subjects provoke scientific attitudes. The artist becomes researcher, he collects and analyses. The first version of Die Sorgen und die Macht revealed economic and political knowledge, revealed knowledge of details. It revealed as well the lack of a living tradition of contemporary plays. The changes (from this first version to a second, C.S.) aimed to discharge the material and to displace scholastic methods with poetic ones" (Peter Hacks, quoted in Theater der Zeit, 5/1 990).

The problem of a contemporary art which came too close to societal problems was solved at the infamous Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee in December 1965 by sharp condemnations and bans on art works of all kinds. Almost all of the annual production of the DEFA film studios was banned. Wolf Biermann, Stefan Heym and Robert Havemann were attacked. Beat music was identified as a weapon of the class enemy. And so on. With respect to theatre once again Hacks and Muller and their plays Moritz Tassow and Der Bau (The Building) were held up as negative examples. Moritz Tassow by Peter Hacks had its premiere in October 1965 in a production by Benno Besson at the Volksbühne, Berlin; the stage set was done by the sculptor Fritz Cremer, the music was composed by Wagner-Regeny. Already the composition of the team of the production was received as a provocation in certain circles of the party and state apparatus. The play was discontinued after the Eleventh Plenum, relying on arguments, among others, relating to a glorification of anarchism, to loutish obscenity and pornography of European quality. The other play, Muller's Der Bau (GDR premiere in 1980), had been published and discussed by the journal Sinn und Form. At the Eleventh Plenum somebody called it "an extraordinarily primitive representation of the economic development of the German Democratic Republic". The way team leader Barka helped himself was criticised as well. In the painful aftermath of this Plenum another contemporary play received similar reproaches in 1966. This time it concerned Volker Braun's Kipper Paul Bauch, published in the journal Forum whose chief editor was Rudolf Bahro. Here too the critique aimed at the anarchic hero.

In this phase of the constitution of the GDR, from 1949 until the end of the sixties, which was marked by Walter Ulbricht's policy, there was a cultural policy of grand design which could be subverted temporarily but which left by its tightening and punitive measures deep traces in the GDR landscape of art and culture. It would certainly be necessary to give more details concerning

7 the ambivalence of the situation in the fifties, that is before the building of the wall. Already the work of people like Hans Mayer and Ernst Bloch at the University of Leipzig, Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, Wolfgang Langhoff at the Deutsche Theater, Peter Huchel as chief editor of the journal Sinn und Form at the Academy of Arts, and this list could be continued, still guaranteed a climate of openness towards influences from 'outside'. And it should not be forgotten that the GDR in its first years had the poet Johannes R. Becher as its minister of the arts who despite all contradiction and an increasingly constrained scope of action still had an understanding of artistic perception and production and, thus, proved to be a piece of luck for the artists. Ulbricht's policy in the sixties then shut the GDR system and led the cultural policy of grand design to its zenith.

There was a noticable sigh of relief among the artists when the successor to Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker, said at the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee, "If one adheres to the firm positions of socialism there can be in my opinion no taboos in the field of art and literature. That concerns questions of content as well as of style--in a word, questions with respect to what one calls artistic mastership" (Neues Deutschland, 18th December 1971). Walter Jens in his Plea against Abandoning (Pladoyer gegen die Preisgabe, Sinn und Form, 5/1 990) wrote that this adage by painters, sculptors, architects and musicians was so scrupulously interpreted, so obsessively examined word by word and analysed with so much scrutiny, with the help of high semantic sophistication, as no other in the history of the GDR. The grand design of cultural policy was thereby opened, but this did not mean that the trouble areas in the practice of artistic work disappeared; I would rather speak of a changed climate of public debate. For instance the procedures of control and approval that regulated the admission of theatre programmes were retained. Perhaps one could speak of a cultural policy which was not strategic anymore but tactical. When Biermann was expelled in 1976 this became obvious: one did not dare to repeat the Eleventh Plenum, it sufficed to make of it an example. What followed was a drain in the GDR effected by the leaving of many artists. Cultural policy until 1989 chose its measures feebly and arbitrarily and featured surprising approvals and bans.

The mutual proximity that power and art sought provided both the power (the state) and the arts with an importance, with a revaluation, with which both could play, be it constructively or destructively. With respect to the programme policy and the shaping of the repertory of a theatre, that meant that on the one hand one tried to make the most of the prevailing guidelines and to fill the present scope of action by using 'counterarguments'; on the other hand, one tried to expand the boundaries and to find yet unknown areas. Anyhow what was needed was an almost artistic talent to carry through daring positions.

When the State Commission for Arts was founded in 1951, a guidance and control according to plan began in the domain of the theatre. Its duty was to further the principle of the ensemble and to intervene into the repertories by means of directives. "A commission constituted with respect to repertories oriented the theatres towards plays and repertory conceptions which helped to form the democratic and socialist state consciousness of the public" (Theater in der Zeitenwende, vol 1, 1972, p. 205). After the events of 17 June 1953 this commission was dissolved. From 1954 on, the theatre-managers were to be 'fully responsible for the repertory and the whole artistic work', depending on the guidelines of the newly founded Ministry of Culture. In 1966 the Verband der Theaterschaffenden der DDR (Association of the Creative Artists in Theatre of the GDR) was founded. In 1967 culturo-economic councils were constituted at the theatres. These were measures which under the pretence of representation of interests were meant to establish theatro-political guidelines on the grass root level, for instance with respect to putting forward perspective and annual plans, or to an evaluation of productions.

Next to the Ministry of Culture, the Department for Culture of the Central Committee was an

8 influential organ. In 1977 Hoffman, the Minister of Culture, gave new orders concerning the approval of repertories. First, performances from now on could only be staged in the GDR if text and director's conception were approved in writing by the Minister. Apart from these two central offices at the highest level, there were state and party headships on the level of counties and districts to which the theatres were accountable as well. Here the reputation of artists, personal acquaintances or even participation in these committees were of some help when trying to carry through repertory politics, as shown by the case study written by Ralph Hammerthaler about the history of the production of Christoph Hein's play Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (The Knights of the Round Table) at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden in 1988/89. Equally possible, however, was a high-handed, more rigid interpretation of official guidelines by local authorities.

Finally, in this context of measures pertaining to censorship and procedures of approval, a point of importance should not be neglected: publishing. In 1946 Henschel Publishers was founded. In the same year the journal Theater der Zeit appeared for the first time, "which thanks to the merits of its first chief editor, Fritz Erpenbeck, developed into an important instrument for the ideologico-artistic orientation of theatre practice" (Theater in der Zeitenwende, vol 1, 1972, p. 32). The publication of rather unusual and difficult plays was supported in the first years by publication journals such as Sinn und Form, Junge Kunst, ndl (neue deutsche literatur), and Forum.

The publication of plays in the GDR was regulated by a monopoly. "The department of drama of Henschel Publishers was responsible. As usual the Ministry of Culture inaugurated a director of the publishing house who was accountable in case of conflict. Director and chief dramaturg (...) had artistic and ideological responsibility for the program. (...) By way of a so-called procedure of acceptance the publisher acquired the copyrights to a play. The approval to distribute the play was to be obtained from the Ministry of Culture and could under certain circumstances be given on condition. (...) Since there was no alternative to Henschel all the authors could do was to address theatres directly with their scripts. In this case, however, the theatre contacted Henschel Publishers in order to learn about the reasons for rejection and to spare themselves political trouble" (Hammerthaler, Theater in der DDR, 1994, p. 195). Nevertheless, a more concrete and differentiated analysis of the programme of the publishers would be necessary, were one to trace the determination of this monopoly with respect to the contents of its policy. The Autoren- kollegium (staff of authors), founded in 1988 as a competitive enterprise, accused Henschel drama of supporting only established authors and of taking no risks with new authors. I will come back to the problematic of contemporary drama later on in a different context.

9 (Ill)

"And they are standing there not for the theatre as institution but for themselves." (Jan Fai

The question regarding alternative, free forms of theatre in the GDR is simple and difficult at the same time. In the GDR there existed almost no free theatre groups and no effective movement of student theatre. The discussion about free theatre groups took place no earlier than the eighties. Yet, Western trends of free theatre movements, especially after the events of 1968, influenced indirectly the GDR theatre. Such influences could be observed in the work of the Volksbühne, Berlin, managed by Benno Besson (especially in his concept of public relations), but also in the method and aesthetic 'trade mark' of directors like Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne, and Einar Schleef and B. K. Tragelehn at the Berliner Ensemble. Alternative forms of theatre, thus, took place inside the boundaries of institutionalised (town) theatre. Even attempts to carry through structural changes relating to the production process of theatre, to the question of its coming into being and to the question of communication with the public occured first of all, and for a long time exclusively, inside the institution of theatre. The problem here was to use and expand the given scope of action and thus to achieve a kind of opening inside the framework of a 'closed system' which made experiences of certain dimensions of liberty possible. If one were to do justice to this problem of alternative free forms of theatre in the GDR we would have to discuss here changes in the notion of liberty in society and theatre. One presupposition for the consideration of theatre and of the conditions of its existence would be the relationship of spatial and temporal, including historical, dimensions of liberty on one hand, and its sensual openness with respect to individual experiences of 'world' on the other. Even if such a complex description of the relationship of alternative free forms of theatre to the society of the GDR at the crosspoint of conflicting demands on liberty cannot be given here, I will try to give some examples of boundary crossings that at least at certain points were rather extreme.

During the previously mentioned First Conference of Bitterfeld, circles of workers writing, painting and playing musical instruments were brought into being and a 'new stage of art creation among lay men' began. This movement, however, was tied to the economic and culturo-political guidance mechanisms of the factories and did not set free any 'bottom up' culturo-revolutionary art. The lay theatre in the GDR had the function of introducing broader sectors of the population to the processes of art as they were understood by the state culture policy. It is possible to speak here of an enlightening pedagogical work of education that methodologically, at least in some cases, had certain creative and stimulating effects. Nevertheless this movement of lay theatre was channeled right from the beginning. In no way was there possible to develop a response to Hacks' demand for the establishment of 'drama brigades', raised well before the Way of Bitterfeld, since this demand aroused too many suspicions of anarchy.

With respect to the history of student theatre in the GDR there was at least one case which had a lasting effect on the GDR theatre. The Studentenbühne at the High School of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst performed on 30 September 1961 the premiere of Heiner Müller's play Die Umsiedlerin oder das Leben auf dem Lande (The Woman Resettler and Life in the Country, later known as Die Bauern or The Peasants) during a student theatre week. Marianne Streisand gives an account of this event: "The 30th September 1961 was a black day in the cultural history of the GDR, comparable, even if less spectacular and still less public, to the culturo-political breaks and decisive points of the years 1951 to 1953, 1956, 1965, 1976 or 1979. The debate about Die Umsiedlerin set a clear sign for the sixties. The hopes for a grand dialogue cherished by some intellectuals after the building of the wall on 13 August (i.e. six weeks before the premiere) turned out to be another one of the many illusions of the left with respect to this state. "And we

10 thought," Heiner Müller said recently, "now that there is the wall we can speak openly about everything in the GDR." But already the affair of Die Umsiedlerin let a completely opposite political and culturo-political strategy become reality just as Ulbricht, once again quoted after Müller, apparently said at the same time: "Now we have the wall and against it we will crush everybody who is against us." (Sinn und Form, 3/1991) What had happened? Müller had been given a grant out of the Culture Fund that guaranteed him two years of relatively independent and uncontrolled work on the material of the Umsiedlerin. In the later 'investigations' it was determined that the responsible control authorities like the Culture Fund, the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), the Association of Writers and the Berlin theatres had failed. Undisturbed for two years, Müller could write the scenes and Tragelehn (a former master student of Brecht) rehearsed them with students of the High School of Economics. The 'Studentenbühne' was to stage a test performance, then Tragelehn was to produce it at the Deutsche Theater, Berlin. As Müller recalls in his autobiography (Krieg ohne Schlacht, 1992, p. 162) writing and rehearsals ran ever parallel but neither while writing it nor while rehearsing it were they aware "of having laid a bomb". The subject of the play is a small village in Mecklenburg County from the time of land reform in 1945 until collectivisation in 1960. The political importance of the subject of Die Umsiedlerin emerged only while working on it and was related to the methods of the collectivisation in GDR agriculture. "I wrote with a feeling of absolute liberty with respect to the handling of the material, even the political was just part of the material" (Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 1992, pp. 161/162). Marianne Streisand calls Die Umsiedlerin a historic drama that tries to understand structural problems of the society without dramaturgically exemplifying them exclusively with respect to personal relationships. On top of that she indicates the laconic, even laughing distance Müller observes while passing in review the history of the GDR which was considered venerable. Die Umsiedlerin is a comedy as indicated by the subtitle. For Tragelehn and Müller the work with students of economics who came from the country or out of proletarian milieus and partly had completed their army service was very exciting. In the programme then Müller wrote: "They behave towards the text like toward a tool. They are not capable, and that is a difference with professional artists, to speak a text they do not understand or which makes no sense to them. They notice the style the very moment when it disturbs the realism, and only then. That is a working hypothesis. What is not understood, perhaps was not understood" (Streisand, Sinn und Form, 3/1 991).

The play and the production were branded as counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, and anti-humanistic. The word 'knocking' (Nestbeschmutzung) hit a sensitive point. The banning of the play and the production forced the students to state their opinions and to distance themselves from it. Heiner Müller was excluded from the Association of Writers, and none of his plays was performed until Ruth Berghaus produced Zement (Cement) at the Berliner Ensemble in 1973. In the interim, the previously mentioned debate about his play Der Bau at the Eleventh Plenum in 1965 took place. B. K. Tragelehn was dismissed without notice from the Senftenberg Theater, and was excluded from the party and sent to work in a factory ('into production') to 'prove himself which in reality was equal to a ban from the profession. The first official performance of Die Umsiedlerin, now titled Die Bauern (The Peasants) was staged in 1975 at the Volksbühne, Berlin, directed by Fritz Marquardt.

Some methodological approaches of the work on Die Umsiedlerin, for instance, the linking of the process of writing to the process of rehearsal, were taken up in the production of Horizonte (Horizons) at the Volksbühne, Berlin, in 1969. This time, the production was done with professional actors. The play had been taken over from workers of a large concern, who had produced it in 1968 following a draft written by Gerhard Winterlich which had been performed at Worker Festivals. Starting from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and cybernetic's notion of model, Winterlich made a group of factory managers and their wives who were on vacation together deal with problems that are normally suppressed by everyday life. Each person

11 played another person, discovering identity by losing identity through disguise (see Theater der Zeit, 3/91). Benno Besson, who joined the rehearsals for the premiere in the factory, was enthusiastic about the material as well as the engagement of the workers. He wanted to put the play in a new production on the stage of the Volksbühne, for which he had taken over artistic responsibility in 1969. Besson turned to Müller, with whom he had worked at the Deutsche Theater, and asked him to cooperate in producing a version of the Horizonte material for the Volksbühne. The result was a collective process which was considered by Müller both to be "Besson's most important work in the GDR" and a "joint flop" (Theater der Zeit, 3/1991). "Besson made the actors improvise some scenes. I took notes and made the scene in half an hour. (...) The whole endeavour was considered a collective work, all participated in writing and composing it. (...) About four, five, six, seven versions came into being. The performance was a flop, mainly due to the stage set. It was written as magic theatre (...) but Besson for the first time in his life wanted to do 'poor' political theatre, and that of course turned bad" (Krieg ohne Schlacht, 1992, p. 240).

Another attempt to exceed the normative boundaries of (town) theatre production which the Volksbühne carried out in 1975/76, was a seminar about pedagogical plays with regard to Brecht's Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule) that took place together with the Berlin Partnerschaftsbetriebe (Partnership Factories), the electric light bulb factory NARVA and the VEB (i.e.. People Owned Factory) SECURA.

I also would like to mention the project of a small group of theatre critics and authors (Barbara Honigmann, Eva-Maria Viebeg, Katharina Thalbach, Lothar Trolle and Thomas Brasch) who, distressed not to have access to productions at theatres in 1970/71, began to work with children in Berlin schools. They rehearsed above all new texts written by Brasch that were considered unplayable or had been rejected by theatres, but also texts that emerged out of improvisations of the pupils on certain themes or newspaper items. The aim was not to theoretically conceptualise theatre with and for children but to try texts in a situation different from that agreed upon by actors: sentence, break, walk, break, break, walk, big sentence, turn. In some cases the work went so far that the children presented their own drafts of plays which were eminently political (see Thomas Brasch, Arbeitsbuch, 1987, pp. 77-8).

The eighties became the years of initiative projects at the theatres; cellar theatres and roof theatres sprang up like mushrooms. These were the years of the workshops on 'Young Art', of staged readings of GDR contemporary drama. In this context a last open attempt to found an authors' theatre was ventured, without success. Dating back to the FDJ Singebewegung (singing movement of the Free German Youth) of the seventies (in 1973 the World Festival took place in the GDR), there emerged forms of song theatres of which the most eminent group was Karls Enkel ('Charly's grandchildren'). GDR rock bands also turned to theatric forms for performing their songs, for example, the group Pankow with their cycle Paule Panke. These were the years of an art that came into being without official support, in cultural centers, in churches and in private apartments, and this certainly has something to do with the social climate following the expulsion of Wolf Biermann in 1976. Perhaps it is possible to name many of the forms just enumerated in relation to the seventies. The difference, however, consists on the one side in a considerably more developed resolution of the boundaries of given forms and in a hollowing out (in the sense of 'making hollow') of these forms, and in a completely changed emotional quality of the eighties, on the other. Jan Faktor in his article on Diese 80er (These '80s) describes this different emotional quality as follows; "It was qualitatively completely different compared to the pushing away and expelling of independent and critical writers in the sixties and seventies. It did not begin with an insult anymore, but almost with a 'So what?'" (constructiv, 4/90). The GDR government countered this atmosphere by pushing much more lavishly than in the sixties and seventies the official culture of mass festivals, Whitsun meetings, gymnastics and sports parties

12 and rock concerts which obviously came to an end when the celebrations of Berlin's 750th anniversary did not finish. The aim was to let emerge a representative picture of the public that was to cover the real speechlessness, the inability to carry on dialogue, and stagnation of the public sphere.

Around 1980 the theatre zinnober ('zinnober' meaning the colour 'vermillion' or 'cinnabar', but also 'fuss', 'nonsense') was founded, and in a strict sense was the only really free theatre group in the GDR. Dieter Kraft from theatre zinnober explains the context of origin and the time chosen for their different approach to theatre work: "Neubrandenburg (the puppet theatre Neubrandenburg; C.S.) was once again a last attempt in the institutional sphere: one of these attempts to create something of an island inside the given structures, inside the culture industry of a town. And it became so obvious that this was impossible. (...) Around 1980 some thinking came to its end (...) which had started around 1968, that is together with processes of democratisation that had a lot to do with Prague 1968 and Biermann 1976. Until then there had been something like a hope that a political and aggressive impulse might be capable of breaking open these structures, this doctrine. (...) This urge that it should nevertheless be possible to force open this rigidified mental Moloch was evidently revealed as an illusion by the expulsion of Biermann. From then on nobody was able to ruin oneself, in the sense of aggressively demanding political democracy (...)" (stattbuch ost, adieu ddr, 1991, p. 76).

Zinnober consisted of nine actors, a scenographer and a technician who came from various fields: puppetry, acting or theatre criticism. Most of them were acquainted with each other from their engagement at the puppet theatre Neubrandenburg. In their rehearsal room, the "store with the big windows" at Kollwitz Place, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, they indeed started with puppet theatre: with the Punch and Judy show Die Jager des verlorenen Verstandes (The Hunters of the Lost Mind). This was a treatment of the issue of the first East German punks, to a certain extent touching on the mentality of drop-outs. They also did a children's piece 1234567, which took up certain approaches of a new pedagogics (after 1968) that were directed for instance against the indoctrination of children. Conceptually zinnober's work focused increasingly on the symbol of the puppet as the transitional stage of the cocoon. The hermaphroditic stage of the puppet between caterpillar and butterfly became the metaphoric image of a process of inner growth which zinnober tried to launch in the form of a collective process of work. "We had the feeling that we should treat each other differently. That we should not view each other just as colleagues or business partners or what do I know, but that we should try to arrive at that point where everybody sees the child in the other and also in oneself. I mean, there is a spontaneous emergence of what somebody dreamt or is scared by. And it is already quite difficult for a grown up to voice that he is scared. You need trust to do that. And to build this trust was our work" (Steffen Reck, Arbeitsmaterial II. Werkstatt junger Theaterschaffender, 1987, p. 55). It was an individual search for a collective space for a journey towards 'inside' ("a journey in the social landscape of a group")--as a response to what occurred 'outside'. Life in the GDR had turned slow-moving. There were no social movements or societal dialogues anymore. Everybody knew that the debate on arms actually meant a consolidation of the systems. The feeling not to be able to 'get out' anymore was widespread--and that meant more than just not being able to 'travel'.

Zinnober in these years had done a piece which prematurely alluded to the situation after 1989. "The approach we developed then, that is the laboratory experiment, like in a tiny water glass somehow resembled to what happened in '89 at large and is still happenning (...). What happens now is somehow something like a giant social therapy, a turn involving 16 million people who all of a sudden are confronted with the foundations of their previous existence. (...) The end is open" (stattbuch ost, adieu ddr, 1991, p. 78).

By attempting to produce theatre with a social and structural approach, which was something

13 completely new for GDR theatre, including the search for a different, very 'close' communicative and trusting relationship with the public, zinnober developed an unusually proper theatric language. In a discussion at the Academy of Arts somebody tried to describe this by speaking of "basic research in contemporary acting - which is the contemporary gesture".

The high point, the 'productive knot' in the work of zinnober, was the piece traumhaft (dreamlike) performed in 1985. "The figures in this piece are travelers running on the spot. They are packed with properties of a strange, grotesque excursion into the space of their memory, projected to the empty surface of a small pedestal. (...) They are figures that have to wait and cannot wait anymore, masked and puppeted beings which begin to change under their clothes, slowly taking them off, figures in the border situation of a quietness. They act in a concrete and present timelessness. Their acting is a remembering, a dreaming, a desire, a fear, it is a longing, a wanting to wake up, to grow up, it is a wanting to voice oneself into the strangeness of other figures, thus crossing the boundary between stage and public. (...) These are attempts to speak, like after a long silence" (programme, traumhaft, 1985). The piece was composed of fragments of dreams, songs, poems, splinters of monologues, attempts at dialogue, noises, music - all embedded into the biographic worlds of the figures.

Zinnober had to face, right from the beginning, the Staatssicherheit (State Security), the police and state institutions. At one point, the group had great difficulty simply working and existing, since its members tried to make their living exclusively within the framework of this group. They did not receive any licence to perform as a free theatre group. That led to bans on playing, to temporary confiscation of the rehearsal room, and so on. One possibility of getting around these problems was to acquire a permit from the GDR headship of concerts and guest performances to play as a solitary puppeteer. This permit, however, was not sufficient for group performances so they were still unable to work legitimately as a free theatre group. For a time, Alexander Stillmark, director of the Deutsche Theater Berlin, acknowledged mentorship over the group in order to guarantee some protection. The Association of Theatre had assumed a rather woolly position toward zinnober as generally regarding the admittance of free theatre groups. On the initiative of the Academy of Arts there was a performance of traumhaft in 1987 in the bat-studio theatre. Amongst those invited were members of the Academy, experts on theatre, directors, actors and so on. Following the performance a discussion took place with the zinnober group regarding the piece and their style of working and living. The intention of this event was to work towards a lifting of the ban that was in effect at that time, for the group to receive approval to play from the Ministry of Culture, and to pose generally the question of the legitimation of free theatre groups in the GDR. The results of the event were ambiguous: the ban was lifted, but the group was approved only as a puppet theatre. The next invitation to Western foreign countries was approved; one had the vague feeling that the officials hoped for them to 'stay absent'. This step indeed was taken by some members of the group a little later.

The question of alternative free theatre groups remained unresolved, even after the preparation group of the Second Workshop of young theatre artists in Potsdam in June 1987 had centered on this issue when discussing the future landscape of theatre in the GDR. In this context I would like to add some remarks concerning the workshops of young creative artists in theatre which were brought to life in the mid-eighties.

In 1982 the Culture Conference of the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth) attempted for the last time to proclaim grand culturo-political guidelines. This task was left to the FDJ presumably for tactical reasons. Hartmut König, secretary of the central committee of the FDJ, gave the main speech which was elaborated strictly following ideology and which in its vocabulary of the fifties and sixties was reminiscent of the earlier demonstrations of power in the policies of art and culture. Once again Braun und Muller were attacked for their "position ignorant

14 of the real life of the working class" (regarding Schmitten by Volker Braun) and their "hostility towards history and their pessimistic world view" (regarding Heiner Müller's production of Macbeth at the Volksbühne, Berlin). König's cynicism was reflected in the following sentence: "Youth in cultural respects as well does not grow up in a greenhouse" (Junge Welt, 22nd October, 1982). Vehement protests by artists and cultural institutions brought this renewed experiment to an end, only to return to the roots of an official cultural policy of grand design in the GDR. The more casual and selective cultural policy came to be regarded as the lesser evil.

The proposal to initiate a workshop of young creative artists in theatre presumably was a spin-off of this failed conference. Christoph Schroth in 1983, once again at a culture conference of the FDJ, proposed a joint endeavour of the central committee of the FDJ and the Association of Creative Artists in Theatre to call into life a "workshop of young creatives of theatre". The first workshop, initiated and prepared 'from the top' (FDJ, headship of the Association of Theatre, Universities of Arts) took place in 1985 in the city of Schwerin. This first workshop appeared on a superficial level to be coloured and lively, but this was due to the fact that it was meant to confer just such a picture of the GDR. For the second workshop young theatre people asked to be allowed to participate in the preparation. Thus in 1986 a youth committee, composed of directors, dramaturges, actors and theatre critics was founded at the Association of Creative Artists in Theatre, which prepared the Second Workshop in the city of Potsdam. They fought for the right to select productions and the themes of accompanying colloquia on their own. For example the preparation committee succeeded, despite the resistance of the FDJ central committee, in inviting two productions by Frank Castorf (Der Bau, The Building, from the city of Karl-Marx-Stadt and Clavigo from the city of Gera); the Nora production by Castorf had been disinvited to the Schwerin workshop in 1985. The Potsdam workshop aroused great interest - there were 1500 participants - due mostly to the issues and problems which were to be dealt with.

Three colloquia were staged concerning the following issues: (1) The necessity of a new reference to reality - sense of art and capability of reception; (2) The finding of your own handwriting in contradiction to established concepts of theatre; and (3) young theatre in old structures?

This workshop was on the one hand an attempt to actively shape their own situation; this meant a short lasting relief. On the other hand, a fundamental problem became apparent which was that most of the productions were average in terms of art, and did not show any new aesthetic impulses. "And this indeed was an important problem that we had to acknowledge this impotence" (Bert KoS, quoted by Barbara Büscher, Freie Theaterarbeit in der ehemaligen DDR, Hagen 1991). The exceptions to this rule were the productions by Castorf, and traumhaft produced by zinnober. An important aspect which was mentioned during preparations and then again in the discussions at the workshop, was the abrupt discontinuation of 'traditions of theatre' or 'handwritings' of the generation of Besson, Tragelehn, Karge, Langhoff, Lang, and so on as a consequence of past cultural policy. One dealt with a vacuum at whose borders mediocrity, even sometimes in the clothes of a misunderstood avant-garde settled down. The exodus from the GDR of the most important artists since Biermann in 1976 played an important role for the next generation, since with this never ending process an important source of possible artistic and aesthetic experience slowly dried up. In the journal Notate published at the Potsdam workshop one could read the phrase: "(...) everybody wants to get away from here, nobody knows whereto." Shortly after the end of the Third Workshop in 1 989 in the city of Gera, a significant part of the population of the GDR had decided to find out about the 'whereto' at the borders of Hungary. In between was 1988, when the Youth Commission, now called 'Open Forum of Young

15 Theatre', among other things discussed the draft of a 'perspective concept toward the development of a theatre art in GDR' (passed by the Ministry of Culture). The Youth Commission wrote a statement concerning the perspective concept which it presented to the Association of Creative Artists in Theatre on 28 November 1988. It included the following important points: "(2) It is agreeable that there is some thinking about the future of GDR theatre. The attempt to draft a plan for a coming theatre without having as a foundation for that a plan for a future society makes a helpless impression, and this despite our knowledge about the dialectic relationship between theatre and society. (3) The present draft appears to be opportunistic. It acts more stupid than those who read it. What is the use of a perspective concept if the decisions which are necessary right now to abolish censorship, to approve of free groups, to establish the self-responsibility of artists, to put forward a publishing system which serves the creativity and mobility of theatre art, are all avoided. The decision on these historically evolved questions is not absolutely in need of a perspective conception, it is rather the other way around, perspectives become possible only when these questions are decided upon" (unpublished material).

I would like to relate these demands to the ideas of 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' in the Soviet Union since Gorbatchev seized power in the mid-eighties. These ideas were obstinately ignored or rejected by the GDR government. All those that had cooperated in the preparation of the Potsdam workshop and the Youth Commission openly acknowledged the failure of their culturo-political initiatives In May 1988 (see Theater der Zeit 5/1988). The preparation of the Third Workshop of young creative artists in theatre, which was to take place in Gera, was taken over by a new group of young theatre people. The atmosphere in Gera was marked by cynicism and capitulation. Nothing was taken seriously anymore. But at the same time there was no mourning, no rage, no derision either: one could speak of a failed theatre performance which eventually ran out of breath after the 250th performance.

Due to lack of space it is not possible to describe here in further detail the attempts of those people of theatre who moved between the structures of amateur theatre, town theatre and cultural centers to search for new forms of production and new aesthetics.

It would be necessary, for example, to point to the Poetische Theater ("poetic theatre") at the Karl Marx-University of Leipzig where Jo Fabian made an appearance with his production of Brecht's Baal and from there he went on to continue his work at the Bauhaus in Dessau. It should at least be mentioned, however, that there were some free and professional groups in the domain of entertainment, for instance Lumpensack ("rag bag"), Gaukelstuhl ("trickery chair"), FINKEFALTZ and some puppet theatres and, in the domain of motion theatre, the mime theatre Prenzlauer Berg. Another form to enter new work relationships was 'project work', which meant that actors and directors who had contracts at town theatres met outside of these structures to realise certain productions. These initiatives were officially sanctioned, as in the case of the Theaterwürfel ("theatre cube"), a pet child of the FDJ directed by Frank Lienert and based in the Jo-Jo-Club, Berlin. As a space for 'free theatre productions' the Theater unter dem Dach ('theatre beneath the roof) was established in the cultural center of the Ernst-Thalmann-Park, Berlin. In 1987 for instance this theatre showed the premiere of Im Urwald (In the Jungle) based on contemporary texts by Lothar Trolle and produced by director Vera Herzberg together with actors from Berlin.

And there were the statt-theater-fassungslos ("instead-of- theatre-stunned", a pun on stadt/town and statt/instead), the group Lautlinie ("sound line"), the Berliner Akademische Künstlertheater B.A.K.T. (Berlin Academic Artist Theatre), Jo Fabian's group EXAMPLE. A comment by Jo Fabian applies to all of these in some respect: "At the moment it is difficult to define here what an alternative scene or an alternative theatre is. (...) For me this was always dependent on people and personalities who proved able to realize their projects somehow. They made free theatre

16 work without money simply because they could not get any. Or they found their staff at the grand houses. I think all this is alternative because it does not come from the state" (quoted in Freie Theaterarbeit, Hagen 1991, p. 67).

With all of the possibilities for 'dropping out' of the usual business, people continuously tried to find forms of cooperation which could be granted legal status, thus avoiding situations like that of zinnober. Viewed under this perspective zinnober remained the one and only free theatre group that, despite the consequences, had left the normative and institutional structures of theatre.

Altogether different experiments in theatric forms were carried out in the eighties, once again originating from the fine arts. The degree of speechlessness reflected in public dialogue as, at least in tendency, in the acting terms of theatre led to a new wave of performance actions which by their sensual use of material, by the structure or arbitrariness of this material in space and by the 'fraying' of space/time-limits distinctly marked new experiments of form. This development found a last focus in GDR when the Permanente Kunstkonferenz (permanent art conference) in the gallery WeilSer Elephant, Berlin, took place in 1989. Actions took place there that intentionally and effectively questioned conventional value systems. Helmar Schramm wrote with respect to the traditional frame of aesthetic notions and quality measures: "Their orienting function, their authority ensuring hierarchy and boundaries failed in a mirror labyrinth of carnival subversions. Thus the intensely provoked pros and cons becomes a discussion with open borders" (Theater der Zeit 10/1989).

1 would say that during the eighties not only the geographical borders of the country tended to weigh increasingly heavily on the mass consciousness, but the drawing of limits with respect to almost all spheres of life took the form of an isolation of the individual.

17 IV

"The public is not a kinetic form of culture but its presupposition. Public does not mean 'framed public', that would be a notion inherently nonsensical. And it does not mean either 'public with respect to selected issues'" (Christoph Hein, Öffentlich arbeiten, 1987)

In the context of the events during the fall of 1989, an outright euphoria started with respect to the role of GDR theatre in 'shaping the public'. The talk was of a special communicative function now to be assumed by theatre in societal life, for instance in pieces and productions like Volker Braun's (Jbergangsgesellschaft (Society in Transition) produced at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, under the direction of Thomas Langhoff, or Christoph Hein's Ritter der Tafelrunde (The Knights of the Round Table) produced at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden under the direction of Klaus-Dieter Kirst. It is well known that theatres in the last phase of the GDR took over the role of the media. The stage became a 'journalistic institution'. The reinforcement of conditions found its reciprocal confirmation in the increasingly restricted function overtaken by theatres to proclaim the truths of daily politics with which everyone was already familiar anyway. But exactly this recurrent confirmation of a feeling and knowledge to be no longer able to 'get out of the state of the GDR' produced an almost religious community whose churches, among others, were the theatres. The biggest massing of artists and intellectuals took place on 4 November 1989 on the Alexanderplatz, Berlin. I was shocked then by the naivety of the 'visions' of many artists. This kind of a politicisation of theatre in my opinion led to an artistic reduction of exactly that which was meant to be the 'different' quality of theatre and whose description the philosopher Wolfgang Heise at the Brecht-dialogue in 1968 tried to deliver in the formulation of "theatre as a laboratory of social fantasy". Such an attempt to rethink the relationship between theatre and audience and to initiate a productive process of communication with the audience takes me back to the seventies.

"We began with changing the auditorium (this was the first stage of our program of reconstruction) in order to relate stage and audience more favorably to each other. (...) All our attempts were directed at the development of the Volksbühne [a pun with the theatre in Berlin bearing that name and its literal understanding as 'people's stage'; the translator] toward a socialist people's theatre. Each time we made it our main task to develop the ensemble and to mobilise the audience" (Benno Besson in Theater der Zeit 3/1989).

As Besson mentions in the course of the interview, the Volksbühne under his direction always endeavoured to offer a broad spectrum of programme. This concerned the selection of issues and pieces as well as the development of new forms of encounters between audience and theatre. Apart from splendid monodramas, the 'en-suite-programme' and the classical period project (Shakespeare, Racine, Gozzi) the Volksbühne became notorious for its 'spectacles'. What were these 'spectacles'? Manfred Karge said of the legendary spectacle of 1974: "So,the 25th anniversary of the GDR was coming up, and we said to each other, damn it, no more of these alibi events. (...) Thus we began to look for new texts and also commissioned texts from writers. From what we were offered we selected an evening with 13 premieres. 13 evenings with 13 pieces, a people's festival. Berlin people wonderfully received this evening. The evening became a legend" (Theater der Zeit, 1/1991). Among others, plays of Heiner Müller, Volker Braun, Christoph Hein, Kurt Bartsch and Alexander Lang were performed. However, in some cases it was only possible to produce parts of the pieces. "This piece [i.e., Schlötel oder Was soils (Schlotel or So what) by Christoph Hein; C. S.] could then only partially be produced, because about a third of the piece had to be cut out for all impossible reasons. (...) I found myself in the situation of an engineer who is prevented from working with the whole series of experiments and has to restrict himself to partial results" (Christoph Hein in Theater der Zeit, 7/1978). Nevertheless, this exclusive orientation to contemporary socialist pieces was an enormous

18 achievement with respect to the general difficulty in presenting contemporary drama to a wider public. In a working paper of the Volksbühne relating to Spektakel 2-Zeitstücke, exactly this issue of how to enable the audience to "encounter seriously and humourously the problems, joys and questions of the GDR citizen" (quoted in Theater der Zeit, 7/1976) is addressed. The important point for the effect of the 'spectacles' was the form of presentation and the overall atmosphere in the house, including the facilities. The audience could choose from the larger programme. Between productions, somebody was in charge of gastronomy. Making contacts and talking were possible. Later other GDR theatres, for instance in the cities of Rudolfstadt, Schwerin and Gera, readily adopted the form of these spectacles. Were one, however, to analyse more exactly the different theatres, their programmes, their programmatic and artistico-aesthetic forms, one could be sure to find in some theatres a rather formal and inflatory adoption of the idea of the 'spectacle'. This means that the form of the 'spectacle' cannot be considered to be something new and exciting per se; it is only in the context of a broader concept of theatre that it can, in my opinion, arouse unusual reactions and effects. And even then the 'spectacles' could exercise considerable pressure on the 'normal' work process of a theatre.

Besson skeptically commented on the reduction of the work of the Volksbühne to the spectacles: "We thought that we were tied down to the theatre form of the spectacle and to the genre of comedy. Though 'spectacle 2' was a complex offer of contemporary drama to the ensemble and the audience, we could not restrict ourselves to this form of theatre alone. From this time on the Volksbühne was considered the place 'where the action is'. Neither the critics nor the audience realised that this meant a considerable 'show of strength' and that this was not reproducable at will. Our intense and continual development was hindered by this pressure of expectations. After the classical period project and the spectacles we almost could not offer any 'normal' qualitative single performance because it was not considered something special" (Benno Besson, Theater der Zeit, 3/1989).

I have already mentioned elsewhere the Horizonte project and the seminar on the pedagogical play Die Ausnahme und die Regel performed at the Secura factory. These two projects already showed what was a general understanding of public relations work at the Volksbühne. The participation of different segments of the audience (teachers, pupils, workers, physicians...) was often achieved right from the beginning, so that the 'final' talks in the foyer after the performances did not convey an impression of being mere appendages to the performance due to a bad conscience toward the audience, but instead almost had the character of continuing work talks. The later substitute function of foyer talks for the poor media of the GDR at this time did not yet play a role. Such an inclusion of the audience into the process of the formation of a production took place for instance in 1975 when Heiner Müller's Die Schlacht (The Battle), as his first great play at the Volksbühne, was directed by Karge and Langhoff. "When working on Die Schlacht for example we had many talks before the premiere in brigades, in schools and in university. (...) This was quite easy with this text which is not extensive and can be read out during half an hour and then brought up for discussion. We then minuted the discussions. The most interesting passages were then given between the scenes and this produced a completely new level, a new layer in the play. The Volksbühne had become a major societal centre, a centre of communication. This was watched with ever increasing distrust until eventually the big hunt started" (Manfred Karge, Theater der Zeit, 1/1991). After the expulsion of Biermann in 1976 Besson produced a programme which in all its essential elements was based on plays by Heiner Müller, and this programme was not accepted by the authorities (in this case by the cultural politicians of the SED-county headship and of the Berlin municipal authorities). This certainly was only the last reason for Besson to go. The full extent of his decision should be analysed in much more detail. Undoubtedly the climate of societal policies was responsible, but the theatre as well reached its limits as Besson himself thought: "For me it was clear that I could not go further on the level reached" (Theater der Zeit, 3/1989).

19 In describing the communicative function of theatre, the aesthetic form of expression of something which may be rather crudely called 'time feeling' possibly plays the lead part. There is no recipe for finding the way there. The productions of the GDR theatre which were received problematically by cultural politicians mostly were characteristic, be it formally or thematically, of a capture and theatrical transformation of the Zeitgeist. Evident examples are the production of Schiller's Die Rauber (The Robbers) by Karge and Langhoff at the Volksbühne in 1971 and of August Strindberg's Fraulein Julie (Miss Julie) by B. K. Tragelehn and Einar Schleef at the Berliner Ensemble in 1975. "The simple fact that an actor speaks a given text, the text of the author, that everybody gets told by the director where to stand and how to speak - these theatrical conventions were hypertrophied in the GDR at this time. Everything was conceived exactly and very exactly laid down. This convention was consciously left, even blasted, by all participants in the production of Julie. This blasting was the proper political process and showed itself in the different measures and forms of the event and eventually determined its big effect" (B. K. Tragelehn, Theater der Zeit 7/1990). The political importance of this theatrical process was the breaking up of a world considered to be harmonic, and the presentation of the idea of a correct society as mere fiction. "The dismantling of the social fiction in the production of Julie was a shock for everybody who had settled his life with respect to a social hierarchy at the top of which he imagined an integrative wisdom. And this was shown by the help of a subject that was rather archaic, namely the conflict between mistress and servant" (Friedrich Dieckmann, Theater der Zeit, 7/1990). The critics attacked the 'dehumanised domination by one's physical urges', the artistry and cheap showmanship. The production saw ten performances; then it was taken off by the theatre-manager Ruth Berghaus who herself was dismissed two years later 'on her own request'.

Of course in these cases the work of the critics, disguised as 'public opinion' ('what can we expect of our public?') and going so far as to manipulate audience opinions, is not to be underestimated. This is something Frank Castorf, for instance, repeatedly experienced when working at the theatres of GDR province. Gudrun Wilzopolski, chief dramaturge, remembers the ban on the production of Bertolt Brecht's Trommein in der Nacht (Drums in the Night), directed by Frank Castorf in 1984 at the theatre of the city of Anklam: "Eventually the theatre-manager declared [after a pre-premiere to which the general public was not admitted; C. S.] that one was not to take it easy, that the production was unusual and throughout impressive, especially the actors' performances, but this would not be a production for the territory [sic!] of Anklam, the audience would not understand it. Therefore he would have reached the view that it would not be meaningful to continue the work on the production. But other present people should voice there view as well. Silence" (quoted by Siegfried Wilzopolski, Theater des Augenblicks, 1992, p. 77). Freya Klier, at this time working at the theatre of the city of Schwedt, explained this in a poll undertaken by Theater der Zeit in 1983 as a split between the artistic intention (experimental will) of director and ensemble on the one hand, and on the other 'more conventional needs of the public' which marked the situation of theatre people in small towns . She emphasised that the relaxation and entertainment needs of the audience of small towns with respect to theatre should be taken very seriously. That is why she pleaded for a temporal splitting of the engagement of directors: half a year of qualitatively highly valued work for a broader audience in the province; then for the other half of the year trying out plays and concepts in a theatre laboratory of sorts, at a bigger theatre and for a special circle of interested people" (see Theater der Zeit, 6/1983). This is an already very artificial construction which tries, in my view, to solve the puzzle of the complicated process of art production by separation and comprehensibility.

An altogether different domain, which I have already discussed at length but which I would like to relate now to the issue of the general public, is the GDR contemporary drama. Christoph Hein once said: "Plays aren't lectures, to write theatre scenes means to trigger reasons to play" (Theater der Zeit, 7/1978). Hein names two important obstacles which again and again were

20 used as reasons to argue against contemporary drama in the GDR. The first is that it often jeopardised an author to leave a new play to mere lecture, that is to literary interpretation. The second is indicated by the formulation of 'triggering reasons to play' and relates to a deeper problem. I believe that if one were to think about the notion of play, starting with the rules of the 'societal game' in GDR, an extensive reference system would be revealed which would clarify why the special role of theatre and of new 'approaches to play' mark an evident difference, that is a danger for the existing society of the GDR.

In 1987 Irina Liebmann and Uwe Saeger, at an event organised by the drama work team of the Association of Writers, proposed the foundation of an authors' theatre. Essentially this proposal had two important components: first, to create a space for something new, something not tested before, independent of the repertory programme of a theatre, that essentially referred back to the classical period and raised this period to the standard of new texts; second to qualify the approval procedure. Christoph Hein commented upon the second point in a letter to Irina Liebmann written on 2 May 1987: "(4) To remove the procedures of approval ('censorship' would be a shorter and more exact word) for just one domain makes no sense. Censorship can only be attacked as a whole. For instance, by making it public, that is, forcing it to deliver reasons which then can be argued. The censorship which is usual today is disgusting since it is executed in a kafkaesque manner: the author almost never learns about the reasons of rejection and gets no opportunity to answer objections" (internal material). Added to the proposal to found a theatre of authors was an "incomplete list of unperformed plays with Henschel Publishers"; this list contained about 70 plays, which does not in itself say anything about their quality. The proposal generated a lively discussion, among authors above all, but among people of theatre as well. Even the Academy of Arts offered their forum as a space for debate, but only internally so, and experiencing as a consequence being severely called to account by the Ministry of Culture. The Academy of Arts, in addition to the proposal, adopted a paper titled "Measures to Initiate a Recovery of the Relationship between GDR Drama and GDR Theatre". The following request appears in the paper: "Recognition of the principle of competence for decisions relating to non-aesthetic matters of concern - appointment of a responsible censor with the duty to give reasons for his decisions; decree of a code of procedure with respect to censorship" (internal material). Even if one were to ridicule the wish of authors to have their own theater, the demand to 'reveal' the censor was much too strong a political issue and was immediately clamped down. This attempt was a failure. About one and a half year later the previously mentioned foundation of the 'college of authors' occurred.

The relationship of theatre, GDR society and the general public would have to be comprehended and problematised much more intensively especially with respect to internationality, and this above all after the building of the wall in 1961. But there is no space here to do this. Of course the public sphere was a limited one, be it with respect to the economy, to science or to other spheres of work and life. This resulted among other things in a very careful consideration and localisation of international tendencies, if they were 'brought in' at all, within a very precise societal reference system. The small size of the GDR played a role, its existence as a buffer state between East and West; all coordinates were well known extending to the last unit. The peculiarity consisted also in the fact that the GDR, on the one hand was considered to be a very dutiful satellite state of the Soviet Union, and on the other, that the GDR population fled for the most part each evening into the world of 'Western television'. This span between daily fulfillment of one's duty and a flight into the media (which was less and less controllable) created a kind of schizophrenia which was experienced as a calm balance, or even lethargy for years.

With respect to the domain of theatre I would like to briefly go into the policy of guest performances and into the work with international guests in theatre. The international guest performances policy was an example of the usual practice well known in the procedures of the

21 admission of members to the Academy of Arts as well: the proportion of art 'loyal to the party' was high, but here and there one could find a loophole to admit art which was unpopular or difficult to classify. Especially guest performances from other socialist countries often profited from such loopholes, and so did their dramatic authors who could be staged in German theatre. Guest performances coming from Western countries were rare anyway.

With respect to the work of international 'guests' in the GDR I have already commented upon one of the best-known examples, which is the work of Benno Besson at the Volksbühne, Berlin. He had already worked with Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble and then was active at the Volkstheater of the city of Rostock and at the Deutsche Theater, Berlin.

Other questions relate to the context of 'inside'/'outside'. What effect did the partial freedom to travel, enjoyed by some artists, have on their artistic biography. In other words, which international influences with respect to experiments with form or unusual choice of subjects, mediated by individual artists, were brought into the GDR landscape of art? Another point which should not be forgotten is that many artists left the country after the expulsion of Biermann and were now working in the West. Of course the interest especially in their further artistic work remained very lively. Even though many of the reports of GDR artists about their experiences of working in the West were ambivalent right from the beginning, one still had the feeling of being left behind in a country which became increasingly empty and emptied.

22 V

"The world has no exit save the one to the knacker. With knives attacking knives, that's the career." (Heiner Muller, Macbeth nach Shakespeare, 1971)

"Marxists do not love the tragic, and therefore the tragedy as well, for its demonstration of the failure of man as an eternal category of human existence. They are convinced that the tragic entered the world together with men and that it therefore could be forced also by men to leave the world. They consider the tragic as a historic, not as an existential category of the condition of man" (Ernst Schumacher in Theater der Zeit, 11 /1977).

Were I to point, perhaps in conclusion, to the 'center of fear' of the official politics of culture, I would consider it to be called upon by this description of the dismissal of tragedy, of the tragic; perhaps that is exactly why the history of socialism went off so near to the tragic. That is the paradox or the consistency in the quote above. If one starts with the history of socialism as one unique and lived tragedy, it could not be in the interest of this state to refer to the mechanism of this tragedy with the help of art, of theatre.

Heiner Muller says that the only piece ever forbidden in writing was his play Mauser (Moult), written in 1970. It was considered counter-revolutionary: "knowing that even the grass we got to tear out so that it stays green" (Mauser, 1978, p. 55). Mauser never was discussed in the GDR. This discussion took place 'in substitute' with regard to Müller's adaptation of Macbeth. Müller's Macbeth was directed by Bernd Bartoszewski in 1972 in the city of Brandenburg. Already with this production Müller was reproached for the 'pessimism toward history'. Even Wolfgang Harich, once critical of Ulbricht, who was imprisoned in Bautzen for a long time, was granted permission to write a long invective article about Müller and his adaptation of Macbeth in the journal Sinn und Form. "The mania of adapting what was handed down by tradition was spreading like an epidemic. When asked to explain himself, one of the protagonists of this mania legitimised it by saying that Brecht himself had already acted in the same manner." (Harich in Sinn und Form, 1/1973). It may be added that of course Brecht, with his adaptations of the classical inheritance, had already hit, like other directors and authors after him, repeatedly upon the limits of cultural policy when he used the material to pose certain questions again and again. "On the 22nd of December, 1949 I quickly made an adaptation of Lenz's Hofmeister for the Berliner Ensemble. (...) To my knowledge it is the earliest--and a very precise-drawing of the German plight. Its only counterpart may be [Schiller's] Die Rauber where a man in order to stay a man must become robber. Here a man in order to remain socially capable has to "unman" himself. At the same time the play goes back to that line in the German classical period which derived from Shakespeare (...)" (Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 1977, pp. 482-483). The book Theater in der Zeitenwende (part I, 1972, p. 306) indicates the contestability of the adaptation of the Hofmeister with the following excuse: "The dependence on the theory of plight which is only explainable with reference to the special situation of the early fifties, shows the weakness of the adaptation, but shows as well that Brecht's reception of the inheritance cannot be judged following timeless, eternal criteria."

23 To get back to Harich's article in Sinn und Form, this was a skillful political move of the editors, and especially of Wilhelm Girnus. Harich tried to convince his readers of a socialism which indeed "had rescued permanently valuable traits of inner-directed mentality with new contents into the present." These valuable traits consisted of having firm principles, loyalty to long-term tasks, resistance to deviance from a strategic course and the ability to put in the last place the interests of the moment. "Socialism achieved this dialectical performance to guarantee historical continuity with the help of the means of revolutionary change by setting the society as a whole one worthwhile aim; this aim was called communism and made the self-interests of the individuals, at work in politics, economy and culture, flow into a development of the whole which was steered by reason and which was brought nearer day by day. Nothing could be more alien to socialism than a pessimistic comprehension of history" (Sinn und Form, 1/1973).

In 1982 Heiner Muller and Ginka Tscholakowa directed Macbeth at the Volksbühne, Berlin. Apart from the culture conference of the FDJ mentioned elsewhere, at which Hartmut König in his main speech heavily attacked Macbeth as the "celebration of a black mass", there was an official visit to the production by the presidency of the Association of Theatre and a round-table talk with leading theatre critics and functionaries, published in Theater der Zeit (1/1983).

Schumacher had phrased Müller's line leading from Shakespeare to the twentieth century distinctly but full of doubts: "Müller's text is expressively titled Macbeth after Shakespeare. That is ambiguous. This can mean: Shakespeare as model, or the view of Macbeth after Shakespeare, that is of a time called the twentieth century. Here Muller makes use of the right to cast an eye through the fable onto the state of the world interpreted by him. (...) My question however is (...) whether I still find the principle of hope in Muller, in this text, in the context of all texts? I am afraid I have to say that I do not find it. That is what I would call the relapse of Muller behind Brecht and Shakespeare" (Theater der Zeit, 1/1983).

As far as the official cultural policy was concerned, all arguments about the classical inheritance went back in a broader sense to the category of approval; what is allowed; how is one to handle the socialist classical property; and any deviance of course was called a relapse, as in the medical sense, which included, to use the same metaphor, the danger of a non-recovery. Directors like Ruth Berghaus, Adolf Dresen, Matthias Langhoff, Manfred Karge, Jürgen Gosch, Peter Konwitschny, Frank Castorf and so on had to face again and again the same reproaches for a 'misappropriation' of the inheritance during their work at theatres. With respect to this problem Peter Konwitschny said in a round-table talk on 'Old plays read anew': "By the way I do not think it so bad that we always and again start with the beginning. It's probably an illusion to think that it is possible to settle this question once and for all. The only thing possible I think is to take the material apart and combine it anew" (Theater der Zeit, 1/1989). Frank Castorf in the same talk took the issue - what is one allowed to do with old pieces - further back into a historical context: "The question we talk about here is repeating itself basically with steady precision, be it in the fights of the young among social democrats in the nineties of the last century or be it the twenties in Soviet Fiussia when the question was: do we open up a cultural front beside the party front or aren't we allowed to do that? How can art, as it gets revolutionised, change feelings and perhaps also thoughts in its own domain? Or is this a part of another big chain?" (Theater der Zeit, 1/1989). Castorf characterises the changed form of the 'being allowed' (at the end of the eighties) as a moralisation of the problem. That means that there was no superficial working with bans any more but instead moral judgments referring to things like 'ill manners'. I would see this change rather as the shifting of accent, for restrictive measures were naturally accompanied right from the beginning by moral judgments, and were reasoned with reference to moral values. Eventually only morals remained after 'hard' cultural policy became more and more resolved, and the force of political-ideological confrontation on both sides was generally waning.

24 During the eighties the GDR government clung desperately to the maintenance of the 'actual state'. There was no longer a path between yesterday and tomorrow. In this sense the following reply given in a speech by Muller at the Shakespeare Days in the city of Weimar in 1 988 has a tragical quality: "The horror which emanates from Shakespeare's mirror reflections is the recurrence of the same. A horror which drove Nietzsche, the son of a parish priest left by God out of the plight of the philosophies into his dance of knives with the spectres of the future, out of the silence of the academies onto the red-hot wire cable of the history put up BY A LUNATIC FULL OF NOISE AND FUROR between TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW" (Heiner Müller, "Shakespeare eine Differenz", Weimar, 23rd April, 1989).

25 Bibliogaphy

Sinn und Form (SuF), Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1949-1991 Theater der Zeit (TdZ), Berlin: Henschel, 1946 - 1991 Theaterarbeit in der DDR (series), ed. by Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste/Zentrum für Theaterdokumentation und -information, Berlin 1966-1992

Akademie der Künste der DDR and Carena Schlewitt, eds.. Der Lohndrücker 1987/ 1988: Heiner Muller, Berlin 1990 Akademie der Künste der DDR, Joachim Lucchesi and Ursula Schneider, eds., Lehrstücke in der Praxis: Zwei Versuche mit Bertolt Brechts Die Ausnahme und die Regel, Die Horatier und die Kuratier (Arbeitsheft 31), Berlin 1979 Braun, Volker, Gesammelte Stücke, 2 vols., Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989 Brecht, Bertolt, Arbeitsjournal, Berlin: Aufbau, 1977 Bunge, Hans, Die Debatte um Hanns Eislers "Johann Faustus": Eine Dokumentation, Berlin: Basisdruck 1991 Büscher, Barbara, Carena Schlewitt et al.,Freies Theater: Deutsch-deutsche Materialien, Hagen 1991 Büscher, Barbara, Freie Theaterarbeit in der ehemaligen DDR: Entstehungskontext und Beispiele, unpubl. Ms., Hagen 1991 Faktor, Jan, Diese 80er, in: constructiv, Berlin, 4/1990 Fiebach, Joachim, Insein der Unordnung: Fünf Versuche zu Heiner Müllers Theatertexten, Berlin: Henschel, 1990 Groys, Boris, Gesamtkunswerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, München: Hanser, 1988 Hacks, Peter, Ausgewahlte Dramen, 3 vols., Berlin: Aufbau, 1971-1981 Hammerthaler, Ralph, Die Position des Theaters in der DDR, in: Christa Hasche, Traute Schölling, Joachim Fiebach, Theater in der DDR: Chronik und Positionen, Berlin: Henschel, 1994 Harich, Wolfgang, Der entlaufene Dingo, das vergessene Floss: Aus AnIaB der Macbeth-Bearbeitung von Heiner Müller, in: Sinn und Form 1 (1973) HaBel, Margarete; Weber,Richard, eds., Arbeitsbuch Thomas Brasch, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1 987 Hein, Christoph, Öffentlich arbeiten, Berlin: Aufbau, 1987 Heise, Wolfgang, ed., BRECHT 88: Anregungen zum Dialog über die Vernunft am Jahrtausendende, Berlin: Henschel, 1989 Hilbig, Wolfgang, zwischen den paradiesen, Leipzig: Reclam, 1992 Jager, Manfred, Kultur und Politik in der DDR: Ein historischer AbrilS, Köln 1982 Kraft, Dieter, Theater-Erfahrung. Ein Gesprach mit Carena Schlewitt, in: stattbuch ost: adieu ddr ODER DIE LIEBE ZUR AUTONOMIE, Berlin: Stattbuch, 1991 Kraft, Dieter, traumhaft: theater zinnober, improvisationen spiele protokolle, Berlin: Aufbau, 1 991 Lennartz, Knut, Vom Aufbruch zur Wende: Theater in der DDR, Velber 1992 Mittenzwei, Werner et al.. Theater in der Zeitenwende, 2 vols., Berlin: Henschel 1972 Müller, Heiner, Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992 Müller, Heiner, Macbeth nach Shakespeare, in: Heiner Müller, Stücke, Berlin: Henschel 1975 Müller, Heiner, Mauser, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1978 Müller, Heiner, Shakespeare eine Differenz, in: Frank Hörnigk, ed., Heiner Müller, Material, Leipzig: Reclam, 1989 Neef, Sigrid, Das Theater der Ruth Berghaus, Berlin. Henschel, 1989 Reck, Steffen, Aus einem Gesprach mit der Gruppe zinnober. Ein Gesprach mit Carena Bredemeyer, in: Arbeitsmaterial: II. Werkstatt junger Theaterschaffender der DDR, Potsdam 22th-28th June 1987, Berlin 1987 Schramm, Helmar, Lebende Bilder auf der Suche nach öffentlichem Raum: Performance-Akzente im Rahmen der Berliner Kunstausstellung, in; Theater der Zeit 10 (1989) Storch, Wolfgang, ed., EXPLOSION OF A MEMORY HEINER MÜLLER DDR; Ein Arbeitsbuch, Berlin 1988 Streisand, Marianne, Chronik einer Ausgrenzung, in: Sinn und Form 3 (1991) Wilzopolski, Siegfried, Theater des Augenblicks: Die Theaterarbeit Frank Castorfs. Eine Dokumentation, Berlin 1992

27 Hungary Herer^racht 168 Postbus/P.0. Box 19304 1000 GH Amsterdam The Netherlands 'Telefoon +31 (0)20 623 51 04 Collectie/Informatie +31 (0)20 625 64 24 'Fax +31 (0)20 620 00 51 ABN AMRO 42 83 33 303 Postbank 4008 KvK Amsterdam 212 208

FOR INTERNAL USE ONLYIli

The Dissident Muse: Critical Theatre In Eastern and Central Europe 1945-89

Theater Instituut Nederland & De Balie

PROJECT SCHEDULE & PROGRAM WEEKEND

OFF ACTIVITIES

Kunstkanaal - Program on Dissident Theatre (November 26)

Cavia Bioscoop (November 24 - December 1): Krzysztof Kieslowski - Personel Agnieszka Holland - Aktorzy prowincjonaini

Film Museum (November 20-29): Andrzej Wajda - Danton - Is this happening or not?

De Groene Amsterdammer - A supplement dedicated to the project to be mailed separately on 16 Nov and published on November 29 in De GA

Installation - Olga Chernysheva & Anton Olshvang (November 28 - December 3 in the lobby of de Balie)

All program components below take place in De Balie

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29

19pm Arrival of the participants Cocktail Dinner

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 30

lOam-lpm Symposium: Session 1 (closed session) The Grey Eminence: the ways of censorship and self-censorship How was theater invented, made and lived under the pressures of politics and ideological norms, what were the rules of the games and what were the exceptions and how limitations and scrutiny shaped an aesthetics, a set of political survival skills and a mentality within the profession? And once censorship disappears what happens with the internalised mechanism of self-censorship? Chair: Hans-Thies Lehmann Introduction: Jovan Cirilov, Nina Kiróly 2

1pm-2pm Lunch in the foyer

3pm-6pm Synnposium: Session 2 (closed session) Aesthetics as politics, politics as aesthetics Was political pressure also beneficial for the development of a particular aesthetics and what were its features? What do we do with the cases of politically bold and brave but artistically bad theater? And were some aesthetic choices more subversive despite their nominally non-political character than outspoken political statements and shrewd political allusions? Chair; George Banu Introduction: Kazimierz Braun, Valentina Valentini

Evening free for theatre The choice seems to be extremely limited. Among possibilities: - Het Muziektheater at 20.15: a new NDT 1 program with Kylian, Forsythe, Lightfoot choreographies - Bellevue 20.30: TGA, Joop Admiraal plays Phaedra (Racine), dir. Jan Ritsema - Frascati 2, 21.00: Dood Paard plays Blind Date

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1

10am-1 pm Symposium: Session 3 (closed session) Critical theater in the time of transition What is the productive heritage of the dissident theater that can inspire and support the theater makers of today in their effort to establish and develop critical and polemic theater in drastically altered political and socio-economic circumstances? What are the possibilities today anywhere in Europe to combine the artistic and civic agendas and make theater a vital laboratory of social consciousness? Chair; Dragan Klaic Introduction; Andrey Yakoubowsky, Rudi Laermans

4pm-4.30pm Video - An introductory program on Dissident Theatre This is a compilation tape made by Katarina Pejovic from different materials we were able to obtain and locate. The same compilation is being run on K-kanal Sunday 26 Nov. The idea is to have this run in de Balie as some sort of introduction every day.

4.30pm-6.30pm Video - The Croatian Faust by Slobodan Snajder - a 1987 production of Theater a.d. Ruhr, Mülheim, directed by Roberto Ciulli (in German) This is a play by a Croatian author, written in 1980 and produced in Split, Belgrade and Varazdin, and later in Theater a.d. Ruhr, in Vienna Burgtheater and elsewhere. It is based on a historic episode, a production of Goethe's Faust in Croat National Theater in Zagreb in 1942 under the Nazi occupation, presented by the collaborationist ustashi regime as a great political gesture of alliance with the German culture. After the opening, some members of the cast run away and joined Tito's partisan army. The play probes the interest of oppressive power to use the glamour of theater for own purposes and the capacity of theater to resist this manipulation.

8pm-11.30 pm Openino 4

5.30pm-7pm

Video - A compilation program (rerun)

8-9pm Panel - Nederland: We Were Not Dissidents - What Were We? A panel with the Dutch theatre people active in the critical and non-conformist theater of the 1960's and 1970's. Participants: Leonard Frank, Jan van Vlijmen, Shireen Strooker, CHOOSE 4-51; as a back up: Janny Donker, Arthur Sonnen, Paul Binnerts; Jan Ritsema, Peter Schat, Annemarie Prins en Ritsaert ten Gate zijn verhinderd. Moderator: Haris PaSovió, who will be briefed how to explore the experience of his Dutch colleagues.

9.15-10.45pm Travelogues East/East (30') Czechs to Poland - Hungarians to Yugoslavia - Rumanians to Hungary; Memories from exciting theatre journeys from one socialist country to another one in the pursuit of interesting theater and a margin of freedom that did not exist at home. Participants: Jovan Cirilov, Marian Popescu, Ondrej Hrab, Lézló Bérczes -I- Lifelong Dissident and an Inspired Survivor: A live memoirs Hungarian playwright, essayist, poet, dramaturge & translator Istvén Eörsi in conversation with Ad de Bont over his remembrances of Lukacs, the Budapest Petófi Club in 1955/56, the street spectacle of Budapest 1956 revolution, his staged trial afterwards and theatre in Kadar's prisons. Over his work in Kaposvar in staging Weiss' Marat/Sade (1981) as an effort to rework the trauma of the 1956 defeat and discard the taboo of this historic episode. (30') H- East/West Travelogue. A Polish Anabasis: The Exile Route from Wroclaw to Buffalo via Amsterdam: Director Kazimierz Braun in conversation with Rudy Engelander over his directing work in Poland, the Dzuma production during the military regime, its Holland Festival appearance (1983) and a clash with the authorities that made Braun lose his theater and his professorship at the theater academy and become an exile in the USA. (30')

11 pm Performance - Peter Halész: 3 Letters to Ritsaert ten Cate (30-40')

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3

4pm-6.30pm Video - A compilation program (rerun)

4pm Case study: Romania: Lucian Pintilie's Golgota: Gogol's The Inspector General by Marian Popescu (30')

4.30pm Case study: DDR - by Siegfried Wilzopolsky (30')

5pm Case study: Soviet Union - Vladimir Vysotsky, a Hero, Not a Dissident by Sergei Ostrovsky (30') 3

8pm Panel - Why Can't l/Ve Play Havel No More? What has changed in Eastern Europe politically and culturally and how it affects the theater repertory and the communication with the audiences. What can theater do if the powers that once closely supervised every gesture today simply do not care what happens on the stage.? Short statements by Ondrej Hrab, Istvén Eörsi, DuSan Jovanovió, Jovan Cirilov, Nina Kiróly, Stanistaw Krotoski, Marian Popescu and Andrey Yakoubowsky in the form of a "chorus". Moderator: Ide van Heiningen ?7?

8.30pm Ion Caramitru - intro address Dissidence before and now (30') The Romanian director and actor talks about his dissident experience during the Ceausescu regime, in the tumult of the 1989 revolution and about his efforts to create a space for independent theater work in the current Romanian circumstances against the encroachment of the regime.

9 pm XY (option: Ronald Harwood) - Intro speech - 30'

10.15pm Staged reading of the play Era una volta in teatro by DuSan Jovanovió This short play was written specially for this project by the Sloven author and director. While two workers demolish a wall in what once was the conference room of repertory theater, stench raises from the bricks and voices from a polemic session of the Theater Board come from the past. The factual background is the ban of Jovanovic's play Karamazovs in 1980 in the National Theater in Belgrade a few weeks before Tito's death. Now, Jovanovic points out the less glorious and impressive side of the theater business of the past: self-censorship and elaborate political rationalisations deployed to avoid confrontation with the authorities. The playlet is a memento of the opportunism and cowardice firmly entrenched in the theater.

10.45-11.30pm Discussion - Fear and Courage: Opportunism and Nonconformism Among Theatre People While dissidence stood central in the efforts of our researchers, the opportunism should not be forgotten. Following the public reading of Jovanovic's play a debate on fear and courage, opposition and opportunism in theater then and now, here and there is to ensue. Participants: Du§an Jovanovió, Kazimierz Braun, Marianne Van Kerkhoven, Adolf Dresen Moderator: Dragan Klaiö

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2

4pm-7pm

4pm Case study: Poland - The March of Dissidents - Video Compilation of Excerpts From the History of Polish Dissident Theatre with Comments by Juliusz Tyszka

4.30pm Case studv: Yugoslavia - Banned by Tito: "When the Pumpkins Were Blooming"by Aleksandra Jovióevió

5pm Case studv: Soviet Union - Yuri Lyubimov, a Portrait of a Dissident Turned Emigré by Arkadi Ostrovsky 5

8pm-12pm

8pm Panel - Secret Language of the Theatre: Allegory, Metaphor, Illusion, Ambiguity; Creating an Alliance with the Audience Theater makers and experts discuss ways the stage and auditorium become bonded in invisible ties of profound understanding, with a code language, indirect ways of saying things and a subtle system of references to thing less obvious but known and felt. Participants: Rezy Schumacher, Max van Engen, Joan Nederlof, Don Duyns, Charlotte Riem Vis, Ivar van Urk, Jan Zoet - CHOOSE ONLY THREE!!! plus Marian Popescu, Juliusz Tyszka, Ondrej Hrab Moderator: Michael Zeeman (45')

9pm-10.30pm Travelogues EastA/Vest Germany Transitions: Theater and opera director Adolf Dresen on his work in the DDR and decision to go over to the West and what cultural shocks this transition brought along. Rudy Engelander interviews Dresen + Remembrances of the DDR Theatre: Participants: Istvén Eörsi, Siegfried Wilzopolsky, Jovan Cirilov, Nina Kirély, Paul Binnerts, Loek Zonneveld, Arthur Sonnen, + Smuggling the Living Theatre into Prague - the Experience of an Underground Presenter Ondrej Hrab + Strange Dances: From Budapest to Amsterdam (Krisztina de Chatel)

Moderator of this whole block; Michael Zeeman 7

10.45pm Performance - Peter Halész: 3 Letters to Ritsaert ten Cate (30-40')

11.30pm Closing remarks - Ion Caramitru & XY (option: Ronald Harwood)

Current list of participants: George Banu, Lészió Bérczes, Anne Bieler, Ad de Bont, Kazimierz Braun, Ion Caramitru, Ritsaert ten Cate, Krisztina de Chatel, Jovan Óirilov, Adolf Dresen, Janny Donker, Rudy Engelander, Istvén Eörsi, Peter Haiész, Ondrej Hrab, Ide van Heiningen, Dirkje Houtman, DuSan Jovanovió, Aleksandra Jovióevió, Marianne Van Kerkhoven, Nina Kirély, Dragan Klaió, Stanistaw Krotoski, Rudi Laermans, John Leerdam, Ann Olaerts, Arkadi Ostrovsky, Sergei Ostrovsky, Marian Popescu, Arthur Sonnen, Pavel Theiner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Juliusz Tyszka, Valentina Valentini, Siegfried Wilzopolsky, Andrey Yakoubowsky and others. THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN HUNGARY 1945-1989

Research by Lószló Bérczes

Contents :

I Basic Problems 2 I 1. Success and Revolution 2 I 2. The Concept of Dissident Theatre 2 I 3. Politics and Aesthetics 3 I 4. Theatrical Traditions 4 I 5. Words, words, words 4

II An Empty Sheet (1945-1956) 6

III The Happiest Barrack 8 III 1. The Revolution 8 III 2. The Birth of Illusions 8

IV The Birth of Dissident Theatre 10 IV 1. The Great Generation 10 IV 2. The Three'T's 10 IV 3. Theatrical Centres on the Periphery 11

V Dissident Theatre in Hungary 13 The '70s V 1. The Szeged University Theatre 14 V 2. From Universitas to Studio K. 17 V 3. The Room-Theatre 19

VI In the Meantime 22

VII Professionals and 'Amateurs' from 1975 24 VIM. Let's join the Institution 24 VII 2. Cases 26 VII 3. Monteverdi Wrestling Circle 29

VIII Question Marks in the '90s 31

Bibliography 33

1 I BASIC PROBLEMS

I 1. SUCCESS AND REVOLUTION

It has been said that the greatest success our classical drama, József Katona's Ban Bénk, ever enjoyed was on 15 March 1848. After the first act the entire audience took to the streets in demonstration. Its success was so great that the performance was not even finished. It was interrupted; one could say, 'considering its great success the performance was cancelled'.

There is a somewhat similar story relating to another important date, 1956, and another play: Galilei by Lészló Németh. Galilei was written in 1953 but was shown only three years later after much debate, re-writing and simply waiting. Its success was enormous. But during the intermission the author, relaxing behind the scenes, received the following piece of news; 'the radio has just announced that Warsaw has been besieged'. 'Well, then this play will not be shown more than five times,' was Németh's reaction. He was wrong. They did not even manage to play it that many times. The first performance was on 20 October 1956. Three days later the revolution broke out and the theatre was closed.

These two examples raise many questions in connection with our topic. The first question perhaps is: What has all this got to do with so-called dissident theatre? Both performances were held in the National Theatre, which, to put it simply, is and always has been the servant and mouthpiece of the government, and has enforced official opinion usually to the detriment of quality. But even accepting this we must admit that no theatre is more 'dissident' than the one being encased, continuing and reaching its completion in a revolution. My examples may be extreme but to me they seem to be the most perfect realisations of the type of theatre we call dissident.

I 2. THE CONCEPT OF DISSIDENT THEATRE

I have written the words 'to me they seem to be' a few lines above with a bit of uncertainty, for before I start a direct and detailed explanation of the actual topic - Hungarian Dissident Theatre Between 1945 and 1989 - I am forced by these extreme examples to think about the essence of this concept for my readers, and for myself too. This is going to be the starting point and a guiding principle in my work.

I think dissident theatre is a political category as well as an aesthetic one. In Ban Bénk - the story takes place in the 13th century - the hero who represents Hungary, motivated by individual and national interests kills the foreign (German!) queen. In Galilei xhe mechanism of Inquisition, which is built upon informing and self-denunciation, forces the great scientist to withdraw his views, breaking him both physically and emotionally. These are obvious hints about that time, about a nation oppressed by the Austrians and about the individual worn down by the 'AVO' (the State Security Authorities). The 'success' was unambiguously due to the political message. So by whatever name we call 'dissident theatre' (opponent, marginal, radical, avant-garde etc.) it always means a theatre opposing actual power. This kind of theatre may or may not be institutional. So, independent of my intention, disposition and interest I must not forget the political aspects. What is more, they will stand in the centre - even if (fortunately) not every theatrical performance provokes a revolution. It also means that we cannot get a complete picture of the era we are going to deal with (mainly the '70s and the first half of the '80s), because some performances and companies that are important from an aesthetic point of view will play a smaller role than others that have a concrete

2 political load. We must always bear this fact in mind, else we may erroneously lead the reader to believe that in describing an important - undoubtedly the most important - era of Hungarian theatre history, we are presenting a complete review.

I 3. POLITICS AND AESTHETICS

Yet, there are two aspects that help us present a relatively total picture. One of them is aesthetic: though it is not the purpose of this essay to explain the causes in detail, we should accept the fact that every piece of art that represents real quality - especially in theatre as it is given to the present - is born from being in opposition. Of course this is not limited to politics, though we will see that in the '60s and '70s young Hungarian (and not-Hungarian) intellectuals were dealing actively with politics independently of their circle of interests. And though this activity had connections throughout the world, or at least between America and Europe, we must distinguish between Western and Eastern Europe concerning this political activity. In Eastern Europe, where democratic institutions and democracy were non-existent, this activity was realised first and foremost in the arts. As we shall see, this hidden political activity was often manifested in the secret sign language of sullen and silent opposition, the significant glances exchanged between the actors and the audience or sometimes by these two and those in power, that gives certain gestures, words and actions a meaning and importance which is incomprehensible to an outsider, a non-Eastern European spectator. Spectators from Western Europe therefore wondered, "Why is this interesting? Why is it so exciting and dangerous?" These outsiders must have been experiencing individual struggles and social miseries incomprehensible to us, but at least they considered freedom of speech to be natural.

The second aspect, not at all aesthetic, only cemented the outsider's lack of comprehension: between 1945 and 1989 in the communist countries practically every public manifestation was coloured politically, even those which by design had nothing to do with politics. Istvan Bólint, a determinant member of the Halósz-theatre remembers one of their early 1972 performances: "Our idea was that a red dragon starts out and slowly eats up, draws in the players and the objects. We were walking around in the city with this dragon to make propaganda for the performance. After the performance in the usual bustle somebody accidentally stepped on the dragon-rag that was left there. Later one of the counts of indictment was that we trampled on the red...what is it...flag. The other count was that the performance was too "lefty" because, of course, it is the Chinese dragon which devours our little world. It was absolutely ridiculous. These accusations were more surrealistic dreams than we could ever invent."

But I shouldn't have jumped so far ahead; we shall speak about the Halész-group and the '70s later. For now I simply want to give a general picture of the situation so as to help the outsider begin to understand the concept of dissident theatre that did not produce spectacular confrontations, or victims crushed under tanks, but nonetheless is important. 1 also wanted to illustrate that this exaggerated politicisation fortunately contributed to the formation of an almost complete picture of good-quality Hungarian theatre, because quality usually showed itself in opposition. So the really good performances before 1989 - either in the National Theatre or some of the university clubs - related to the essence of the actual regime and loosened its pillars indirectly.

On the other hand, because of this indirectness and the use of sign language, most of the plays and performances of these decades remained unknown or inconceivable in the West where, understandably but often regardless of real value, only the unambiguously political

3 plays were marketable. This was true even If they were didactic. But In Hungary's 'soft dictatorship' after 1956 nothing was unambiguous (and before 1956 the political situation was so unambiguous that dramas could not be written or taken out of the desk-drawer, let alone be performed live).

To tell the truth this project would have been much more marketable In Western Europe around 1989-1990, when Eastern Europe was popular or at least was paid attention to. So I cannot deny that In writing this essay 1 have an urge to 'pump' politics Into every line of It making the topic - Hungary, ourselves, myself - saleable and understandable. Being concerned about this, my intention is to find patterns, basic types that help describe the era before 1989, instead of writing a theatre history full of unnecessary details, mixing up the essential with the unimportant. And I don't want to look for value In politics only.

14. THEATRICAL TRADITIONS

Let's return to our initial examples - Ban Bénk and Galilei - for their story helps us to draw a number of Inferences. I think the most important of them is In Illustrating Hungarian theatrical traditions. Being aware of these traditions may help to clarify later why certain theatrical Innovations, appearing mainly within amateur companies, achieved an extraordinary Importance despite the fact that these methods had long been employed or even exploded In European theatre history. A lonesco performance In the '70s (banned after three performances!), a production concentrating on the actor's physical skills or sight - these were ordinary theatrical events In other countries. But here they were conslderd to be 'revolutionary', so attempts were made to hinder them. This is an important difference between Hungary and other Eastern European countries, in contrast to their political circumstances which were basically similar. In a strange way the history of the Hungarian theatre shows almost no connection with the theatre history of the surrounding countries. While It Is not within the scope of this essay to detail the differences between Polish, Czech, Russian, 'Yugoslavian' and Hungarian theatre, the full book will surely do so. And I cannot deny that In a comparison the latter would be the loser.

I 5. WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Let's have a look at our examples again. Ban Bénk was written by József Katona In 1819. Since its 1848 'success' the play has been performed In our theatres continuously. Because of the basic problem with the plot, it has given rise to a number of political conflicts. Nevertheless I have yet to hear of a really effective performance. We do believe in It, we repeatedly try to put it on stage (In 1991 1 myself took part in a similar attempt as a dramaturge), but in all probability we simply do not have the proper means to make Ban Bank and the other two 19th century Hungarian classics. The Tragedy of Man and Csongor and Tünde work on stage Independent of a revolutionary situation. (The Polish example is much different: MIczklewIcz or WysplanskI are built organically into Polish theatre history; they are the starting point of a process that Involved WItkiewIcz and Gombrowicz, GrotowskI and Kantor).

In the case of Galilei we could not repeat Its great success of October, 1956, though last year a Hungarian theatre tried to use the original - banned - version of the text. It has become obvious that the text of Lészlo Németh was valid only during a certain era of our history. The drama does not create a theatrical challenge, but merely utters the words In an articulate way. As It turned out. Its value was temporary and was hidden exclusively In the text. It Is the same with almost all the plays that were prohibited In the '50s or were written routinely

4 for the desk-drawer. During the premieres that took place decades later the same thing happened almost every time; instead of the long-expected Event there was a respectably boring, disappointing theatrical night. Why? I can imagine how discontended the reader is with what I have written so far: I have been discussing written texts, dramas and not theatrical events. But here is the key to understanding Hungarian theatre traditions: the text. With Hamlet we may say: "words, words, words". In the 20th century we have always had a text-centered theatre (and this is what the 'dissident theatre' of the '70s tried to modify). Ambiguously, we could call it naturalistic or realistic theatre. The main point is that the civil conversational drama born at the beginning of the century (of which Ferenc Molnër, the only really famous Hungarian playwright, was a great representative) was not disturbed until the 1970s. It means that the European avant-garde experiments of the 20s, the different 'ism'-s that rushed roughly onto the stages kicking up all the ready trivial forms, did not even get a foot in the door in Hungary. Therefore, in - let's say - 1925 or 1955, very different texts were presented on our stages, but with the same interpretation. This is why Hungarian actors don't know what to do with the text of Ban Bénk-, while with the text of Galilei (and this title could be replaced by most of our 20th century drama) there is nothing to be done. The aspect which regards the director as a necessary evil and a mere arranger of a given text is a consequence of being text-centered. If the director's role appears to increase (as we shall see in the cases of Ruszt, Acs, Ascher, Paél etc.) needless and pitiful pseudo-disputes arise about the directors' dictatorship, the actors' freedom and so on. Later on concrete examples will show that Hungarian dissident theatre had to play an oppositional role in every area. It was a mouthpiece of social dissatisfaction and at the same time it became antagonistic to the institutional Hungarian theatre. The attempts made to stop backwardness often resulted in strange contradictions: the performances that seemed to be radical on the Hungarian stage proved to be awkward, clumsy and ineffective in the rare cases when they were shown abroad. The legendary leader of the Szeged University Theatre, Istvén Paël says about their 1966 guest performance in Zagreb: "It was a simple failure. At that time La Mamma Theatre had already been performing there - they were much more advanced. The things that were considered to be avant-garde in Hungary, were a dreadful bore there. Especially in Hungarian".

SUMMARY

1. In Hungary and probably in all of the former-communist countries every public activity - from teaching school to chatting in a pub, from collecting stamps to making theatre - was politically coloured.

2. A really high quality theatrical work may always be regarded as dissident theatre from an aesthetic and/or a political point of view, but the reverse does not always hold true. Dissident theatre does not always represent quality.

3. With regard to its political circumstances, Hungary exhibits basic similarities with the surrounding Central and Eastern European countries, but in looking at Hungarian theatrical traditions we can find essential differences.

5 II AN EMPTY SHEET (1945-1956)

Our project is extensive, it comprises the entire era of the Eastern block's existence. (This block of course still exists; only its communist character has ceased. It is still distinguished from so-called Europe, though its members are feverishly stretching out their hands and pushing each other aside to gain admission). However in all honesty, and this fact is valid not only for Hungary, in this first decade we cannot really speak of dissident theatre. So this chapter could just as well be an empty, white sheet of paper.

Doubtless, by the beginning of the 1950s, the nationalisation of theatres created a structure with elements we shall soon sorely miss, i.e. government subsidies and resulting full employment. (Unemployment is spreading among actors and theatres are on the verge of being closed due to a shortage of funds.) But at the same time, central direction forced artists to live under total ideological oppression. For forms of art where individual work is possible (literature, fine arts, music) it meant at the most problems of sustainance. One can write for the desk-drawer, paint for the studio, but in the end one must live off something. But in the case of community works of art - film and theatre - even creation was hindered. Or rather there was a difference, unfavourable to the theatre; a film that was made accidentally, because of the carelessness of 'censorship' (I'll explain the quotation marks later) can be put into a box and shown later; but theatre cannot be taken away from the present time and it becomes paralysed in such conditions.

Theatres were working very actively (due to the well-built infrastructure, within 50-100 kms from any locality there was a theatre, and fortunately this is still the case in the middle of the '90s!) but their repertory was rather poor and one-sided: Soviet plays, contemporary Hungarian dramas and 'progressive' Western plays. Luckily 'Soviet' encompassed Chekhov, too, and any classical drama was accepted among the Western ones (between 1945 and 1960 Tartuffe was played about 1200 times in our theatres). In any case this so-called development resulted in a far from positive change, and as 1 have already noted, the style of acting didn't change much. A theatrical publication dealing with this era (I have only been able to find one; it is ten pages long and was published in 1 962) lists many great actors but no directors at all and though it describes the necessity for new creative methods it goes no further than the continuous repetition of the word 'realism'. It mentions Stanislavsky several times but 1 don't think he really intended his method for an adequate realisation of schematic Soviet plays. So the text-centered theatre which regards the director simply as an arranger remained untouched.

In the completely closed system of the dictatorship there was still a loophole: writing plays. But strangely enough, apart from the above-mentioned Lëszló Németh, very few people wrote plays in these years, and those who did were not very important. Perhaps this was because the chances of producing a sound play were minimal; another possible cause is that in Hungarian literary tradition lyrics and epics have always been considered more dignified genres. If our writers nonetheless descended to writing a play, they did not stoop to get up from their desks in order to make acquaintance with practical work in theatre. So we see the same thing: written word, text above all. Lészló Németh's opinion is typical of the situation: "The difference between the author's vision and the theatrical attraction was so big that their meeting was a serious trial for my nerves even when I was young and healthy; so I didn't see more than three rehearsals all my life". What's so appalling about it is not that the author didn't want to take part in the rehearsals, but the fact that (considering the general level of Hungarian acting) he was probably right.

6 SUMMARY

1. Nationalisation created a structure which guaranteed proper financial support to the theatres but weighed heavily on them ideologically and provided no freedom of thought. So between 1945 and 1956 we cannot speak of dissident theatre.

2. Changes took place exclusively in the repertory: the methods remained the same, buried under the blanket called realism that covered everything. Ill THE HAPPIEST BARRACK

III 1.THE REVOLUTION

It Is unnecessary to discuss the 1956 Hungarian revolution here. This is probably the only event of our 20th century history that is well-known all over Europe. The revolution broke out on 23 October 1956, and less than two weeks later, on 4 November, it failed. The Russian troops that came back here stayed. The essence of the communist system did not change. So it was an unsuccessful revolution. But the following three decades were different (in a positive sense) from the experience of the surrounding countries as a result of this 'unsuccessful' revolution. Cynically we could say that within constraints we obtained the best bargain, we became the 'happiest barrack'. But what we received in the bargain, the resulting 'soft dictatorship', proved to be quite expensive; we paid in blood.

In any case it is certain that the subsequent development of Hungary was determined by the autumn of 1956 - and this holds true for culture as well. This is why this short chapter is needed. We still cannot speak of dissident theatre at that time, but we can describe why theatrical workshops attacking the conservative theatre (and society) came into existence mainly after 1968, emerging from theatrical institutions and official theatres in the provinces.

The revolution was followed by strict, hard years. There were executions even in 1958 (I am not thinking only about the former prime minister, Imre Nagy, but also the teenagers who were put in jail, waiting until they reached the age of 1 8 to be executed). Thousands of people were put in prison, and even more left the country. These were the years of the founding of the Kédér-era which lasted almost until 1989; these were hard times which generated the conditions of the above mentioned 'bargain'. In such circumstances the fact that theatres were opened and the curtain rose every night in itself was a great achievement. Though significant actors and writers were sitting in prison or spending their 'silentium' idly because of their 1 956 activities, theatrical life resumed the old routine. The old routine! So the outcome was that everything returned to the way it used to be: conservative, text- centered, directorless acting.

Ill 2. THE BIRTH OF ILLUSIONS

By the beginning of the 1960s the situation had stabilised and positive changes began to emerge in the area of economics and culture. We were living in relative wealth, much better than our fellow-sufferers, for example in Poland or Romania. We can even speak about relative freedom - compared to the surrounding countries, of course. The evidence of this freedom is that many people were released, and more and more received passports valid for travel to the West. The authorities were winking at us and we were winking back shyly. We put on the jeans we obtained this way, listened to Luxembourg and Free Europe Radio, took part unwillingly in the procession of May 1st to eat sausages and drink beer afterwards...The bargain was concluded silently and as a matter of fact, unconsciously: it confirmed the Kédér- regime more or less and provided (more or less) the freedom of creation. In the theatre, the time had only come for the question of 'what to play'; 'how' was still not mentioned, because there were no points of reference, no patterns to follow. From the middle of the '60s, literature, films and fine arts that were forbidden thus far began almost to flow in. We came to know the avant-garde of the '20s and the New French Novel at the same time, and with the opening of certain sluices the winds of freedom rushed through Hungary.

8 1968 fell into this active, bustling atmosphere like a cold shower. It meant American hippi- movements, French and German student-rebellions but most of all it meant Prague, the shameful overrunning of Czechoslovakia. There was disappointment and disillusionment on the one hand - and a new impulse of illusions on the other. The latter can be explained by the experience of 1956: we were over the blood sacrifice, so we could move on a looser leash. The generation that was born during the Second World War reached its most active, most talented age at the end of the '60s, and the first moments of disappointment were followed by a rebirth and soaring of illusions. The people of this age-group, who are in their fifties now, are still carrying the burden of the 'Great Generation' - the term sometimes used nostalgically, sometimes ironically. The previously mentioned soaring was manifested naturally not in political activity, but in another course of intellectual existence: in art. Therefore political activity could formulate itself in art, too. The best example is the 'golden age' of Hungarian film: Jancsó, Szabó, Kósa, Makk, Huszérik and the others whose importance went beyond Hungary's frontiers. And now we have arrived at last at dissident theatre which is rooted in the '60s.

SUMMARY

1. 1956 was followed by hard, strict years. The Kódér-regime was built up and got stronger.

2. After the legitimation of the system a relative prosperity and freedom began. We became 'the happiest barrack'.

3. The opening in the '60s appeared mainly in the field of culture - it brought not only illusions, but real results as well.

9 IV THE BIRTH OF DISSIDENT THEATRE

IV 1. THE GREAT GENERATION

At the beginning of the 1960s the Budapest University Theatre - the Universitas - and the Szeged University Theatre were formed. The leader of the former was József Ruszt and the latter Istvén Paél. Among the members of Universitas were to be found Péter Halész and Istvén Bëlint (the leaders of the Room-theatre and Squat) and Tamës Fodor (the founder of the future Studio K.); in the Szeged group there were Jénos Acs (the director of the 1981 Marat/Sade in Kaposvér) and Arpéd Arkosi (one of the most significant directors today). In addition to these leading companies many other amateur groups were formed. It is unnecessary to list them all now, however we must mention Szkéné and Pinceszinhaz (their leader is Istvén Keleti, our most important actor-pedagogue) and the Manézs Theatre (its leader, Pél Lengyel and some of its members will be engaged in Kaposvér later).

It should be mentioned here that at the same time at the Academy of Dramatic Arts two would-be directors, Góbor Székely and Gébor Zsémbéki began their studies - later on they set up excellent companies in Szolnók and in Kaposvér, and in the '80s the Katona József Theatre was established under their leadership.

The above mentioned names (and many others) form the Great Generation of our theatre history. They are in their fifties now, most of them in important positions. The 20-year-olds today are making their dissident theatre in the tradition of the great generation, but at the same time turning against them. The '60s were the rebellious age of the above-mentioned directors. Many factors helped these artists stir the stagnant waters of Hungarian theatre.

I have already mentioned them in previous chapters. But one thing I only hinted at: the stagnant water moved only at the edges; in the centre nothing seemed to happen. This centre, the institutional theatres popularised by radio and television, entered the chrysalis state, and did not take any notice of the experiments that led the way to another kind of theatre. They gave themselves over to their narcissistic passion, and buried their heads in the sand. Then suddenly it turned out that what we thought to be the edge of the stagnant water was actually its centre.

IV 2. THE THREE 'T'S

Let us turn sign language into facts: dissident theatre was born on the edges, on the margin. It was part of the 'bargain' that was concluded by an unspoken and perhaps unconscious conspiracy. At the universities, youth clubs and provincial theatres much was allowed that would have been unimaginable in institutions exposed to view. 'So you want an oppositional theatre' - said the Authority, and he nodded - 'OK, but you must do it in a small, remote place or in the provinces - and even there on the periphery'. This was the period of the three 'T's; the authorities Supported-Tolerated-Banned (in Hungarian all three words start with the letter T: Témogatott-Türt-Tiltott). It always remained a mystery when and why a performance slipped from one category to another. This was the main point in the Authority's method: to keep the artist in a defenceless position. 'The things we had tolerated the day before yesterday were supported yesterday, are forbidden today but tomorrow may be awarded a medal.'

10 This is where we must speak about the censorship that was put between quotation marks in the introduction. There has never been formal censorship in Hungary after 1945. And it is a pity. Censorship is nothing to love, but if it exists in practice, it should also exist in name so that it may at least be calculable, with explanations provided in writing. But if there is only a telephone message or we must decide what to do on the basis of vague hints or obscure winks, then we always live in fear, and we must censor ourselves in order to feel safe. We must try to guess how far we can go. So usually we do not even risk approaching the permissible limits.

It was a well-known fact that the university groups were allowed to go beyound certain frontiers. And they did so, even when they weren't allowed to. Professional theatres were often envious of them because they could play dramas that were unimaginable in the repertory of a theatre in the '60s. The Szeged group, for example, showed lonesco's The King is Dying in 1967 and in the same year Universitas in Budapest played Genet's Maids. Watching from the West or looking back from 1995 it seems ridiculous, pitiful and somewhat unbelievable that these facts were so important. But there is something else: after three performances the lonesco-play was banned upon the instructions of György Aczél - because lonesco supposedly made some statements against the Hungarians (even if it had been true, it had nothing to do with this brilliant drama). Aczél was the spiritual leader of the Kédër-era, he 'could play chess' very well with Hungarian intellectuals. (By the way, a decade later they wanted to ban a Bulgakov-performance - The Purple Island - in the theatre in Szolnók because the main hero had a moustache just like Aczél's. A quick moustache-fixing, and the play stayed in the repertory.) The views expressed in 1973 by one of the potentates of the Hungarian theatre, Kéroly Kazimir theatre-manager and rector of the Academy of Dramatic Arts was typical: "It is inadmissible for amateurs to show plays that are not in the repertory of public theatres because of ideological problems". (On the other hand he was allowed to direct Beckett's Godot in 1964. I wish he had not been...)

The prohibition in 1967 could have smashed Istvén Paél's group in Szeged, but on the contrary, it carried on working as an amateur group on a professional level. Universitas continued its activity too, but a number of artists left the company at the end of the '60s to go their own ways. 1 am thinking primarily of Tamës Fodor, Péter Halész and Istvén Béiint. The former founded a company called Orfeo (later: Studio K.), the latter ones began their avant-garde experiments in Kassók Club (until they created a certain 'Chinese dragon'. After this they were forced into a flat and the Room-theatre came into being.)

IV 3. THEATRICAL CENTRES ON THE PERIPHERY

We are at the end of the '60s now, paying attention to the three most important dissident theatres: Paël's group in Szeged, Fodor's Studio K. and Halész's theatre. They were common in their opposition, but were basically different in their intentions and methods. However this is the topic of our next chapter.

We shall also observe what happened when the representatives of this generation - Székely, Zsambéki, Babarczy, Acs, Ascher and Csiszér - finished their studies at the Academy. We know that they found themselves on the periphery: Szolnók, Kaposvér, Miskolc... We also know that these were the places where Hungarian theatre really happened: at the edges, on the margin. Together, the periphery, provincial towns and amateur groups formed the points of junction, the centres that determine our theatre even today.

Kéroly Kazimir, quoted above, had a different opinion: "Only the evil-minded can say that the

11 explosion-like development in the amateur movement was not a result of the inspiring effect of our theatrical life." This narrow-mindedness and manipulation comes from self-defence. In fact, the renewal of our institutional theatre is due to the amateurs and young 'professionals' who were sent to the provinces.

SUMMARY

1. At the beginning of the '60s the 'Great Generation' began its career. It determined the cultural life of the next three decades.

2. One part of the 'bargain' concluded with the intellectuals was the three 'T'-s; productions were Supported - Tolerated - Banned (in Hungarian: Tómogatott-Türt-Tiltott).

3. The centres of our reviving theatrical life were born on the periphery: at the universities, youth clubs, and provincial theatres. Things that were banned in large, representative institutions were tolerated there.

12 V DISSIDENT THEATRE IN HUNGARY The'70s

I have already mentioned that after its initial disappointment, 1 968 was an inspiration for illusions. We have written about political reasons, let us speak about professional ones now: the above-mentioned amateur companies realised at the end of the '60s that they had to do something else, in a different way from before. New groups, built upon hard, often fanatical work came into existence mainly under foreign influence. The time of carefree, irresponsible and clumsy playing was over. The validity of statements like 'considering that they are amateurs they are not so bad' ceased. Foreign patterns could be seen only in festivals abroad, because at that time no worthwhile company came to Hungary for a guest-performance.

Two towns should be mentioned here: Belgrado and Wroclaw. Some had the chance to go to the BITEF, even more to Poland, and they could see Grotowski's theatre which was a salvation for the entire Hungarian amateur movement. József Ruszt, the wise master and former leader of the Universitas (many of our determinant directors and actors 'slipped out of his overcoat'*) remembers: "...the turning-point was the Wroclaw festival. We had a chance to see the Grotowski performance: The Steadfast Prince. The whole company turned against me: why are we playing school and folksy plays at home, when this is the up-to-date theatre?! Let's make a Grotowski-like workshop! By this time we had excellent personalities in the group like Tamés Fodor, Péter Halész..." Well, after this, in the spring of 1968, they did do a performance called The 8th Circle of Hell based on KZ-Oratory written by our great poet, Jónos Pilinszky. (Pilinszky, who didn't have much to do with theatre, later became acquainted with Robert Wilson's theatre and wrote a famous book about Sheryl Sutton, probably Wilson's most significant actress. I must note here that the effect of the change following The Steadfast Prince is still present in 1995(!) József Ruszt himself directed The Steadfast Prince and the Budapest Chamber Theatre has played it with success at a Spanish Festival this summer.) The 8th Circle of Hell was a great success in half of Europe: (Parma, Paris, Krakow, Wroclaw!) - and we can consider it a special sign of success that it was banned in Hungary.

As we have already said, after this the Halész-group moved to a flat and the Room-theatre was founded. The really great period of Universitas was over: after various conflicts Ruszt went to the provinces to work, to Debrecen and Kecskemét and he established an excellent theatre in Kecskemét with some great actors from Budapest.

Tamés Fodor left the Universitas, too, but he didn't join the Halész-group - he went his own way and became the leader of the Orfeo-Studio, which in the middle of the '70s changed its name to Studio K.. In Szeged Istvén Paél continued his work: in 1970 he directed a very successful avant-garde play. The Giant-Baby written by Tibor Déry in 1926. It was not an insignificant action. Let us remember that in Hungary the avant-garde of the '20s was simply left out of theatre history. (Much later, in the middle of the '80s, when Paël was the main director of the famous Szolnók Theatre, he was not allowed to direct an adaptation of a Déry- novel, though he asked to do it many times. As a result, he lost his patience and left the theatre. He more or less finished his struggle against authority and this is how his period of great directing ended.)

* "We have all slipped out of Gogol's overcoat" - the original saying, referring to Gogol's famous short story. The Overcoat means that he was a determinant character in Russian literature just like Ruszt in Hungarian theatre.

13 So by around 1970 there were three really important amateur-alternative groups in Hungary: the Room-theatre, the Orfeo (later: Studio K.) and the Szeged University Theatre, All three continuously antagonised the authorities. But they represent three different types of opposition, they are models of three kinds of artistic behaviour. A fourth way will be shown by Gëbor Székely and Gébor Zsëmbéki who at that time had just left the Academy and created a dissident theatre in the provinces, on the periphery of the institutional system.

V 1. THE SZEGED UNIVERSITY THEATRE

The Szeged group was on the margin of the margin. They were amateurs in a provincial town. (1 should have mentioned before: Hungary is called a 'hydrocephalic country', because everything is concentrated in the capital, so 'provincial' often has a negative connotation.) "I was left alone. There were no professional theatrical specialists working around us. Disadvantages everywhere" - says Paél.

What was so special about the Szeged group? Their theatre was actively political. But dealing with politics was only possible within the system. So Paul's group was the most naive, they were carried the highest by the spirit of '68, and they were swallowed up by illusions after '68. They were left-wing; they believed in the fashionable idea of the 'permanent revolution'. They thought politics and ethics were organically connected, so their plan to join the Portuguese revolution under the leadership of Paél was not at all accidental. Of course they couldn't do that, but their idols were Petófi and Che Guevara. So they remained inside the regime. But still, they always found themselves face to face with authority and of course the system itself. Every single one of their productions was a demonstration of their faith, and at the same time a demonstration of its failure. By this 1 mean that they did not want to be antagonistic and yet they continued to find themselves on the other side. The best example of this is the story of their famous performance, Petófi-rock. In the autumn of 1972 the radio announced a competition to prepare for the approaching Petófi-anniversary. Since the Szeged University Theatre was a successful company, it was expected to take part in the competition, representing the university.

Of course they didn't wish to follow the pattern of festival programmes discredited by the KISZ (Communist Youth Organization). So they collected the reports from police, censors and informers about the spring of 1848 and confronted them with Petófi's diary and some of his poems. One of the members of the group, an acknowledged jazz musician, wrote the music. So the texts were ready (among others the famous '12 points' from 1848, that were prohibited even one and a half centuries later because they contained demands such as 'Hungarian soldiers should not be taken abroad /Czechoslovakia, 1968!/ and foreign soldiers should not be brought to Hungary /I 956!/'. They also called for liberty of the press). There were also some beautiful songs, and Paël found an appropriate form for all of this: the group danced, sang and marched for half an hour, and the circular structure of the performance made the ending the beginning. Thus the play, perhaps following the idea of a permanent revolution, started again and again. The players held out their hands to the audience, so they could join the circle dance. They kept repeating Petófi-rock until everyone joined them. The distinction between the roles of player and spectator ceased to exist; everyone took part in it and the strong team became a community. Something was born that to some extent is the aim of every theatrical work, taking us back to the cradle of the theatre, to the moment when in a given, closed community everyone is the creator of the thing being born. A ready form worked out in advance became an absolutely present-time happening. In the case of Petófi- rock it also became a political gesture and the community of the entire performance turned against authority. It's no accident that Petófi-rock led to many conflicts, because an unstated

14 possibility was hidden within it: the participants might not have remained in the hall; the 1848 success of Ban Bénk could have been repeated. The 'performance' might have continued in the street.

Of course, this required a suitable historical context, and the spring of 1973 seemed to fit the bill. The first day of the 1848 revolution, 15 March, had always been a holiday that the authorities wanted to forget, and later, changing tactics, tried to monopolise. So actually March 15th had always been a feast of the opposition (23rd October, the first day of the 1956 revolution was of course the same, but it was easier to forbid it openly). In 1973, university youth went beyond the tolerated degree of celebration, that is they protested, and the government was forced to call the police into action. Some students were removed from the universities and some were sent to punishment camps.

The group played Petófi-rock in the midst of this turbulence at Szeged University. "We were holding each other's hands; I felt we should leave somewhere now. Isti was standing down there playing the drums and we could see on his face that we must go back to the lecture- room now. Our hearts were breaking but we went. More than a thousand people were left there." This is how a member of the group remembers. So it was Paél ('Isti') who thought that a continuation in the street would be senseless, it was he who restored order. In spite of this the Szeged University Theatre was branded as oppositional and some of the members - above all Paél - were placed under police supervision, had to submit to extensive interrogation, and though there is no clear evidence for it (this is the essence of soft dictatorship), the lives of many members went astray at that point.

Comparing them with the two other important companies, we shall see that the Szeged-group was the least suitable for either complying or restrained survival, because the quality of their theatre and their ethical behavior meant the same thing for them. In any case, Petófi-rock was overcome with success; there were memorable performances in Zagreb and Wroclaw, and though the audience couldn't understand the words, it responded to the outstretched hands. Grotowski himself entered the circle, held their hands and hummed the tunes of the Petófi- songs with them.

In studying the nature of Authority another Pefd/zVoc/r-performance must be highlighted. The group played it in the club of the Szeged Police. To be clear: it was not a part of the investigation, it was a kind invitation to improve the minds of the policemen. "There were two detectives present who had interrogated me before. When we were singing the poem called 'To Liberty', we were kneeling, holding each other's hands. Accidentally I found myself face to face with the two detectives. It was satisfying to me that the two policemen cast down their eyes and didn't dare look at me," remembers a student, who, in spite of her good grades, was barely able to earn her degree, and when she did, could not do much with it and remained unemployed for a long time.

To my mind, Petófi-rock being played in the Police Club - where, if I remember correctly, 'holding hands' was omitted - illustrates perfectly the contourless, jelly-like, obscure situation, in which the authorities and opposition in a small Central East European country muddled along, doing nothing but marking time, with one of the parties (always the same) being slapped in the face from time to time.

The story of Petófi-rock also demonstrates that theatre is completely bound to the present. A form that was appropriate in the beginning of the '70s did not work later. Several years later a number of groups (among others the successor of Szeged University Theatre) tried to play it

15 again - with no success. Everything was copied exactly, and perhaps the singing was even better and the acrobatics more skilled. But holding out hands became mechanical, there was no calling in the glances and of course there was no one to call. The audience remained the audience, it was following the events on the stage as appreciative viewers. But the players themselves did not form a community either, so nothing would have changed even if they had held each other's hands. Spectators and players remained apart; they couldn't break through the wall of revolutionary romanticism and instinctive opposition.

This wall was really built by Paél and his company in their last performance, which followed: Kelemen, the Bricklayer. They adapted the legend written by Imre Sarkadi to make one of the most beautiful performances in Hungarian theatre history. The production proved that after Wroclaw the Szeged-group didn't 'drop' Grotowski's hand. Kelemen, the Bricklayer was the most authentic Hungarian realisation of the sacred, of the poor theatre. Kelemen, who wants to build up the castle of Déva with 11 of his fellows is forced to sacrifice his own wife, to have her built into the wall in order to make it not crumble. His fellows are planning the future happily, while Kelemen is left alone with his tragedy and the question: is it worth it, is it acceptable to build anything at the expense of human sacrifice? The performance was both a conclusion and a summary of Istvan Paél's Szeged period. It could be regarded as an opening as well, for he showed the direction in which the group should have moved - but the external conditions for such an opening were missing. Istvén Paél's days in the university were numbered; he was attacked by the institution's management. Besieged by ridiculous and unfounded accusations, he was ultimately forced to leave the university and the city. He received a contract with the National Theatre in Pécs. Jónos Acs, who played Kelemen, studied directing at the Academy, while the other main character in the performance, Arpëd Arkosi, stayed a little longer and two years later became a director in the Szigligetti Theatre in Szolnók (by this time Paél was in Szolnók, too). But this happened in the second half of the '70s, and that is going to be the topic of our next chapter.

SUMMARY

1. From the end of the '60s three determinant amateur theatres were working in Hungary: the Room-theatre of the Halész-group, Fodor's Orfeo-Studio K., and Paël's company in Szeged. Three groups - three patterns of behaviour.

2. The Szeged University Theatre tried to combine left-wing politics with ethical behaviour, so in spite of their intentions they permanently antagonised Authority.

3. After his two most important performances (Petófi-rock, Kelemen, the Bricklayer) Istvën Paël was more or less chased away by the leaders of the Szeged University; they levelled ridiculous accusations against him. He finished working as an amateur director and went on to work in the National Theatre in Pécs.

16 V 2. FROM UNIVERSITAS TO STUDIO K.

The most important performance of Studio K., led by Tamës Fodor, was Woyzeck in 1977, but the story began in 1 960, when Fodor as a first-year student applied for admission to the Budapest University Theatre (later; Universitas). I have spoken about Universitas in general, but it is important to emphasise a few concrete facts which will clarify the work of Fodor and other leading personalities of the Room-theatre. These people acted as opposition political activists, with politics and theatre organically connected. During the 1960s the University was a site for many writer- and reader- meetings and debating evenings. In most cases authors were invited who could not appear in other fora because after 1956 they were punished with silentium or prison. Film screenings were also significant events, where students could become acquainted with the films of the awakening Béia Balózs Studio and Polish short films. It is typical that most of the surviving film documentaries about dissident theatre activities were made by Béla Balézs Studio. The Polish short films provided information about Europe which was completely closed to us at that time.

The next steps were the performances on the verge of being forbidden. Fodor took part in most of them as an actor or director: in the Steam Bath by Maiakovsky (it was banned from professional theatres), a play by another banned Spanish author, Vallejo, then plays by Albee, Beckett, lonesco whose names could not even be uttered at that time. Fodor directed the poetry-performances of Zoltén Latinovits, who was a legendary actor in the history of Hungarian theatre and film just as Cybulski was in Poland and Smoktunovsky in Russia.

Fodor's truly independent activity started after 1969, first in the Pince Theatre and from 1971 in Orfeo Puppet Theatre, where he founded his own section, the Orfeo Studio. The six years work that concluded in Woyzeck meant directing actively political performances, conducting debating evenings that followed and complemented these performances, and working out etudes that demanded a much more intense presence from the actor than usual. (Observing Fodor's career we can find a strange duality: on the one hand a direct and public political activity pushing back the frontiers and on the other, a concentrated direction realised in closed, almost laboratory conditions. Between '71 and '77 the former was more typical, and then came a tendency termed 'hypernaturalism' by Fodor, which followed the spirit of Stanislavsky. Fodor's later period, when he was both a politician and a director at the same time, is in concert with this: in the second half of the '80s he was a stage manager in the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnók, but from 1990 - giving up theatrical work only later - he became a representative of the liberal party, the SZDSZ. But in 1994, leaving parliament and professional theatre, he organised a new alternative group and now, over fifty, he has begun a theatrical experiment on the periphery).

In 1971 Orfeo Studio showed Semprun's War is Over. The literary work, the excellent film based on it and Orfeo's performance examining the connection between the crowds and the party proved to be undesirable in Hungary. No wonder, since the questions raised were offensively pertinent to the regime: is it possible to lead a revolution from behind the writing table? Is anarchy a feasible solution?...The further performances, etudes, poetry evenings and debates continued in this direction. Fodor considers their attitude at that time as ultra-left wing.

The two most important groups in Budapest (Fodor's and Halész's) continued to maintain this connection. "Péter's opinion was that art should be comprehended in a much cleaner way, not so politically. But 1 always needed something to hold on to. We were analysing each other's performances at that time, but were always arguing," says Tamas Fodor about the

17 '70s. In spite of the differences the final result was usually similar: censoring ('revision'), interrogations, forbidding. These were never arranged by means of legal action, denunciation or official documents. "The telephone dramaturgy arranged ail this" - says Fodor. Then came the 'Orfeo-case' (Jënos Kadér, the first secretary of the communist party used this expression), more and more articles attacked the group and interrogations became more frequent. In an interesting way these were connected to another 15 March, though - quoting Fodor again - "we didn't consider March 15th so important, it seemed to be too national". This was the main difference between the Szeged and the Budapest group. At the same time the idol of the Orfeo was Guevara, too, a man who after the victory of the revolution didn't take office but took his gun and moved on.

1974 is the year that Studio K. was founded. Its members came to know each other well and formed a loose living community. Three years later they produced Woyzeck, then Genet's Balcony and Büchner's Leonce and Lena. Woyzeck was the culmination, but it did not contain overt political hints, just like Kelemen, the Bricklayer in Szeged. The performance was played in several scenes, partly simultaneously; the auditorium and the stage were not separate. The spectators were even able to help the humiliated Woyzeck who was cast to the floor. Actors who didn't take part in a particular scene did not disappear into the wings; they mingled with the audience and watched the performance.

The performance, 'by showing the tragic story of a couple dying in the false scale of values of a hierarchic world questioned the relationship between ourselves and our received or created scale of values' according to Istvén Nónay, dramatic critic. We can see from this quote that the lack of overt political activity did not mean a denial of the basic questions of the era. Moreover, this excellent performance proved that in the expression 'dissident theatre' the second word is more important, because if theatre is realised at a higher level, a turn away from authority, away from traditional theatre and our boring, outmoded selves is automatic.

Woyzeck was a summary of their work so far, and though there came two more productions (Balcony was quite successful in the Amsterdam Theatrical Meeting, The Festival of Fools) the unity of the group disintegrated. The strongest personalities (Erzsi Gaal, Miklós Székely B.) were about to leave, to go their own way. After 1981 the group stagnated and two years later all that remained of the old Studio K. was its name and of course its leader, Tamës Fodor.

SUMMARY

1. Tamés Fodor, leader of the future Studio K. actively became acquainted with politics and politically inspired theatre in Universitas between 1960 and 1969.

2. At the beginning of the '70s he founded his own group, the Orfeo Studio, and following ultra-left wing views it produced overtly political performances. The natural consequence of this was its continuous 'connection' with the police.

3. In 1974 Studio K. was established. Its most significant performance was Woyzeck which was an important event in Hungarian theatre history.

18 V 3. THE ROOM-THEATRE

As previously discussed, 1968 was a milestone in the life of many amateur companies. This is also when Péter Halész left the Universitas and organised the Kassök House Studio with Anna Kóós in a suburban cultural centre. In the following two years they presented a number of both shorter and longer productions. These were usually built on improvisation and exhibited a strong Grotowski influence. (We have already come across this influence in The 8th circle of Hell, a Universitas performance which was a psycho-physical series of etudes in 1968).

Later on they 'forgot' about Grotowski and turned in a completely different direction. Two decades later Péter Halész remembers as follows: "Luckily we soon travelled to France where we met new influences and were released from the 'Grotowski-prison'". Haiësz refers to the Nancy Theatre Festival in 1971 in which the Kassëk Studio was allowed to take part. It is an interesting and almost incomprehensible contradiction (there were many of them in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries before and after 1989): every one of their performances was on the verge of being banned, usually they were banned, and still three years after 1968 they were allowed to go to Nancy and Paris to perform. After all this it would seem to be understandable, even natural, that half a year following their return their first really significant work. The Murderers of the Village-museum was banned. It is worth quoting the decision of the borough council for two reasons: first, in the world of 'telephone- dramaturgy' official prohibitions in writing were none too frequent; second, its text was typical of the communist 'csinovnyik' (bureaucrat) way of thinking: "The play presented is remarkably different from the script filed in advance and from the first performance held on 19th January. It was supplemented with obscene scenes and texts that offend public morals. It is capable of misinterpretation from a policital point of view, too. The play does not serve our cultural aims..." The group became tired and bored of such continuous molestation and left Kassék Club.

Their common decision was to continue their theatrical activity in flat number 25, 4th floor, Dohany Street 20. As a matter of fact the flat turned out to be a safe place. I must allude to the 'bargain' of the Kédër-regime again: in the Dohany Street flat, 20-30 young intellectuals come together every night and did strange things. 'Let them do it' - waved the hand of Authority sadly. It sent in its informers, signed on the caretaker as a spy, and sometimes sent messages through acquintances. The parents of some of these young people were also famous artists or worked in the party apparatus - it would have been embarrassing to make a 'case' from the children's evening entertainment. They only could and wanted to act officially when the group left the flat on occasions.

In the summer of 1972, for example, they put on an open-air performance in a sandmine. On the fourth day the police arrived and dispersed the participants. A year later the authorities mobilised a bigger apparatus: at the invitation of an artist (György Galéntai) there were several productions in the chapel of Balatonboglór, which raised the interest of the party newspaper, the 'Nèpszabadsëg' ('Liberty of People'). An inspired journalist talked at length just to reach the predictable (predicted by the party) final result: "Half of the village could see that this is a mockery of art. It is more than extravagance: it is immorality, tastelessness, hostile behaviour. In this case a socialist community cannot be contented with correspondence. It must be banned!"

19 Let's remember what the Haiësz-group had against Tamës Fodor's theatre: it was too political. Really, the Halész-group was the only one of the three which did not deal with politics. Still the quotations and the later events show that it was they who most irritated the authorities. How was it possible? The answer is hidden in the inconceivable contradiction of soft dictatorship. Things that are banned today will be obligatory tomorrow. And vice versa. It is typical that the above-quoted article - written obviously under orders - could be answered by the brilliantly witty Istvën Eörsi in the same newspaper! The same Eörsi who simultaneously was writing plays for the desk drawer and who was later 'concealed' by Kaposvór Theatre as a dramaturgist.

Well, what was the problem with the Halész-group? We can refer to the contradictions of soft dictatorship but it isn't the only answer. The overtly political performances of the Szeged- group took place within the existing regime. They wanted to change, to repair something - so they took notice of this something, and they accepted it. At the moment Halész, Béiint and the others moved into the flat, they moved out of the regime, intentionally becoming outsiders.

"We did not protest. We thought that by doing what we did freely, without permission, we stated that the existing regime did not exist at all" - says Halósz, who is speaking about 'statement' here, though the essence of Room-theatre was asking questions. Every performance, every manifestation was a question mark. Adapted to art the question was; 'What is theatre?'; to the society: 'What is freedom?' They didn't know taboos, so their activity was a continuous confutation of taboos. Of course this was connected with the essence of art, because violating taboos is a basic artistic attitude. By using the flat as both a theatre and a flat, sleeping, eating, existing there and making performances day by day, the frontiers of theatre and not-theatre merged with each other. After a time it couldn't be determined if someone was inside or outside the production. An exact repetition of a given action could not be produced the following day because it would have spelled a denial of present-time existence. I emphasise this because beyond all the extravagance, the nudity, the building of a house inside the flat, having the text of Three Sisters narrated by three men and so on...beyond all of this the essence and the most radical act of Room-theatre was that they violated every rule that had been formulated the day before. Their taboos were fixation, repetition and dogma that kept the present within the boundaries of the past. Perhaps this Is why Péter Halész mentioned the 'Grotowski-prison', and why when they appeared in Wroclaw in 1973 they found the name 'Open theatre' too demagogic and put on a performance without invitation or permission in a student hostel (at the same festival the Szeged-group won first prize with Petofi-rock).

It is no accident that in 1975 they decided to make a Diary-theatre which meant that for 365 days of the year they were to play anything that came to mind (the organic follow-up was making a performance based on a newspaper article from that day; Halész tried it first in America and carried it to perfection in Katona József Theatre in Budapest, in 1994). Their behaviour which knew no limits, asked questions about everything and violated taboos was irritating the authorities. It didn't have arguments for this; or rather there was only one remaining argument: to offer to leave. It was another wink: they had gotten back their withdrawn passports before, and nobody commanded them to leave, but the gates were wide open. Half of the group received an immigration-passport, the others left as tourists. At the time they thought they were leaving forever. But at the end of the '80s both Halész and Béiint 'had a look at' Hungary. Now they spend most of their time here and make theatre independently of each other, enjoying success to some degree.

20 Their work between 1976 and 1989 is better known in Western Europe and in America than in Hungary. This is the era of really dissident theatre - the word 'dissident' in Hungarian refers to those who left the country and didn't/couldn't come home. After a one-and-a-half-year search for a way and a place they found a home in New York and invented shop window theatre. This was Squat Theatre. But its story is not a part of the history of Hungarian dissident theatre.

SUMMARY

1. In 1969 Péter Halész and his friends left the Universitas and worked for three years in a suburban cultural centre, the Kassók Club.

2. After a series of difficulties and prohibitions they broke with every kind of institution and moved to Halész's flat. The Room-theatre was born.

3. They were not political on the surface but violated all the taboos. At the end of 1975 the authorities 'let' them leave the country.

4. From January 1976 they made their own theatre abroad, mainly in the United States under the name of Squat Theatre.

21 I

VI IN THE MEANTIME

I have already said this: as a consequence of its essence, art always suggests an oppositional attitude. In the introduction I made it clear - and the later examples proved it - that in Central and Eastern Europe it is (was) a peculiarity of the regime that politics infiltrated all areas of life. So by limiting my story to the topic of dissident theatre I could write an almost complete theatre history. But we cannot forget about this 'almost'. The quality of the existing performances still does not depend on whether the authorities found anything in them to disapprove of or not. The only probable fact is that better quality usually generated more things of which to disapprove.

While Paél, Fodor, Halééz and other so-called amateur artists were working amidst conflict on the margin, it is important to remember that others were fighting their battles within the institutional theatrical structure. This is important because we are speaking about the same generation and as we'll see, the two groups - having gone about it in different ways - will arrive in the same place during the second half of the 70s.

It was a cardinal moment when the two personalities who have determined the last two decades of Hungarian theatre history, Gébor Székely and Gëbor Zsëmbéki became stage managers and a bit later directors of two provincial theatres in 1 971. That year they both directed Chekhov's Seagull to declare their adherence to a new, basically different theatre. So there were stones thrown into the 'stagnant waters' of Hungarian theatre causing ripples from two sides: from the side of the amateurs and from the side of talented young people, professionals, who were trying to simultaneously forget and use everything that they had learned at the Academy. Naturally they too were sent to the margin: to the sleepy provincial towns of Szolnók and Kaposvér. These towns don't even have a dignified institution of higher education. Under their leadership the two best theatres of Hungary were soon formed there. Of course a permissive gesture of Authority was hidden here: what would be forbidden in the capital was tolerated in the provinces. But why should Chekhov's Seagull be forbidden? What could the authorities have against Three Sisters, T/mon of Athens or The Unhappy, the play of Milén Füst (perhaps the greatest Hungarian playwright and only discovered many years after his death) being performed in Szolnók? We could ask the same question regarding a similar list - ivanov, Devils, As you like it - about Kaposvér, too. There are no problems with the plays. But more and more people were making pilgrimages from the capital to Szolnók and to Kaposvér to see them. Students, all kinds of intellectuals, film-makers, avant-garde artists, prominent figures of the future political opposition. These were different theatres. They were also built on Hungarian traditions - what else would they have been built on?

Except for the 1972 guest performance of Peter Brook and his company (A Midsummer Night's Dream) there was almost nothing to hold on to. There was high-quality realistic acting in Szolnók and Kaposvér. The latter company had the opportunity to take part in the Festival of Nations in Warsaw in 1974. The production that was praised in Hungary produced silent disinterest there. Zsémbéki concluded with self-irony, but not desperately, 'The Kaposvér theatre was not on a level to compete with the best of world-theatre: Bergman, Strehler, Peter Stein', But this failure was not a setback for the theatre. Better and better teams, of both actors and directors, were formed in the two towns. It was considered dignified to work in a town where a few years earlier work seemed to be done in exile. Their rare guest performances in Budapest - rare because the authorities did not really support them - became cultural and political events. The majority of people interested could not get into the building, which led to scandalous scenes.

22 The guest performance of State Stores directed by Tamës Ascher in Kaposvér, for example, was a legendary one. If we examine only the play it is incomprehensible that fighting literally broke out between the spectators wanting to get in and the police sent in to stop them. The 'communist operetta' called State Stores was originally presented in the Budapest Operetta Theatre in 1952 and later a film was made after it. It was a Hungarian classic concerning the hardest period of Stalinism, the 1950ë. This is what Ascher directed more than two decades later. To put it simply, we can say the frantic success was due to three factors: it was a piece of light genre, it was full of nostalgic love of the director for his childhood ("It was a kind of confession of love to the theatrical world of the past" - says Ascher) , and last but not least the performance put not only the story on stage, but also the milieu in which the story was born and which was full of lies and fear.

It is the usual mechanism again: almost independent of intentions a dissident production is formed, this time from within the institution, threatening the existing regime.

SUMMARY

1. In 1971 two very talented young directors, Gëbor Székely and Gébor Zsémbéki became the leaders of the Szolnók and Kaposvér theatres. They founded excellent companies from almost nothing with diligent, hard work.

2. Their guest performances achieved great success, which was tantamount to a political demonstration.

23 VII PROFESSIONALS AND 'AMATEURS' FROM 1975

VII 1.LET'S JOIN THE INSTITUTION

The three important amateur groups we discussed earlier reached the limits of their possibilities. On the one hand they increasingly came into marked conflict with authority, and on the other their desires, skills and professionalism, developed during years of common activity, did not find space or support in the amateur world. I am not referring to the audience here, but to financial and technical support. They were speaking of Grotowski - with good reason - while they were forced into a flat or were torn between the 8 hours' workday / making money / and creative activity in spare hours. After Kelemen the Bricklayer or Woyzeck an advance would have been possible only under real theatrical conditions. But though the economic situation in Hungary was better than in Poland or Czechoslovakia, tradition and the authorities' interests did not allow small theatrical workshops (such as Grotowski's '13 Rows' laboratory or the clubs in Prague) to come into existence. The Halész group chose the radical solution of emigration. There was only one way left for the others: to join the existing institutional system. It would not have been so easy if there had not been Szolnók and Kaposvér. It is of symbolic importance as well: the influence of the two provincial theatres was spreading. Paël went to Szolnók, to Gébor Székely, Fodor had experiments with the new Studio K. and in the middle of the '80s he and his group chose Szolnók. The most talented member of the Szeged group, Jénos Acs finished the Academy and joined the Kaposvër theatre. We could continue to list names, but the main point is that the period of amateurism had come to an end, and we can still feel the effects of this. But the positive results of this process are even more remarkable: talented people were able to continue their work because their opinions were similar to the views of those who called and accepted them as equal partners. And as a result of joining forces, they were not swallowed by the lazy comfort of the institution. They made a compromise - of couse, the ones left behind regarded it as a betrayal - but it did not mean giving up themselves. So at the end of the 70s the rebirth of institutional theatre started in Hungary.

These young people succeeded in breaking through a wall that was held together by the mortar of constancy. This mortar consisted of gestures of conscious self-defence: 'Several newspapers - following foreign examples - demanded amateur directors to direct in professional theatres. Let those extraordinarily talented amateurs apply for admission to the Academy. We think this is the right way....'. The royal plural was used by the provost of the Academy in 1973. Luckily enough Gébor Székely and Gébor Zsémbéki did not pay attention to it. This is why - for example - Istvén Paél could direct his excellent Mrozek-performance, Tango, in Szolnók. The Russian director Lyubimov saw it and the following year came to Szolnók to direct, too. By the way, Paél never gained admission to the Academy.

In 1978 the two theatres suffered great losses. Zsémbéki, Székely and Ascher went to Budapest and became the leaders of the National Theatre. They took many actors along and everyone was afraid that the theatres left behind would be weakened. But in Kaposvér an ideal new director, Lészló Babarczy kept the theatre well in hand, so it survived. He was helped by Ascher and a number of actors who came back to work from time to time. Jénos Acs also joined the theatre. In Szolnók Paél, who was still in great form, established his own company as a stage manager. So two good theatres remained the same and a third was born: the National. But the Hungarian National Theatre has always been a place of conflict because - usually with reason - it also had to meet non-theatrical requirements, (think about the 1848 'success' of Ban Bónk). Zsémbéki and the others 'simply' directed good performances - so they had to leave. But later it turned out to be a fortunate decision: they

24 were given a small theatre In Budapest. The strongest connpany of the '80s, the Katona József Theatre was established here.

We have to stop for a minute at this point. We are inside the institutional system - is it possible to make dissident theatre there?! This is the trap of this study and I have to walk into it anyway. Either I must classify every good performance as dissident theatre, or accept that certain productions - sometimes accidentally - attracted police attention while other, even better ones, went unnoticed. I chose the latter, so my work will be full of disproportion and thus injustice. From the point of view of my topic there is nothing to say about Ascher's Three Sisters though it was one of the most important performances of our recent past. There was no prohibition, no fist fights before performances - it was simply a worldwide success. Of course in every bit of it you could feel the oppositional attitude of the '80s, but you could not get hold of these bits, so they were not 'dangerous'.

Arriving at the '80s we can see that the entire Hungarian society was polarising, and that things were becoming ambiguous. Previously there had been two poles: the opposition (consisting of a small active group and a passive but possibly mobile crowd) and the authority it opposed. Dividedness and polarisation appeared in the latter, too. More and more people joined the so-called 'reform-socialists'. The result was that prohibitions and other limitations were sometimes only formal and did not actually have the intended effect. I do not want to make the frequent, both small and large, scandals in theatre seem less remarkable, because the artists who were not prepared to be flexible, to compromise in order to survive, who could not 'wink back' lost the only clear support they could count on to face Authority. There were no more clear situations. The main reason was that the mistakes of the existing regime became increasingly obvious, both covert and overt oppositional activity grew in strength, and the artists representing the reformation of art and the political opposition started to understand each other. (In the '70s this was not typical. Lészló Rajk, the son of a communist minister of home affairs who was found guilty in a staged trial and executed at the beginning of the '50s, and who was the leader of the opposition producing 'samizdats', a stage- designer and now a liberal MP, remembers as follows: "The politically active circles did not have an affinity towards the Hungarian avant-garde that became really dignified by then." The previously mentioned communist culture-politician, György Aczél, got hold of culture and thus of theatres, but really talented artists produced works of art (in film art, literature, fine arts and theatre) that could not escape attention. The leaders, being anxious about their position and power tried to put on the brakes, while the generation in their 30s that survived cruel conflicts, and the younger ones who followed, were stepping on the gas. The result was a great deal of splendid performances - and naturally almost the same number of political cases, and scandals erupting or hushed up.

SUMMARY 1. The outstanding amateur directors and actors of the generation which followed 1 968 could not go on working in amateur circumstances beginning in the mid-'70s. So they joined professional theatres led by their contemporaries.

2. In 1978 Zsémbéki, Székely, Ascher and the actors in their circle went to the Budapest National Theatre, and a few years later they received a small theatre, the future Katona József Theatre. Kaposvér and Szolnók survived serious losses and remained the centres of Hungarian acting.

3. At the end of the '70s all of the remarkable artists went into the institutions - so the scandals became 'institutional', too.

25 VII 2. CASES

In Kaposvër the change in 1978 was quite simple because Lëszló Babarczy, who followed Zsémbéki, had already been in the theatre for a long time. In addition, Jénos Acs arrived soon after and Tamës Ascher directed there from time to time. In Szolnók a similar change was expected. Gébor Székely's dramaturge, the playwright György Schwajda, became the director. In spring he planned the next season. The pillars of his plan were two dangerous projects: Tango and The Merchant of Venice. It was a pitiful, ridiculous situation: Mrozek, a world-famous writer from Poland, which belonged to the communist block, was 'dangerous'. Still we can explain it: confused Western ideology, absurd drama etc. But Shakespeare? The truth is that The Merchant of Venice was banned by the Hungarian fascists, 'the arrow-cross men', in 1940. This prohibition was still valid and came across almost four decades later in a system that seemed to be totally inconsistent with fascism. "Be contented with Tango," said Aczél to the brand new director. Then he accepted Shakespeare. The casting was made. The role of Shylock was given to a great old actor of ours, Tamés Major, who had played the same role in its most recent previous performance - in 1940(1). The director was Istvén Paël. And suddenly there came a phone call in summer: there would be no performance. Schwadja resigned, and Paél had to be contented with Tango.

Luckily enough Tango was a great success and Paél became stage manager. While he continued his battle against local and central potentates he was thus in a good position. A few years later he could make a noble gesture to a younger contemporary of his, Jënos Szikora. Szikora finished the Academy in 1978, and had worked with an amateur group before that. This very talented young director burst into the theatrical world. He directed Tibor Déry's avant-garde play from 1926, The Giant Baby in Pecs, then The Trial by Kafka. In Gyór (which is famous for its ballet) he became the leader of the drama section. Several exciting performances were made here but in 1982 - obviously for political reasons - he and his company were forced to leave. His suffering began with the directing of a play. The Cleaning, by Péter Nédas who has since become famous all over Europe. The play was banned - on the telephone, of course, - because the writer was spending his 'silentium' then. The next play was Folding-screens by Genet. The rehearsals had already started when the prohibition came. (To avoid any misunderstanding, the explanation did not mention political causes.) However, some performances were carried out: The Cleaning at last, Hrabal's Bambini di Praga; a brilliant talent of our film art, Gébor Bódy who died young, was permitted to direct Hamlet and Andrés Jeles (we shall meet him later!) put Magic Flute on stage. As Szikora's collaborators, many members of the Hungarian avant-garde and political opposition appeared in the theatre (writers, dramaturges, designers). Szikora was forced to leave. He requested and received an audience with György Aczél. He reported in an interview, "Aczél told me how Jénos Këdér had abused him: 'What's going on in Gyór?! Make order!'" So Aczél went to Gyór and made order. There were many pretexts: they spent too much money, they were denounced by the Czechoslovakian cultural attache who said Bambini di Praga was 'against socialism' and so forth. Aczél also blamed Szikora for choosing the wrong friends. This was the situation when Paël offered to engage them in Szolnók. He could only engage Szikora's team but not Szikora himself because the local party-committee sent a message saying Szikora must not set foot in Szolnók district.

At the beginning of the '80s there were many similar stories. It is unnecessary to cover them in detail; only the workings of the mechanism is important for our purposes. There is another fact pertaining to this mechanism: the politically dangerous Szikora, who was warned off everywhere, became the director of the new theatre in Eger in 1985. Suspicion on the one hand, trust on the other. How can that be? The answer is ambiguous, and lies simply in a

26 geographical name: Central and Eastern Europe.

I nnust definitely mention one more 'case': Marat/Sade directed by Jénos Acs. It is not only the working of the mechanism but also the quality of the production that is remarkable here, because the performance precisely illustrates the process that led up to 1989. The premiere was on December 4, 1981 in Kaposvér. The winds of history turned the wheel of this excellent performance's fortune. One and a half weeks later a state of emergency was declared in Poland. It turned out that Acs was mistaken when he first read the drama, which is about the relationship between the crowds and the authorities, about the stages of a revolutionary process. Having read it for the first time Acs cried out: "It's nonsense! What abstract stuff! What does this German emigrant want? What does he know about us from Sweden?" Fortunately Acs was not satisfied with only one reading. Peter Weiss's sharp logic, cool rationalism, and passionate pursuance of truth was joined by the bitterness, fury, romanticism, despair and temper of an Eastern European artist - and so one of the most important performances of our theatre history came into existence. From a professional point of view it was the culmination of a process in which experiences from both the amateur and professional theatre were combined in an exceptional moment of an exceptionally talented artist. It is worth quoting Acs here, because his thoughts transmit something that was typical of the best performances in the '80s: "It was a fortunate meeting of the elements of amateur and professional acting. There was a rare balance between them. On the one hand it came from the world of formal elements running in my blood that 1 brought from my amateur past. I used it in moving the actors and the extras and in making a choreography of my own. I liberated the people, they could show wild, sensual and realistic behaviours in the background. On the other hand professional quality appeared, too...'

In spite of the later conflicts and political attacks, we can say that the Marat was born under a lucky star. The tension in Hungary and the Polish events gave an unbelievable sense of reality to everything that happened on the stage. At the same time the authorities woke up very late - I do not know why. It was a frantic success in Kaposvër, bus- and car-convoys came to the otherwise uninteresting little town. Every performance was a feast that almost became a demonstration. But the party and the ministry discovered its importance only a year later. In the autumn of 1982 the theatre had made a guest performance in Budapest, which was also the year of BITEF. Acs's direction won the Grand Prize there (it had not - could not have - happened before, but later two performances of the Katona József Theatre won there, too: The Inspector and Three Sisters). This prize provided a kind of protection, so it was too late to ban the production on some trumped-up pretext. Of course the public was not informed about the prize. There was a news-ban around Marat. Only a short piece about it was published in a newspaper: "...1 could only sneak in the news about the prize in Belgrade because there was a change of editor-in-chief, so the office was masterless at the moment," remembers a theatre critic. The authorities could do nothing - they could not pretend there was no performance. The Minister of Culture (!) wrote an aggressive article against it, but this was only a confession of helplessness. The degree of the success is borne out by two pitifully funny Eastern European stories: Acs had been applying for a telephone for years, but had not yet received one. After the Marat he received a notice: a telephone would immediately be installed in his flat. Why? So that they could tap in to the director's conversations. They thought he was a wild member of the opposition. Another present for him: György Soros offered him an American scholarship, but the ministry would not permit him to accept it. Instead, they coughed up a scholarship for him themselves. "They showed that - come what may - they are in command of the award-trips" - said Acs later.

27 SUMMARY

1. At the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s, in the context of 'soft dictatorship', there were no really significant political conflicts caused by theatrical perfornnances. This was due to the blood-sacrifice of '56. Both small and large scandals and prohibitions indicated that a gradual break-up of the systenn had begun.

2. A few theatrical scandals grew into political cases: The Merchant of Venice in Szolnók; the problems of Jénos Szikora and his company in Gyór; the chaos around the grand- prize-winner Marat/Sade - a demonstration-like success in the theatre and powerless fault- finding and fussing in the offices of the authorities.

28 vil 3. MONTEVERDI WRESTLING CIRCLE

I have already mentioned that by the end of the 1980s the amateur theatrical movement was 'finished'. In fact, the conditions had changed. The period when a group could be contented with loving each other and having a good time together was over. The best groups wanted to make high-quality theatre (or just wanted to live off of the work they were good at) so they joined professional theatres. But in the middle of the '80s another network of subsidies started to develop; it is well-known in the West. It helped the work of groups that wanted to create another kind of theatre. This is when the term 'amateur' was replaced by 'alternative'. The point of course is the same: the amateurs of the '70s and the alternatives of the '80s wanted to produce quality performances outside the theatrical structure. They received financial support from the government or from foundations.

We must emphasise two companies from this period: Arvisura Theatre and Monteverdi Wrestling Circle. The former had been working at a high level for 1 5 years, with their most famous production, A Midsumer Night's Dream showing all over Europe. Still, from the point of view of our topic and because of the quality of their performances, the activity of the short-lived Monteverdi Wrestling Circle is more exciting. The group was founded by Andrés Jeles. He is one of the most outstanding, most original, and most extreme personalities of Hungarian film and theatre. He finished the Academy as a film director. His first film Little Valentino caused a sensation. Those who were awaiting a renewal greeted him as a saviour, while the conservatives demanded a prohibition. (It came later: his film called Dream-brigade was kept in the box for some years.) This contradictory reception has accompanied Jeles ever since. He produced a haiku-performance and two plays with Monteverdi Wrestling Circle (its members arrived from the most diverse areas of alternative culture). Their first performance was Wind-storm in 1985. Its basis was a play that showed the events of 1956 in a primitive, schematic way. Naturally Jeles was interested not in the text, which was stupid in itself, but in the meeting of the play and the actors. These actors had nothing to do with '56 or this 'Stalinist realism'. It would have been easy to direct a successful parody, but Jeles and his group dug deeper. Behind the mawkishly dull sentences, we were shown the miserable, defenceless people of '56. At the same time it all became present-time, because young people were fighting with their fathers' past, with voices and gestures on the stage. "It gave me the shudders, it turned my stomach. The whole company hated this play. That's why the performance became so good. It was present on the stage," remembers one of the players of Wind-storm.

The performance was a great success. This was due to the new theatrical methods and to the fact that 1956 was shown on the stage in a way that reflected people's thinking (three decades after the revolution it was still inadvisable to speak about it). Jeles's next direction. The Empire of Smile was just this side of being banned. The basis was Mrozek's play, the Police, but - and it is typical of Jeles - only a few motifs were kept from the original drama. What they played was a special mixture of ballet, opera, fine arts and prosaic theatre. The final results of the two performances were different but the method was the same: distorted voices, singing the text in prose, broken slow motions, costumes that were in perfect contrast with the real situation and the lines uttered, and pictures shown on a screen. The result was that we could not rely on the routine of attention, so we noticed, received or refused things that we would not even have perceived in a traditional performance. Unfortunately Monteverdi Wresting Circle soon fell apart, but Jeles is still an active creator in our theatrical life.

29 SUMMARY

The two outstanding alternative groups of the '80s were Arvisura Theatre and Monteverdi Wrestling Circle. The leader of the latter was Andrés Jeles. In his two productions he used methods that were extreme from a political and a professional point of view - and he gave justification to another kind of theatre.

30 VIM QUESTION MARKS IN THE '90S

Dissident theatre after 1989? It is a captivating question. If the concept is simplified to political opposition, the answer is easy. One of the key elements of dissident theatre involves dictatorship, which came to an end - so there was no longer anything specific to make theatre against. Although there are still problems, after '89 a system of democratic institutions in Hungary was established. And we are using these institutions, albeit somewhat awkwardly. Sometimes people take to the streets to demonstrate, but the motivation is never a theatrical performance. We hope the 1848 'success' of Ban Bónk will never be repeated. There is no longer a need for hidden political speeches to be recited from the stage - speeches can be delivered in the parliament. These are positive facts. But many people fell into a vacuum when the boot which was always ready to trample them disappeared. It is also a fact that before 1989 allowances were made in theatre, because the performances had a special significance; courageous works of average quality were valuable. Many previously banned productions turned out to be tiresome and old-fashioned once the pillars of politics were pulled out from under them.

Naturally the word 'dissident' refers not only to the sphere of politics. I have tried to emphasise and vindicate this in my study. In spite of this, Hungarian theatre is not in an easy position. There are no replacements for the outstanding directors of the so-called 'great generation'. Most of the 30-40 year-old directors are lacking in power; they are often satisfied with strange, meaningless performances that are interesting only to themselves.

Nonetheless, 1 still find the situation now, in 1995, hopeful. It is not the obligatory confidence in the future, the principle of 'all's well that ends well'. I have hope because some important things have happened in the past one or two years. A new generation that was born well after 1956 has appeared. Gëbor Zsémbéki, Gëbor Székely, József Ruszt and Lészló Babarczy are finally in positions where they can determine who, how and what should be taught at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. Whether someone is professional or amateur has become a secondary issue. The above-mentioned 'doyens' are still guarding their thrones and do not look favourably on their students if they set themselves against their masters. But it has always been so and always will be so.

Let us summarise the status of present-day Hungarian theatre: in the provinces, Kaposvér is still first, due to the persistence of Babarczy and Ascher and the emergence of a vigorous new talent, Jénos Mohécsi. In Budapest Katona József Theatre has just had a blood transfusion; while many leading actors have left, a number of young actors have joined the company. The productions that promised a revival in the '94/'95 season are connected with the names of Péter Halósz and Andrës Jeles. This is the season when the 'New Theatre,' led by Gébor Székely, was founded - and it immediately became a rival of the Katona József Theatre. Besides Székely and Jënos Acs there are young directors in the theatre (Eszter Novék and Ivön Hargitai) who made their début with splendid performances. Some important productions came into existence outside the structure as well. First of all I am thinking of a most excellent Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Jënos Csónyi. The director, and thus the production 'owned' by him, do not belong to any theatre, though the players are leading actors of the strongest Hungarian companies. Some artists have come to be outside the structure in another way: Tamés Fodor, MP and stage manager, left the parliament and the theatre in Szolnók. He re-founded Studio K. with unknown young people and is trying to make 'dissident theatre' in the context of a small workshop.

There are still things to oppose. It is obvious that under miserable economic conditons and the

31 pressure of American culture that is sweeping over Europe, small theatres have a promising future, both inside and outside the structure. The positive examples described above all came into being in opposition to something. This 'something' is the theatrical factory that calls forth and serves the consumers' demands. It is a perfect, well-oiled machine that turns out professional, commercial productions. Only the human beings who long for a real meeting are missing from the stage and from the audience. Real theatre - we can call it amateur, alterna- tive, dissident or (to use Eugenio Barba's expression) third theatre - is opposed to this. Their point is to create circumstances where the artist and the spectator can take each other by the hand. In my opinion this is the duty of (dissident) theatre after 1989.

SUMMARY

1. With the disappearance of dictatorship the inspiration for oppositional theatre disappeared, too. Every creator must pose the eternal question in each production: what is the mission of theatre today?

2. The future of Hungarian theatre is in the hands of artists in leading positions (Ascher, Acs, Babarczy, Ruszt, Székely, Zsómbéki), the 'eternal rebels' who do not accept the rules of the present (Jeles, Haiész, Fodor) and the young talents who emerged in the '90s (Mohócsi, Novëk, Csënyi, Hargitai).

32 Selected bibliography of Critical Theatre in Hungary

Gébor Antal: About Our Theatre-art (published by Kossuth, 1983) Gébor Mihélyi: Kaposvér - phenomena (by Müzsëk, 1984) Tiber Vérszegi: About Hungarian Alternative Theatre (by Vërszegi, 1989) Tibor Vérszegi: Turnings (by Vérszegi, 1990) Erzsébet Bogécsi: Down-Stage Blockade (by Dovin, 1991)

Szfnhéz - 1991 October-November Studies On Theatre/19 (by Hungarian Theatre Institute, 1986) Éva Dévényi-Péter Balassa: Woyzeck - Studio K (by Hungarian Theatre Institute, 1981) Péter Nódas: Auditorium (by Magvetö, 1983) Tamés Koltai: Theatre of Hungarian Dramas (by Népmüvelési Propaganda Iroda, 1979) Tamés Koltai: Active Theatre (by Magvetö, 1980) Zsuzsa Radnóti: Age of (by Széphalom, 1991) Ivén Séndor: Quo Vadis Thalia? (by Kozmosz, 1986) Gébor Mihélyi: Arguments on Theatre (by Népmüvelési Propaganda Iroada, 1976) Frenc Hont: Hungarian Theatre History (by Hungarian Theatre Institute, 1962) Lészló Bérczes: On the Borderland (by Cégér, 1993) Lészló Bérczes: Until the End of End/lstvén Paél (by Cégér, 1995) Articles on some important productions

József Ruszt: Gregory 7th : Népszabadség, 11-02-1977 (by Gëbor Hajdu Rëfis) Szi'nhëz 1977/5 (by Istvën Nënay) Kritika 1977/5 (by Tamés Tarjën)

Istvén Paól ; Caligula : Magyar Nemzet 16-06-1976 (by Andrós Barta) Szi'nhóz 1976/4 (by Istvén Nénay) Ubu King : Magyar Hi'rlap 15-03-1977 (by Tamés Mészéros) Jelenkor 1977/5 (by Hajnal Futaky) Szinhéz 1977/5 (by Gébor Mihélyi) Tango Kritika 1 979/1 (by Tamés Tarjén) Szi'nhéz 1979/3 (by Katalin Saéd) Üj Tükör 31-12-1978 (by Tamés Koltai) Nagyvilég 1979/4 (by Gébor Mihélyi)

Imre Csiszér: Peer Gynt Népszabadség 29-04-1983 (by Dezsö Kovacs) Üj Tükör 1983/21 (by Tamés Koltai) Élet és Irodalom 1983/23 (by Julia Szekrényesy)

Jénos Szikora: Bambini di Prague : Népszabadség 05-02-1982 (by Tamés Tarjén) Üj Tükör 1982/3 (by Judit Széntó) Szinhéz 1982/4 (by Péter György)

Gébor Zsémbéki: Sea-gull ; Népszabadség 24-10-1971 (by Péter Molnér Géi) Szinhéz 1972/2 (by Katalin Saéd) Szi'nhéz 1972/3 (by Andrés Pélyi) Nagyvilég 1972/5 (by Tamés Koltai) As you like it : Trybuna Ludu 24-06-1975 (by Roman Ydlowski) Sztandar MIodych 01-07-1975 (by Maciej Karpinski) Ivanov : Magyar Hi'riap 02-11-1 977 (by Tamés Mészéros) Film Szi'nhéz Muzsika 1977/42 (by Miklós Apéti) Népszabadség 21-10-1977 (by Péter Molnér Géi) üku King : Magyar Nemzet 03-11-1984 (by Erzsébet Bogécsi) Népszabadség 21-11-1984 (by Miklós Almési) Shi'nhéz 1985/5 (by József Vinkó) Magyar Hi'rlap 17-11-1984 (by Tamés Mészéros)

The Government Inspector: Élet és Irodalom 08-01-1 988 (by Tamés Koltai) Shi'nhéz 1988/4 (by Istvén Nénay) L'ünita 30-04-1988 (by Aggeo Savioli) Gazzetta di Parma 28-04-1988 (by V. ott) II Giorno 28-04-1988 (by Ugo Ronfani) Tamés Ascher : State Store : Népszabadsóg 04-06-1076 (by Péter Molnér Géi) Master and Margarita : Eulensigel 1986/46 Trybuna Ludu 1986/11/01 Three Sisters: Film Szi'nhéz Muzsika 04-01-1986 (by Lészló Ablonczy) Élet és Irodalom 03-01-1986 (by Tamés Koltai) Szinhéz 1986/3 (by Istvën Nénay) Theater der Zeit 1986/4 (by Irmgard Mickisch) Streven, Antwerpen 09-08-1986 (by Cartos Tindemans) Danas, Zagreb 07-04-1987 (by Dalibor Foretic) Theater Heute 1987/11 (by Renate Klett) La Stampa 28-04-1988 (by Guido Davico Bonio) The Guardian 15-07-1989 (by Michael Billington)

Jénos Acs ; Marat/Sade : Mozgó Viliég 1982/2 (by Andrés Pélyi) Hi'd 1982/10 (by Tamés Koltai) Szi'nhéz 1982/3 (by Péter György) Politka 1982/9 (by Branislav Milosevic) Knizevna Ree 1989/9 (by Svetislav Jovanov) Kierunki 14-12-1986

Gébor Székely : Sea-gull : Népszabadség 21-01-1972 (by Tamés Koltai) Magyar Hi'rlap 05-02-1972 (by Andrés Pélyi) Jelenkor 1973/2 (by Lészló Peterdi Nagy) Szi'nhéz 1 973/7 (by Péter Balassa)

Catullus ; Népszabadség 14-03-1987 (by Miklós Almési) Szi'nhéz 1987/6 (by Istvén Nénay) Theater der zeit 1987/7 (by Ingeborg Pietzsch) Zürichsee Zeitung 05-05-1989 (by viviane Egii)

Jénos Csényi : A Midsummer Night's Dream : Élet és Irodalom 06-01-1995 (by Tamés Koltai) Népszabadség 25-01-1995 (by Péter Molnér Géi) Szi'nhéz 1995/3 (by Adrienne Dömötör) t

Poland

'• V vj/.v r THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN POLAND 1945-1989

Research by Dr. Juliusz Tyszka

Contents:

I 1945-1956. Captive theatre in conquered country 2

II The period of thaw 1 1

III The breakthrough of 1970-1971 24

IV Silence and storm: 1973-1981 27

V From Martial Law to Freedom: 1981-1989 31

Notes 38

General bibliography 39

1 I. 1945-1956. CAPTIVE THEATRE IN A CONQUERED COUNTRY

Poland was one of the victors of World War II, but there have been strong disputes among historians, politicians, journalists and even quite often) ordinary people over the historical value of this 'victory'. For the outcome of the war was extremely tragic for Poles on many different levels.

Firstly, there were enormous human losses: more than 6 million people died during the war; that was more than one sixth of the pre-war population. Among those who were killed were many intellectuals, politicians and other members of the social elite. The policies of both the German and Soviet occupiers towards the Polish population was clear: to deprive Poles of their leaders, intelligentsia and representatives of state, and to subordinate them totally to the occupational powers, thus relegating them to a nation of slaves, unable to resist or even to recognise clearly their situation.

Secondly, industry was smashed, agriculture devastated, and almost all major cities were ruined (95% of Warsaw was destroyed).

Thirdly, no part of Europe was more profoundly affected by great displacements of population. Polish citizens were deported in all directions by both occupying powers during the period of German-Soviet partition (September 1 939-June 1 941). After the war more than 1.5 million Polish nationals were transferred from the territories annexed by the USSR (about one third of Poland's pre-war territory) to the new Poland. They found new homes in the region east of Oder-Neisse, in West Pommerania and East Prussia which had been German before the war and incorporated into Poland in 1 945.

The biggest controversy, however, was the issue of the war's political outcome and its consequences for the new Polish state. The future of Poland was determined and defined in the process of the superpowers' negotiations in Yalta (1944) and Potsdam (1945). The new European order, with Central Eastern Europe subordinated to the power of the USSR, was determined without consulting Poland or the other nations in question. Poland, an ally who provided more than 200,000 soldiers to fight on both fronts and another 100,000 to the biggest European clandestine Home Army, was allowed neither to determine its post-war territory and population, nor its future political and economic order. Stalin's Russia took Poland as a spoil of war, along with the other Central European and Baltic states and East Germany. Churchill, in declaring the beginning of the 'cold war' in 1946 and thus sanctioning the division of Europe, was perfectly aware of this situation.

The partition of Europe created a schizophrenic situation for the majority of Poles for almost five decades: we were regarded as enemies and non-Europeans in the West whereas in fact our political and cultural orientation was almost totally pro-Western and pro-European. (I remember well the meeting of the representatives of the Polish student theatre with cultural officials of the French region of Picardy in May 1980. After our declaration that the Polish 'young theatre' movement was politically oriented they made a number of remarks and comments concerning our 'communist agit-prop' orientation. They simply could not imagine any other issue, whereas what we had in mind was actually strong anti-communist opposition).

Stalin's Russia began very quickly to enforce communist totalitarian order in Poland. In fact, according to testimony from a number of sources, NKVD and the KGB penetrated the Polish political and cultural communities in Western Ukraine and Belorussia from the very beginning of Soviet aggression against Poland in September, 1939. The first two to three years of our

2 post-war history were, however, full of hope and enthusiasm. There was general approval for some kind of 'new order', more to the Left than before 1939. The Provisional Government of National Unity introduced state management to all major industrial establishments and issued a decree on land reform. The reconstruction of Warsaw had begun.

Officially, Polish theatre didn't exist at the time of the German occupation during World War II. The German 'cultural policy' was clear: the nation of slaves needed only a few simple distractions and some basic education. Polish schools were limited to the first four classes of primary school, and the teaching of Polish literature and culture was forbidden under the penalties of death or concentration camp. Radio sets were confiscated and theatres were closed down. Soon Nazi occupants offered Poles a net of 'variety theatres' with minor, pornographic repertoire. Polish artists, encouraged by the government-in-exile with premises in London, and the Home Army, boycotted these enterprises. Artists who had decided to perform in 'variety theatres' were punished, sometimes severly (the weakest punishment was infamy, the heaviest - the death penalty).

The clandestine theatre movement developed soon after. The theatre of Leon Schiller in the monastery of Samaritan Sisters near Warsaw, the experimental Independent Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor and Rhapsodic Theatre of Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk (both in Cracow) were the most significant artistic initiatives of that time. Thousands of performances were given on Ger- man-occupied territory, without the Nazi authorities catching on. In August, 1940, under the auspices of the Polish Government-in-exile, the Clandestine Theatre Council started its most intensive activity. Its members, the most prominent artists of Polish theatre, were coordinating the boycott of 'variety theatres', providing material help to all theatre artists in trouble, organising clandestine theatre life under German occupation and planning the future shape of Polish theatre following liberation. The outcome of these activities was, among others, a detailed plan of future theatre life in free Poland. Shortly thereafter, under the influence of the Clandestine Theatre Council, underground theatre schools in Warsaw and Cracow began with educational work, which was continued until the end of the war.

The enthusiasm of the first post-war years was shared by the Polish theatre community. Soon the majority of the 36 destroyed theatre buildings were reconstructed. New theatre ensembles moved in, and began to play long-awaited Polish classics for an enthusiastic public. Theatre schools, theatre studios and The Union of Polish Stage Artists (ZASP) began to work freely and enthusiastically as soon as the war was over. Polish actors and directors were determined to initiate serious and wide-ranging reforms in the organisational system, repertoire and artistic style of our theatre. They expressed the will to break away from the commercial model of theatre because theatre-as-a-distraction had dominated the pre-war period. The continuation of the noble Polish tradition regarding theatre as a national artistic and educational institution seemed obvious and clear.

The community was open to many different foreign traditions and experiences, including Russian ones. Even before the war, in the times of the 'red curtain' on the Soviet-Polish border, many Polish artists declared their will to profit from the experiences of Russian academic and avant-garde theatres.

In the winter of 1945, just after the Soviets took over Cracow, a group from Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre gave on-the-front performances in the city. Jerzy Zawieyski, a novelist and playwright (and a devout catholic) wrote: "In this theatre, as also in other Moscow theatres, there exists something that we never had (with perhaps a few exceptions): a lively interest in the problems of art, and in particular questions concerning the art of acting. From the artists of the Vakhtangov Theatre we learn that

3 I

their entire life is concentrated on working to expand their means of expression. ... Their extraordinary results follow from their talents, but are also an outcome of the high culture of their craft."'

The unconstrained atmosphere of contact with the Soviet theatre and its tradition was soon disrupted by propagandist considerations. Polish Communists took complete power by the end of 1948. Inspired and steered by Stalin's Russia, the "cultural policy" of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) and of the party-controlled government aimed to embrace theatre activity within the planned economy and the increasingly potent apparatus of state propaganda. As early as June 1946, during the first (and last) meeting of Theatre Council, the government advisory body of eminent artists, the well-known writer, playwright and Deputy Minister of Culture and Art, Leon Kruczkowski, stated: "The consequences of changes that have come into effect in Polish life...must include the theatre. ... This follows from the theatre's great functional importance as a powerful and extremely suggestive instrument of influencing the masses. We want the theatre in democratic Poland to educate its nation, so badly educated till now."^

Thus announced, the 'consequences of changes' did not keep the nation waiting: the Soviet, centralised model of theatre management was introduced in a rapid, hasty fashion. In the spring of 1950 all theatres were nationalised and were to be almost totally supported by the state. The ministry (in fact the Section of Culture in the Central Committee of PZPR which in the communist system was a body superior to the ministry) took total control over all theatre activities. The directors were nominated by the minister. The ministry officials fixed and confirmed the repertoires as well as the style of acting and directing. Theatre budgets (including the income from ticket sales) were the subject of central, ministerial planning and confirmation. The enthusiastic audiences from 1945-1947 were ignored by the state planners. The public existed only as statistics to serve as proof that the 'socialist model of culture' was the best in the entire world.

From 1949 or 1950 until 1956 there existed in Poland at least ten systems of state control over a given theatre's director and his staff:

1. Each theatre was subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and Art which controlled repertoire, budget and employment policies. The ministry fixed the official proportion between Soviet, Russian, classical Polish, modern Polish, 'socialist' countries and 'progressive' Western plays in theatres' repertoires.

2. PZPR had its division in every institution. PZPR's cells in theatres carefully monitored the decisions of theatre directors. If the first secretary of PZPR's division was in conflict with the director, the party and the ministry supported the former in 90% of all cases.

3. Preventional censorship took place on two levels. First, the censors had to give their approval for undertaking work on a given show, and second they had to approve the performance itself. No rehearsals of any show could start before the script received a seal from the Central Office of Control of Publications and Spectacles (the official name for censorship) or one of its regional branches. Then the censors would attend general rehearsals. In many cases they were accompanied by party and administration officials, as well as agents of the secret police. Their decisions were impossible to fight. Even after such inspections there were sometimes refusals to allow the presentation to go ahead on opening night. These cases were very rare, however, as the mechanisms of 'preventional' control were numerous and very efficient.

4

I Anyone wanting to take a show on tour also needed special, specific permission from the branch of each region (voivodship) where the tour was meant to go. The number of voivods- hips was 17 (up until 1975) and since then this number has grown to 49. I remember in the late 70s, when I was a leader of a student theatre group, having to mail the scripts of my shows to many regional censorship branches if I wanted to perform on tour outside my home city of Poznafi. It was, however, rather easy to get such permission as the censors were too busy (or perhaps too lazy) to carefully read scripts which already had been checked. The exceptions were the regions where so called "anti-socialist events" (riots, strikes, protests, hunger strikes, etc.) had taken place prior to the planned tour, in these cases control was scrupulous and very detailed. I must stress, however, that the situation for Polish artists in the early '50s, in the time of Stalinist order, was incomparably more severe than in the late '70s.

4. Communist trade unions and artists' associations did not represent artists' and workers' interests but simply transmitted the party's and ministry's orders, directives and 'suggestions' to the theatre community. In 1949 ZASP became the object of many anti- democratic changes and in 1950 a new, a totally conformist organisation replaced it under the new name of the Association of Polish Artists of Theatre and Film (SPATiF). The first head of SPATiF was Leon Schiller.

5. 'Theatre councils' existed in every theatre as the expression of 'collective governance'. Generally, with a few exceptions, they transmitted the directives of the party and controlled all important decisions.

6. A network of secret police (UB) and army counter-espionage denunciators were present and very active in every institution and public place in the country. One of the most important rules of Stalinist order was summed up by the adage, "If somewhere there are two of you. Papa Stalin is with you" (or by the slogan from Orwell's 1984: "Big Brother is watching you").

7. There were periodic ministerial controls and inspections.

8. Theatre critique was inspired and governed by the party. Many of the so-called reviews were in fact designed to inform against (denunciate) theatre artists.

9. Awards and gratifications, both official and unofficial were given out. The latter were the most frequent and efficient since those who accepted them, in essence, expressed their subordination to the omnipotent state power. The total control of the state gave party and state officials the opportunity to distribute various privileges amongst those who obeyed their orders. The system was mafia-like; you do 'us' a favour and 'we' won't forget it; or: 'we' do you a favour so be ready to return it when the proper time comes. The 'favours' were very easy to do in a country devastated by war, where there were shortages of almost everything. The 'favour' could be, for instance, holidays in a luxurious state pension, a coupon for a state-distributed cheaper car, a cheap flat in a state controlled 'housing cooperative', permission to be treated in the hospital for party and state officials, permission for a son or daughter to study at university, permission to eat lunches in a special canteen on party committee premises, and so forth.^

If someone did not accept the communist order he/she was in real danger. In the period 1949-1956 it was extremely difficult, dangerous and risky to be in conflict with the state power. Those who were courageous, reckless, or stupid enough to enter into such conflicts risked their lives and the lives of their families. Everybody was perfectly aware of what was going on in the

5 country: non-conformists were disappearing or living in poverty without support from friends who were too scared to help them.

The time soon came for the party to take control even of theatre style and methods of work. In June 1949, during a so-called 'theatre briefing' in Obory, near Warsaw, Polish artists were given to understand that from then on they should create their works in the spirit of 'socialist realism'.

Has there ever been such a thing as 'socio-realistic' acting, directing 'method' or 'artistic style'? I subscribe to the opinion that socio-realistic creation was taking place in the sphere of people's ethical activity, because the unquestioned requirement under Stalinism that everything have a useful social purpose, which underscored all human existence, couldn't, after all, omit the Art World.

Therefore, one shouldn't write about an actor, rather about 'stage activist' - 'teacher', 'engineer of human souls'; not about the artistic experience of a spectator but about the efficatious influence on that spectator's actions outside the theatre. Consequently, it is not possible to write about 'socio-realistic acting and directing method, and style' which, in fact, have never existed in reality, even during the peak of 'social realism's' development, in the early 50s.

The peak of 'socio-realistic' theatre finds its place in communist Utopia where acting, even in the 'living', interactive sense, simply disappears. A person on the stage is totally, indivisibly 'a stage activist', passing on his/her 'private-public truth' to the 'activists' in the audience. The consciousness of the latter is thus filled, if I may say so, with the same 'private-public contents'. Through their perceptions they close the circle of values, ideas, norms and emotions. No 'truth' exists, because if everyone says only what he/she feels and thinks, and everybody feels and thinks the same, then no lie exists either. Everyone knows and feels everything, that is to say, the same as everyone else.

The 'method' of the internal work of the 'stage activist' (and of every citizen) would be based here on the gradual and total captivation of his/her mind and body through the social system's imposition of values, ideas, norms and emotions. The process would cause in him/her the disappearance of honesty and authentic thoughts and feelings - in other words, the disappe- arance of his/her personal identity as we currently understand it.

Fortunately, the communist Utopia never reached the borders of reality. In practice, the enforcement of 'socio-realistic aesthetics' and 'methods' meant that Polish stages increasingly frequently featured so-called 'production plays' which were in fact typical examples of pure propaganda. The protagonists of these kinds of plays were always the effective, positive and devoted-to-the-party workers or peasants, while the villains, usually CIA or MI6 agents, came from the intelligentsia or the middle class.

The last efforts of Polish critics and artists to fight against the enforcement of 'socio-realism' in our theatre involved discussions after the tours of Louis Jouvet's Théatre de l'Athénée, the Moscow Puppet Theatre of Sergei Obraztsov and the Moscow Dramatic Theatre of Nikolai Okhlopkov. The critic who was still courageous enough to defend the variety of styles against 'socio-realistic mono-culture, Józef Maélihski, wrote after Jouvet's tour in Spring 1948: "We saw 'unconventional, unrealistic realism', almost the same as that applied by Russian artists after 1905, in the period of bourgeois art's crisis. ... One may express the same things with many different languages and we should understand it. One may build a real cottage of real wood on the stage. One may pour real water over characters entering the stage from rain and thus, pretending 'real realism', one may present a mystical, pretentious fairy-tale. But one can also express living truths in the language of stylisation and stage metaphor, and thus give fresh blood

6 to reality. ... Knowing that our new reality will bring new forms to our theatre of socialist future we should be neither orthodox formalists not orthodox supporters of Stanislavsky.""

Obraztsov's tour in the Autumn of 1948 once more inspired Maélirtski to defend Polish theatre tradition and to speak out against the enforcement of 'socio-realism'. It turns out - he wrote - that Obraztsov who was educated by Stanislavsky's theatre tried to elaborate his artistic style in a way very similar to the best theatre artists who were fighting both with the clichés of naturalism and with literary salon blah-blah on the stage. Obraztsov did it in the name of the 'neorealistic' monumental theatre of great poetry, described by Mickiewicz in his lectures at Collége de France and made by our best metteurs en scène and directors.®

The last words of Maólirtski were an obvious defence of Leon Schiller's theories and artistic achievements. Schiller, 'the giant of Polish stage' (b. 1887) was already in danger. Young 'socio-realist' critics (Jan Kott, Adam Wazyk) had just started a campaign against 'the old formalist pretending to be the up to date socialist artist' which was a clear sign of being in the party's bad graces.

Okhlopkov's theatre tour in the Spring of 1949 was Maólirtski's last opportunity to express his views. He wrote; "Theatre-goers who understand theatre through "Cherry Orchard" in the Moscow Art Theatre opened their eyes widely in surprise after having seen Okhlopkov's shows: 'This is pure eclectism!' - they shouted. Yes, in their language it is pure eclectism. (...) In our language we call this kind of staging the melting-pot of all forms and means of stage expression. What's more, we do think these forms and means are good enough to convey a real truth about new ways of life and art to the spectator."®

Maélirtski was one of the best and bravest critics defending theatre art against the invasion of 'socio-realism' up until the last moment. His non-conformist attitude didn't survive long, however. Soon he was forced to write a number of articles on 'Stanislavsky's System' defining it the best, most 'progressive' and most 'scientific' method of acting and directing in the world. This was how he had to prove he was worthy (i.e. obedient enough to PZPR) of being a theatre critic.

And so the poster-like tendentiousness of 'production plays', naturally staged, caused the Polish theatre to regress to the time of Antoine and his Théêtre Libre. The romantic and neo-romantic dramas of Slowacki, Mickiewicz, Krasirtski, Norwid and Wyspiahski (the heart of Polish drama and theatre tradition) and modern avant-garde plays by Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz were forbidden. A Polish or foreign classical play was allowed to appear on stage only when party officials had sanctioned its 'progressive' message. 'Progressive' meant sanctioned personally by Stalin or by one of the members of his 'imperial court' or at least by the PZPR politburo. There was no other measure of 'progressiveness', 'political correctness' or 'aesthetic values'.

By the way, one must discover just how important theatre was in that era, how highly it was recognised as, let me use Kruczkowski's words, 'the instrument of influencing the masses'. The high esteem for and evaluation of theatre goes back to the time of the quick development of the revolutionary Bolshevik party in Russia. There, theatre was considered to be the most suggestive tribune for the people of our time ' which could do everything with the spectator that the artists intended.®

Many theatre people in our country feel somewhat nostalgic for this time. They don't feel comfortable in the roles of actors or directors - [only] masters of their craft, no longer 'stage activists' or 'revolutionaries through art' - communist or anti-communist. They miss the time when theatre was considered as something much more than theatre as such, both by party or

7 state authorities and the people. They often express their disenchantment and grunnble that they have been brushed aside and neglected by history and society.

There were no other modern Polish plays besides 'production plays'. Almost all modern Western plays had been 'diagnosed' as 'hostile to the 'values of socialism' and thus strictly forbidden. Critics quite seriously compared the performances of actors of Nowy (New) Theatre from Lódz in their production of Victory by Janusz Warmirtski (1951) with the behaviour of the authentic protagonists of the story on stage - peasants who had founded a co-operative in their village. The postulates that theatre should be true to reality and that an actor should identify with a stage character were pushed to the utmost.

The Nowy Theatre may be considered the 'peak of conformism' (or maybe 'the peak of stupidity') in the realm of Polish theatre during the Stalinist period (1948-1956). It was founded in December 1949 by a 'collective' of young actors (the group's leaders were Kazimierz Dejmek and Janusz Warmirtski) who a few months earlier had declared their devotion to the ideals of socialism, to Stanislavsky's Method and to the 'aesthetic' patterns of 'socio-realism'. They had been rewarded shortly thereafter with a theatre and institution in Lódz where they began to stage 'socio-realistic' plays in a 'socio-realistic' manner. Before staging the 'production play' by Ukrainian writer Alexandr Korneytchuk entitled Makar Dubrava (1950), which showed 'collective work' in a coal mine, they visited one of the mines in Upper Silesia in order to 'get better acquainted' with the conditions of work in such an enterprise, and also to meet several 'miners' colectives' and local 'labour champions'. The style of their staging and acting was ultra-naturalistic, perfectly in order with the aesthetic and political directives of socio-realism's 'gurus' such as Zhdanov, Kyerzhentsev, Markov and Kedrov. The collective of Nowy Theatre was soon given a State Artistic Award and a dozen medals and gratifications. Up until 1 954 it was being presented to the public as the 'leading collective' in Polish theatre. Warmirtski was even allowed to stage a romantic drama by Slowacki (Horsztyhski \u 1951) which was totally forbidden for any other theatre and director (except for Dejmek, of course). Party officials believed Warmirtski would produce Horsztyhski m a 'proper, realistic way', underlining the 'social message' of the play. Warmirtski didn't disappoint his protectors but the artistic result was very poor as the romantic drama in his interpretation resembled many realistic and naturalistic dramas from the end of the 19th century.

The total power and control of the communist party was established in 1949-1950 for good (many people believed forever). Theatre contestors and oppositionists, and even the people who simply had not fit the patterns of the 'cultural policy' were brushed aside (e.g. Edmund Wier- cirtski, Wilam Horzyca, Irena and Tadeusz Byrskis) or fired from all prominent posts. This is what happened to the most famous, talented, visionary artist of Polish theatre, Leon Schiller, in 1951. (After that he was only allowed to direct opera and edit historical reviews).

I can't point to many examples of negative political reactions to performances which had already been staged and shown to the public since, as I've just mentioned, the control before the opening night (carried out in various forms) was very strict. There were, however, several cases of party-inspired 'corrections' after a show's premiere. For instance, Leon Schiller, before being fired from Polski (Polish) Theatre in Warsaw in 1951 was forced to make many corrections in his staging of God, Emperor and Peasant, a worthless, agit-prop play by the Hungarian communist author. Hay. The party's intervention was a perfidious humiliation of the great artist who, by the way, after his return to Poland in 1946, had constantly and even more profoundly demonstrated his devotion to the ideals of communism. Two cases where a show was 'cancelled' following dozens of performances occurred in 1946 and in 1950. The first show was Electra by Jean Giraudoux, produced in The Theatre of Polish Army in Lódz. Electra was the first (and the last) production of the experimental 'poetic stage' of

8 the theatre. The show's director, Edmund Wiercirtski, was one of the greatest artists of the time, the ensemble consisted of the best Polish actors (the army theatre was privileged; its authorities distributied food and clothes) and the working atmosphere was enthusiastic. The message of this sophisticated play was ambivalent, but particularly in the Polish post-war context three different messages could be clearly read from the show. Firstly, all ideologies and doctrines are false as they simplify the richness of the real world. Secondly, the fight against violence and the force which captivates a nation is always preferable to a neutral, passive attitude. (The latter message referred not only to the present situation of Poles but also to the decision of Home Army authorities to begin the Warsaw Uprising on August 1st, 1944. The outcome was more than tragic: the total destruction of the city (typical of Hitler's revenge) and half of its Polish population killed by the Germans. Communist propaganda referred to the uprising as 'the madness', not mentioning, however, that the Soviet Army for more than six weeks had been standing on the right bank of the Vistula river, waiting until the Uprising was fought by the Germans). Thirdly, the show's creators stressed the fact that in spite of the outcome of the war Poles still belonged to the universe of Western culture and were still able to read and understand their history and national identity through the great narrations of Greek mythology.

Crowds of spectators went to see the show, many of them several times, and many Lódz textile industry workers could be seen in the audience hall. Such a situation was dangerous to party officials who were planning rather different 'artistic attractions' for the representatives of the 'working class'. Electra was forbidden after its 44th presentation.

The second case was Don Juan by Molière (Polish Theatre, Warsaw, directed by Bohdan Korzeniewski) which had its premiere in 1950. Korzeniewski stressed Don Juan's libertinism and made him a contemporary cynical monster who challenged all the rules governing society. The associations with the communists were inevitable, all the more so as Don Juan clearly stated that one could commit any crime or blasphemy on the condition that he/she was supported by an organisation, formal or informal.

Shortly after opening night, all of the members of the party's politburo (the only one absent was the president, Bolestaw Bierut) came to see the show. Their official verdict was negative. The motive of such a decision was that the show was a popularisation of fideism and of superstitious practices. (Not long before the so-called 'miracle of Lublin' had taken place. The Holy Madonna had appeared to several people, and thousands came to see the Madonna and to profit from her miracles. In such a context the statue of Commandor could have been seen as an obvious allusi- on).

Bohdan Korzeniewski wasn't satisfied with such an explanation. He insisted on having the truth. Soon after the show was forbidden, one of the most prominent party rulers, Jakub Berman, the man responsible for both culture and the police (typical fusion in the Stalinist era), told him the truth during a face to face conversation. He openly estimated that PZPR's share of the vote in free elections would be at most 10%. The party desperately needed more members and supporters, no matter who they were. Many people with obscure or openly criminal pasts entered the party simply because membership provided them with privileges, power and impunity. Therefore, stressing Don Juan's cynical attitude and showing his punishment was considered an act of open criticism of PZPR politics.®

The communist party, which in that era was, in fact, an occupational power in a conquered country, was in the process of building up its criminal, mafia-like structure and 'Don Juan' showed very clearly the moral and intellectual evils of such efforts.

9 Electra and Don Juan were the most significant examples of conscious dissident message. Other examples were Murder in the Cathedra! by Thomas S. Eliot and Forefather's Eve (Dziadyl by Adam Mickiewicz, staged by the Academic Theatre of Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), the only catholic university east of the Elbe. In this case the mere choice of the plays (two of the most violent accusations of state power in international dramatic literature, combined with the anti-authoritarian and anti-Russian message of Dziady) was an expression of independent political and intellectual attitude. How was it possible? KUL was totally financed by the church and it preserved its independence even during the most severe period of Stalinism. The two above- mentioned premieres provoked strong reactions from the party's poiitburo, and the organisers and the members of the cast were subject to constant investigation for several weeks. The authorities were too cautious to provoke open conflict with the church hierarchy, however.

10

1 II. THE PERIOD OF THAW

The worst, most oppresive and painful period of Stalinism ended soon after Stalin's death (March, 1953). The Second Congress of PZPR (March, 1954) adopted, among others, a resolution calling for the raising of the standard of living. The collectivisation of agriculture was to be continued but with less pressure on the peasants. (After the breakthrough of 1956, it was abandoned forever. This was a great success for Polish peasants who were able to keep 80% of the arable land in their hands). The minister of public security responsible for UB terror was removed from office in December, 1954, and several high officials of his ministry were arrested on charges of using torture to force political prisoners to give evidence. Finally, the ministry itself was dissolved. (The changes were promising but not very deep. Many of the Stalinist oppressors are still alive and well. In 1995 two secret police agents of that era are still in the process of being sued for torture and inhumane repression of political prisoners).

The slow, evolutionary process of liberalisation was continued in 1955. Many political prisoners were released but the charges against them were not lifted. Great activity was displayed by intellectuals and artists who demanded the acceleration and deepening of the democratisation process.

In the summer of 1953, our theatre press was quick to convey the contentious statements of some Soviet and Polish artists. As the thaw spread, even Polish theatre administrators decided to distance themselves from their previous decisions and directives. At the Theatre Congress in May, 1954, Stanislaw W. Balicki, head of the Central Theatre Management at the Ministry of Culture and Art, asked: "Why is it that our theatre is becoming colourless and dull?" The question itself was sensational but the answer given by Balicki was even more astounding: "It is the schematism of contemporary drama... a rather clumsy transfer into our context of secondary features ... of Stanislavsky's method. ... Searching the classics for vulgar didactism ... has brought our theatre to dullness and boredom."'®

Thus the thaw affected even the top ministry officials. Radical changes of the entire system seemed inevitable.

The turning point came after the 20th congress of the USSR communist party (February 1956) and the famous report delivered there by Nikita Khrushchev. In March the first secretary of PZPR and president of Poland, Bolestaw Bierut, died in Moscow (there are well-founded suspicions that he was poisoned), and in May Jakub Berman, the politburo member responsible for the police and culture, was dismissed.

On June 28, 1956 the industrial workers of Poznart staged a general strike, and a procession of about 100,000 people demanded bread, freedom, free elections, and the departure of the Red Army and Soviet officials who had been well established in many Polish institutions. The event broke down the illusion of popular support for the party. The demonstration was followed by riots, attacks on secret police premises, the lynching of several UB agents, and demolition of devices jamming Western radio broadcasts In Polish providing non-censored political information. Order was restored over the next two days only by the army's use of tanks. Official reports said there had been 53 people killed (the real figures were much higher). Several hundred rioters were arrested and condemned to at least five years of prison on charges of 'anti-socialist activity provoked by Western spies'. In the summer, events accelerated. Wtadystaw Gomulka, party leader in the late '40s, then imprisoned, was released and restored as a party member. It was clear he was the only man who could restore party unity and authority. On October 19th, when the party's Central Committee was holding its general assembly to elect the new politburo, a number of Soviet party officials of the highest rank (among others, Krushchev, Molotov and Mikoyan) arrived in Warsaw. At the same time, the Red Army commenced unexpected 'manoeuvres' on Polish territory. The situation was clarified the next day when Gomulka succeeded in convincing 'Soviet comrades' that his return to power would not mean a worsening of Soviet-Polish relations and the European 'cold war' staus quo. Peace was salvaged (contrary to Hungary) but Poland still remained in the 'socialist camp'.

The result of these events was a series of important changes which finished the era of Stalinism in Poland. Russian army officers and government officials went home, the police force was subjected to government control, political prisoners were freed and many of them were rehabilitated. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyhski, the primate of the Polish Catholic church, was released from internment and returned to Warsaw in October, 1 956. By agreement between the state and Catholic church bishops, freedom of worship was restored. Several church-supported MPs from the circle 'Znak' ('Sign') had been elected to the parliament (sejm) and they acted for more than a decade as a kind of (closely controlled) opposition. Finally, censorship became more liberal, and 'socio-realism' was practically abandoned.

In spite of these important changes the totalitarian regime, enforced and supported by the Soviet Union, was still in power and soon the 'nomenklatura' began to regain lost territory. Stalinist order was impossible to restore but the party and state powers were still restraining the country's development in every domain. It soon turned out, for instance, that freedom of publication and the performing arts was still out of reach (preventional censorship was never suspended). As early as the beginning of the '60s it became obvious that strict party control over politics, economy, philosophy, social sciences, mass media and the arts would lead to another violent crisis.

In Polish theatre the thaw was continuing not only as a result of anti-Stalinist declarations by party and government officials. There were many strong declarations by the artists themselves and, first and foremost, there were some important productions which marked the end of 'socio-realistic' mono-culture which gained a great deal of public attention.

First was The Bath by Vladimir Maiakovski, staged by Kazimierz Dejmek in Nowy Theatre in Lódz. The Bath was the first premiere of Maiakovski's play in Poland for more than 20 years. The ensemble of Nowy, the first "socialist collective" in Polish theatre, was the only theatre company to get permission to stage such a 'blasphemous' play. Dejmek who, as all his generation did, felt cheated, deceived and used by Stalinist authorities, transgressed the party instructions. His staging of Maiakovski's anti-bureaucratic and anti-totalitarian satire turned out to be revolutionary in the Poland of December, 1954. His excess was, however, accepted by the 'progressive' and 'revisionist' wing of PZPR rulers who were delighted (although still somewhat scared) while attending the show. There were many excursions of party officials to Lódz to see the performance and to taste the 'forbidden fruit' of liberty in the arts.

The other sign of the thaw, very obvious and clear, was the opening nights of two masterpieces of national romantic and neo-romantic repertoire: Stanislaw Wyspiartski's Wesele (The Wedding) and Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefather's Eve). The first was performed by the ensemble of the Polish Army Theatre, recently transferred from Lódz to its new premises in the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science - a huge, awful building in the very centre of the city, a 'gift to Warsaw from the Soviet people', displaying its imperial, sharp-edged outlines to the entire city, including the

12 farthest outskirts. In spite of these circumstances, the premiere of The Wedding (June 25, 1955, directed by Maryna Broniewska and Jan éwiderski) was a true breakthrough. It meant that permission for staging national romantic and neo-romantic repertoire must have been given by the highest party officials. The theatre community remembered well that the project of staging Forefather's Eve by Leon Schiller (1948) was a subject of two politburo briefings and that the final refusal was expressed directly by the party's first secretary, Bierut. The anti-Russian message of Dziady (Polish Theatre, Warsaw, November 26, 1955) had been weakened but this powerful, poetic drama, in spite of many 'corrections', still sounded like a call for liberty and an accusation of ocupational power. One of the main subjects of many long debates, discussions and quarrels between the director, Aleksander Bardini, and party officials was the 'unrealistic' characters such as ghosts, angels and devils. The problem was that they weren't supposed to be shown to the theatre public in a country ruled by Marxist-Leninists who officially believed only in a material world. The outcome was that all the ghosts and angels were to be represented only by their voices whereas grotesque devils were to be relegated to the world of folk fairy-tales.

On January 16, 1956 Kazimierz Dejmek staged in his Nowy Theatre in Lódz Noc listopadowa (November Night) by Wyspiar^ski. The play focussed on the events of the night of November 30, 1830 when the uprising against Russian occupation was broken up in Warsaw. The style of staging was reminiscent of Leon Schiller's pre-war mises en scene and of the style of Jean Vilar's Théêtre National Populaire which had toured in Poland in October, 1 954 (the first tour of a Western company since 1948) and had greatly influenced many Polish theatre directors. Many young actors tried later to imitate the acting style of Gérard Philippe.

In the spring of 1956, two premieres of Juliusz Stowacki's romantic masterpiece Kordian took place in the Warsaw National Theatre (April 20, directed by Erwin Axer) and in Cracow Slowacki Theatre (May 6, directed by Bronislaw Dqbrowski).

The next signals of a breakthrough were the opening nights of Brecht's plays: Caucasian Chalk Circle (Stowacki Theatre, Cracow, Dec. 31, 1954, directed by Irena Babel), Herr PuntHa and His Man Matti (Teatr Wybrzeze, Gdartsk, Feb. 1955) and Good Woman from Setzuan (Polish Army Theatre, Warsaw, Feb. 18, 1956, directed by Ludwik Réné). The granting of permission to produce Brecht's dramaturgy was significant, as before the thaw Brecht was considered in all Soviet block countries a suspicious figure, opposed to 'socio-realism' in theatre. His theories on acting and directing were supposedly contrary to the dominant 'Stanislavsky System' and thus were fervently fought against. East German party officials invented a means of weakening Brecht's position: they decided to send the Berliner Ensemble on tour to People's Poland in December, 1952. They expected a storm of criticism from Polish critics and the theatre community which would enable them to start an open anti-Brechtian campaign in Germany. Their ultimate goal was to get rid of 'Brechtism' allowing 'socio-realism' to be the one and only doctrine of 'socialist theatre'.

They failed: after the tour of the Berliner Ensemble in Cracow and Warsaw, Polish critics and artists expressed nothing but admiration and enthusiasm. Something had to be done to weaken Brecht's success and to prevent the German party from accepting his 'theatrical blasphemy'. Some young critics were ordered by party officials to criticise Brecht's show. They did so, but the result of their action was pitiful; nobody believed them. For the next several years Brecht, his dramaturgy and his theories were for the people of Polish theatre a sign of hope that even in the communist block there exists something more modern and more sophisticated than 'socio-rea- lism' and the distorted, petrified 'Stanislavsky System'. Brecht's shows and ideas had a great influence on many Polish theatre artists, especially on Konrad Swinarski who had spent two years (1955-56) in the Berliner Ensemble. The autumn of 1956 and winter of 1957, a time of political breakthrough, saw other important events in the Polish drama-repertory theatre. First of all, Dejmek and his company, Nowy Theatre from Lódz, staged èw/^to Winkelrieda (Winkelried's Holiday) by Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jerzy Zagórski, a satire on typical Polish desperado war heroism. Dejmek's interpretation, however, stressed another aspect of the play: the criticism of autocratic power, bureaucracy and corruption. The characters of City-Mayor and his wife were direct references to the Polish prime minister at that time, Józef Cyrankiewicz, and his wife, a well-known actress, Nina Andrycz.

The next manifestation of the thaw in theatre came as Hamlet was produced in Cracow Stary (Old) Theatre (Sept. 30, 1956, directed by Roman Zawistowski). The Danish prince played by Leszek Herdegen was a sensitive, sophisticated intellectual involved in the world of political intrigues and crime. The significance of the Shakespearian premiere was very high as Stalin had refused to allow the staging of many of Shakespeare's plays in his empire in order to avoid associations of the plots of Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet or even Midsummer Night's Dream with the mechanisms governing his imperial court and the empire as a whole.

The beginning of 1957 brought the first premiere of an avant-garde Western play: Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the Warsaw Wspólczesny (Contemporary) Theatre (Jan. 25, dir. by Jerzy Kreczmar). The significance of this breakthrough in repertory politics was multiplied by fascinating staging and by the acting of four old masters in craft. Beckett's play was soon followed by many other 'absurd drama' plays, especially by lonesco, Sartre, and Adamov. The process of absorbing new Western dramaturgy was being supported by the newly created (May, 1 956) monthly Dialog which published modern Western and Polish plays.

The events supporting radical changes in theatre were numerous: in October, 1956 Bohdan Korzeniewski became a dean of the Directing School of Warsaw Theatre Academy; in December, 1956 Henryk Tomaszewski founded his Wroclaw Pantomime Theatre which gave a new impetus to the development of world pantomime; in February, 1957 the congress of SPATiF decided to add the pre-war abbreviation ZASP to its name. Authorities refused, however, to allow SPATiF-ZASP activists to officially represent the entire theatre community; in June 1957 Wilam Horzyca, an eminent director with significant pre-war credentials marginalized in the late '40s, took the post of artistic manager for the National Theatre; in November, 1957 the Cracow authorities re-opened the Rhapsodic Theatre of Mieczystaw Kotlarczyk. This unique theatre of declamation had been founded as a clandestine company during the war, and in 1953 it was charged by communist authorities with spreading fideist catholic values and was closed down soon after. The atmosphere of the thaw enabled Irena and Tadeusz Byrskis, also marginalized in the late '40s, to develop their 'theatrical holding' in provincial Kielce and Radom and to mark the great significance of their management by several important premieres (e.g., Maiakovski's Badbug, Camus' Caligula)

Up until 1960 the premieres of Polish classical and contemporary plays forbidden in the Stalinist era, the debuts of new Polish avant-garde authors, and the discoveries of modern Western dramaturgy were accompanied by several authorities' decisions proving that 'the owners of People's Poland' were very slow and unwilling to give up the power and privileges provided by the Red Army and by the pacts of Yalta and Potsdam. On the one hand, therefore, there were premieres of Wyspiahski's Wyzwolenie (Deliverance), Zygmunt Krasirtski's irydion and Nie-Boska Komedia (Non-Divine Comedy), Witold Gombrowicz's Iwona, ksi^zniczka Burgunda (Yvonne, the Princess of Burgundy) and èlub (The Marriage), Stanistaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's W malym dworku (Little Manor) and Wariat i zakonnica (The Madman and the Nun), Broszkiewicz's Imiona wladzy (The names of Power) and Andrzejewski's Ciemnoéci kryj^ ziemiq (The Darkness Covers the Earth), world premieres of PoUcja (Police) by Slawomir Mrozek and Kartoteka (Card Index) by Tadeusz Rózewicz. On the other, in September, 1957 Arnold Szyfman, a genial theatre manager. was dismissed from the post of general manager of the Warsaw Polish Theatre which he himself had founded in 1913.

And, first and foremost, the authorities did not allow for further presentations of Witkiewicz's Szewcy (Shoemakers! following its successful, sensational premiere in Teatr Wybrzeze (Seacoast Theatre) in Gdartsk-Sopot (Oct. 12, 1957 directed by Zygmunt Hübner). This visionary play showed the fall of both leftist Utopias and conservative values. Its sharp, grotesque form stressed an anti-doctrinal message. It was even forbidden to publish reviews of the show. The ban on playing Shoemakers and the closing down of the popular weekly of the young intelligentsia 'Po Prostu' (Straight Out) were the events which showed that the process of 'normalisation' had already begun. Gomutka, who didn't understand artists or intellectuals at all, knew well that the Polish people were satisfied with better living standards alone and did not need liberty in the arts.

The period which was named the 'little stabilisation', which I prefer to name after the Czech dissident Antonin Liehm the 'new social agreement' started in 1958. Gomutka fully satisfied his Moscow protectors: he restored the communist order with few liberal changes, among which the provisional compromise with the Catholic church was the most significant. There was no way back to Stalinist terror and poverty but, on the other hand, nothing could be done to weaken 'monoparty' omnipotence, omnipresence and total control over the entire country and nation.

Polish drama-repertory theatre entered the period of the 'new social agreement' much more independently than in the era of Stalinism, with wider repertoire, several young, talented Polish playwrights, new styles of staging, tours of Polish theatres abroad (ever since 1 954 when the Warsaw National Theatre took part, with great success, in the Paris Theatre of Nations), tours of foreign companies in Poland (the most significant being: The Shakespeare Memorial Company of Laurence Olivier, 1957, and Giorgio Strehler's Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 1958) and, above all, decentralisation of management and repertoire politics. Starting from 1 958 many important decisions concerning theatre activities were handed over to local authorities.

The system of almost-total control was thus weakened but not eliminated. The ministry still controlled personal, repertoire, financial and foreign exchange policies. When a theatre's manager intended to produce a Western play or world premiere of a Polish play he/she had to ask the ministry for hard currency to cover royalties (for the former) or simply for permission (for the latter).

Soon the ministry's politics turned conservative and very Stalinist. It became clear that strict administrative control and preventative censorship were not allowing Polish theatre artists and managers to undertake artistic experiments or a serious dialogue with the public. The Byrskis were brushed off once more, the key posts in the National Theatre and SPATiF-ZASP were taken by well known conformists, and the list of refusals to produce plays and adaptations defined as 'anti-socialist' grew every year (among others The Wedding by Gombrowicz, Police by Mrozek, The Castte and The Trial by Kafka (!), Reverend Marek by Slowacki).

After the description of the great breakthrough of the thaw one must ask a simple question: "what was theatre dissidence in a communist country?" In a country where totalitarian social, economic and political order has existed for at least two-to-five years the answer to such a question seems rather simple. Dissidence means the conscious refusal to take part in the process of the totalitarian lie. The picture of the world in every communist country was officially required to be in perfect accord with even the most detailed directive of the authorities. No citizen was allowed to say or even think anything different from the official statements issued by those in power. Theatre was an important part of this total lie, and therefore even the reflex of independent thinking was something truly revolutionary. Of course, I'm writing about conscious dissident actions and not about involuntary acts which were unfortunate enough to cause strong reactions amongst party and state officials.

There existed, however, another aspect of dissidence in theatre, less spectacular than that mentioned above. In my opinion, theatre could be considered dissident when it was composed of an ensemble whose operation differed from the mode of existence of mainstream repertory theatres (drama, puppet, operetta and opera) in the four factors which comprise the contemporary definition of theatre. Namely, it had to differ:

1. as an institution which organised theatrical performances, specifically regarding: a. the institutional and legal status of the theatre; b. its administrative structure;

2. as an ensemble of people who were working cooperatively with each other to create and perform theatre productions, specifically regarding: a. organisation of the work of the entire theatre staff; b. organisation of the work of the artistic group responsible for the performances; c. organisation of the contact with spectators;

3. as a place - an actual physical space formed with the intention both to facilitate communication between a spectator and an actor during a performance as well as to provide the spectator with an impression of Theatre as an artistic institution (not an office or factory) before and after the performance;

4. as a type of performance, specifically regarding the following relationships: a. actor - spectator, the basic relationship to which the next two are subordinate; b. actor - his role; c. performance - literature; or, using contemporary terminology, the performance as an autonomous art work and its manifestation on paper.

Such kind of theatre dissidence was impossible in the Stalinist period of Polish history (1949-1956) as Stalinist directives and patterns strictly covered all of the above-mentioned aspects of theatre. The control was total and there was no chance for either a minor trace of dissidence, or a minor discussion concerning the omnipotent 'socio-realistic' doctrine or the rules governing the theatre organisational system and its management. The fate of Soviet 'formalists' and 'people's enemies' such as Meyerhold, Kurbas, Michoels, Zinaida Reich or even less cruel fall of Polish great artists of the pre-war period were very impressive.

When the thaw had spread, there emerged an opportunity to undertake independent artistic creation which would oppose the totalitarian system not only (or even not at all) by showing its mechanism of the total lie. The great artistic, social and political importance of independent initiatives resulted from breaking off with aesthetic patterns and, above all, with institutionalised contact with the public. In mainstream drama-repertory theatres the contact with the spectator was (and still is) limited by the architecture of proscenium stage and by administrative rules and procedures which have made the spectator a statistic, and the actor an office worker. These limitations were multiplied during the Stalinist era by bureaucratic, oppressive rules and procedures which made theatre-going a compulsory duty in order to fulfill the plan and to make the statistics more impressive. Theatre's principal duty was (let me quote Kruczkowski's words once more) to educate the nation, not to enchant the spectators with the artistic values of the show. Compulsory theatre-going, combined with 'educational artistic strategy' (read: 'socio-realism' and 'production plays') made theatre shows at that time hardly bearable even to the most devoted theatre-lovers.

16 In the period of thaw, the time had come to break from these 'strategies' and rules. Drama-repertory theatre artists did it in their own way, although they couldn't transgress the limitations of bureaucratic administration or of theatre-as-an-institution and of theatrical space. This had to be done by independent, professional and (more frequently) non-professional artists who were free enough to make their own (although still limited) choices regarding the method of creation. 'Independent artists' were to be found mostly outside of the Polish theatre community.

In March, 1954 the Warsaw STS (Student Theatre of Satirists) began rehearsing its first 'satirical miscellany' consisting of a dozen scenes based on the texts of different authors. The premiere of Tu idzie m/odoéó (Here Comes the Youth) on May 5th, directed by Jerzy Markuszewski, inaugurated the activity of Polish post-war independent (alternative, off, young) theatre. The revolutionary change of the show creator's attitude was that young students from STS were trying to express their authentic passion, sense of humour, fears, options and joy. In a totally steered and controlled world this naive, awkward, primitive show sounded like thunder.

What made this possible only in the spring of 1954? Firstly, the founders of STS were recruited from the community of agit-prop groups of university students who would tour the villages with shows encouraging peasants to establish farm-cooperatives (kolkhozes), and would recite Maiakovsky's poems to encourage people to take part in the 1952 'elections' (with no alternative to PZPR). They would also organise the artistic elements of official ceremonies. This is why the activists of the Polish Union of Youth (ZMP), the totalitarian, mono-organisation of young people, let their theatre-making colleagues shape their shows more freely than was normally the case for official drama-repertory theatres. Secondly, the censors didn't check the STS scripts as carefully as those of professional theatre institutions. Student theatre was considered as a none too serious distraction for young people. It was also believed to have little impact on society due to its limited circulation as a result of the intellectual sophistication of the shows and (which was more than perfidious) of administrative limitations. 'The artistic, social and political activity of the Polish student theatre community, begun by STS, was a very important component of dissident theatre in Poland and lasted, in different organisati- onal and artistic forms, up until 1989'. In later shows the company of STS developed the gender of 'satirical miscellany'. After Prostaczkowie (Simpletons, Sept. 1954) and Konfrontacja (Confrontation, April 1955) came Myélenie ma kolosaln^ przyszloÉó (Thinking Has Colossal Perspectives, Sept. 20, 1 955, all of which were directed by Markuszewski), representing a real breakthrough in the theatre's curriculum. The company chose its patrons (Maiakovski, Galczyrtski, Piscator, Brecht, Meyerhold) and defined its attitude towards the changing reality. It's hard to believe but the founders of the STS still believed in the 'sunny future' of the communist world! Their principles were strictly socialist, their reaction to the first symptoms of thawing in the arts and in everyday life (jazz music. Western clothes, snobby, pro-Western way of life) was negative. They hadn't yet discovered that by criticising the thaw and the liberty of artistic expression they were acting against their own interests. They pictured themselves as a kind of principal sect defending the purity of the 'true socialist way of lite' against both totalitarian Stalinist power and the first supporters of the thaw.

There were several aspects of STS' criticism which provoked authentic positive reactions, laughter and reflection. For instance, STS openly criticised fervent Stalinist activists who, as the thaw spread, quickly 'changed their minds', joining the liberal wing of PZPR (it was not forbidden anymore) and demonstrating their disgust towards their former way of life. However, the last words of Thinking...: "There will not be a command 'Stand easy!'/ We will still stand at attention" caused a lot of reservations and even disgust among spectators. The STS shows which followed, Czarna przegrywa, czerwona wygrywa (Black One Loses, Red One Wins, Feb. 17, 1956) and Agitka (Agit-prop Show, June 6, 1956), both directed by Markuszewski and Wojciech Solarz were the peak of the company's politically involved creation. The scheme of 'satirical miscellany', elaborated in the first performances, showed its artistic and political power at a time when the company was still being confronted with unexpected, stormy political events. Typical elements of STS 'miscellany' were: a Soviet song (a sign of political and artistic perverseness), some gags and black-outs on up to date topics, an operetta or a long musical sketch, a parody of children's theatre, and several songs written by STS authors. Blackouts on politics in both shows were reversed, allowing them to play a role in providing up to date political comments. (Let me stress here the fact that in that period STS artists ignored the existence of the censorship office). Agitka was being played on tours in many cities, towns and villages. STS also played it during the hot days of October, 1956 at a meeting of young workers and intelligentsia which took place over several days in the hall of Warsaw Politechnic.

The most significant and influential members of STS, apart from the shows' directors, were the authors of texts: Jarostaw Abramow, Waldemar Dqbrowski, Andrzej Jarecki and Agnieszka Osiecka.

The pattern of 'satirical miscellany' elaborated by STS became the beloved gender of many student theatres of the era. Many companies, such as Lódz Pstrag (The Trout) and Cytryna (The Lemon), Wroctaw Kalambur (The Quibble), Poznart ZóHodziób (Callow Youth), cultivated and developed the gender which was a perfect tool for expressing the views and attitudes of the young 'October generation'.

"We are political theatre" - stated the ensemble of STS in Black One Loses... - "We are political theatre of the moment. We are a theatrical political newspaper. ... We may show a sketch on the production of corn if we have decided it is right and needed." Such an attitude was no longer necessary once the political breakthrough was completed - there was no longer a need for 'living newspaper'. In 1957 STS began to change its artistic profile, until finally it became a satirical theatre of the Warsaw intelligentsia of the '60s . The company which elaborated the most creative form of 'post-STS satirical miscellany' was Stodota (The Barn) from Warsaw. Their best and most famous show was, however, Ubu the King, a "scandalous fantasy based on the play by Alfred Jarry", written by Boguslaw Choirtski and Jan Galkowski (May 1959, directed by Jan Biczycki). It was one of the most bold, scandalous, and funny shows in student theatre history. The performance was a mixture of panopticum, absurd macabresque, claptrap, and historical variety show. Its creators were exploring the universe of Polish national myths and values. The spirit of parody and primitive schoolboy's joke embraced the entire reality of the performance. Poles were exposed to the public as the subjects and objects of a cruel, bloody history with no sense, no clear order and no future. Jarry had located the action of his play 'in Poland which means nowhere', and the authors of the show provided contemporary Poles with the clever prolongation of his cruel, funny claptrap. Ubu the King gave the young public a moment of release from political tension, and an opportunity to mock everything, including its own captivity. The show was, therefore, a true, authentic expression of people's feelings and attitudes.

The greatest rival of STS was Gdartsk Bim-Bom, founded in November 1954. According to rumours, the Gdahsk company didn't use text at all! (Which, by the way, might have been the best strategy for fighting against censorship). Unfortunately, it wasn't true. Bim-Bom actors would speak during the shows but their most important means of expression were poetic images, metaphorical blackouts, and gags with the use of prop-symbols. Each show was on the whole rather 'innocent', full of joy, jokes and joyful blackouts but taken together their influence on the public was truly explosive because of their revolutionary aesthetics, openness and the authenticity of the acting. The most popular Bim-Bom slogan was 'dreanning is a motor of action'. The group's main goal was to make its young public feel the joy of life. The goal was revolutionary, as in the era of Stalinism there could be no other joy than the joy of believing in a 'sunny future' and of participation in working towards this future paradise. Those who were unable to share this joy were considered enemies and punished in the most painful ways.

Bim-Bom played in student canteens, and in the halls of culture centres and the halls of academic buildings. All the actors needed was a kind of dais, for instance several tables gathered in the corner or centre of a room. What was most important was the spontaneous contact between young actors and young audiences, sharing their views and attitudes towards reality.

All the Bim-Bom programmes had the structure of 'satirical collage': Zero (1954), Acha (Ah, May 1955, directed by two founders of the company, young actors from the Seacoast Theatre in Gdartsk, Zbigniew Cybulski and Bogumil Kobiela), Radoéó powazna (Serious Joy. March 16, 1956), Toast (May 1957) and Coè by trzeba (Something Has to Be, 1960). All shows were directed by Cybulski and Kobiela. The authors of sketches and blackouts were (apart from both directors): Jerzy Afanasjew, Wlodzimierz Bielicki and Jacek Fedorowicz (students of Fine Arts Academy). The members of Bim-Bom invented two kinds of characters: cocky men and hurdy-gurdy men. The former symbolised the human struggle for power and wealth, human vanity and earthly ambitions, and the latter were singers of love, youth and joy, roaming the world, trying to improve it with songs, poems and clownery. Bim-Bom productions were reminiscent of the films of Chaplin, French surrealism and the films of Italian neo-realists.

New artistic forms in student theatre vere brought to life by the 'painful need for direct, authentic communication'. Stalinism made this impossible since every act of communication had to be mediated by the totalitarian authorities ('Where there are two of you. Papa Stalin is the third one'). Bim-Bom seemed to ignore the omnipresence of the ominous 'papa' embodied by the UB agents who came to control its shows. The simple content of Bim-Bom's performances did not contain overt political messages, as was typical for STS shows, but the mere fact of direct communication and the mode of the actors' existence were totally anti-totalitarian. People on stage wouldn't 'play'; they simply existed as they were. (Such a mode of existence was impossible in a Stalinist society where everyone had to perform his/her personal mimicry, pretending his/her consent for Stalinist order, and thus struggling for survival). Bim-Bom actors weren't playing; they were performing their 'human artistic actions' in anticipation of the counter- culture acting of the late '60s.

The third important student theatre company was the Cracow cabaret Piwnica pod Baranami (The Cave under Rams) founded in Spring, 1956 by art critic Piotr Skrzynecki and his friends, young actors and fine arts students. The first show by Piwnica..., Polska stajnia narodowa (Polish National Stable) had its premiere at the end of September, 1956. In spite of political tensions, conflicts and a generally unstable situation, the actors and public laughed loudly at everything: at power, bureaucracy. Heaven and even at themselves. One of the most important texts from the show was the parody of a sermon: "From the society where one man is unhappy because he says what he really thinks whereas another man is unhappy because he does not say what he thinks. From the society where another man lives a better life because he does not think at all...... redeem us, our Lord."

The style of The Cave under Rams was diffrent from that of Bim-Bom in many aspects. First of all it was reminiscent of Cracow cabaret tradition which dates back to the Green Balloon cabaret of local bohemians from the beginning of the 20th Century. The social structure of Cracow remained untouched by the war, and the city was still full of 'terrible bourgeoisie'. Therefore the draughtsman Bruno Schuiz and painter, writer, playwright, art theoretician and philosopher, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Cricot 2's first premiere was based on the text of Witkiewicz's Matwa (The Cuttlefish, May 25, 1956, director & author of stage design: Tadeusz Kantor).

The future Cricot 2 curriculum consisted of several stagings of Witkacy's plays, which were expressions of Kantor's artistic doctrines; W mafym dworku (Little Manor, 1961, informel theatre), Wariat i zakonnica (The Madman and the Nun, 1963, zero theatre), Kurka wodna (Water Hen, 1967, happening theatre), Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Beauties and Apes, 1973, impossible theatre), Umaria klasa (Dead Class), based on the fragments and motives of Tumor Mózgowicz (Tumor Brainowicz, 1975, theatre of death). The performances which followed: Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Niech sczezn^ artyéci (Let the Artists Die, 1985), Nigdy tu juz nie powróc^ (I Shall Never Return, 1988) and posthumous performance of 1 990 Dzié s^ moje urodziny (Today Is My Birthday! were the continuation and development of experiments and achievements of the theatre of death.

Kantor, the founder and leader of the clandestine Independent Theatre at the time of the German occupation, was a brave and radical innovator. He always stressed the bureaucratic nature of state official theatres, stating that an authentic artistic initiative 'needs small territory to develop its potential'. Cricot 2 was the theatre of painters, Kantor's friends. Up until 1983 it never had an institutional structure, being a totally informal artistic ensemble. The great success of Dead Class and the international career of Kantor's theatre posed a real challenge to official state theatres and to the communist party. In 1979 Cricot 2 was forced to work in Florence (Italy) on Wielopole, Wielopole. Its work in Cracow was endangered by local authorities who refused to renovate the old Krzysztofory Art Gallery where Kantor's theatre had been performing and rehearsing. Cricot 2 spent almost two years in Florence. After 1980 all the premieres of Kantor's performances were performed abroad.

The only independent initiative emerging in the milieu of professional theatre artists was the Polish Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Ludwik Flaszen and their collaborators, founded in 1959. The history of the ensemble is well known and is described in many books and articles.

Grotowski was not a dissident in any political sense of the term. He became a member of PZPR in 1955, and was an activist in revolutionary youth organisations during the breakthrough period of thaw. His theatrical work was, however, contentious not only in an artistic but also a political sense (see my remarks on student theatres).

The first six years of the Laboratory Theatre's history showed that local authorities in Opole and high officials in Warsaw as well as conservative, pro-communist critics were hostile to Grotowski's artistic achievements and research. They tried many times to dissolve his theatre, which was rather easy since Laboratory Theatre was the only state experimental theatre company in the world (founding it Grotowski profited from the fact that he knew many high state and party officials from the period of his fervent political activity in the mid-'50s). Officials from the Ministry of Culture and Art didn't allow the Polish Laboratory to go to the Theatre of Nations Festival in Paris in 1 964 (with Tragical History of Dr. Faustus by Marlowe, premiere in 1 963) or to the same festival in 1965 (with Constant Prince by Calderon-Stowacki, premiere in 1965). Finally the company received permission to go on tour to Scandinavia and Holland and to perform at the Theatre of Nations in 1966. The triumph of Constant Prince there confused the officials but it was too late to do anything to stop it. The international career of the Polish Laboratory Theatre had already begun.

21 The Polish Laboratory Theater opposed not only the petrified post-Stalinist structures and Institutions of artistic creation, but also the values, beliefs and interests of the Polish Catholic hierarchy. Not only the PZPR Central Committee secretaries expressed open criticism of his artistic experiments. In 1 969 primate Wyszyrtski himself attacked with great force the 'anti- christian' and 'inhuman' message Apocalypsis cum Figuris (premiere 1968) in a sermon before a hundred thousand pilgrims in front of the sacred monastery in Czqstochowa.

In the '90s Grotowski has stated many times that he and his company were "a bunch of Vikings" attacking the fundaments of Polish conservatism, both communist and catholic, which is obviously true. He has also pointed out that there were even some traces of political dissidence in his shows. For instance, the oppressors of Don Fernand in Constant Price (1965) wore the gowns and boots of army prosecutors. Associations with the Stalinist trials of members of the Home Army and the political opposition, including torture and political murders, were inevitable.

Grotowski's strategy of gaining quick international acclaim and moral support in order to survive at home paid off. Communist authorities, illegally installed in Poland by the Russian Big Brother and still subject to his whims, were very anxious about foreign public opinion which could question the legality of their power.

Grotowski left Poland in 1982, during the Martial Law period. One of his motives was that the authorities had insisted he join the official Council of Culture. The Council was to be a body consisting of prominent artists which sanctioned Martial Law order in the arts.

The years of the 'little stabilisation' ('new social agreement') did not give rise to many acts of dissidence. In 1964 two young scholars, former PZPR activists, Jacek Kurort and Karol Modzelewski, wrote an open letter to the PZPR Central Committee warning party officials of the next crisis which was inevitable in a country where 'nomenklatura' kept total control over everything. Kurort and Modzelewski were soon arrested and condemned to several years of prison.

In theatre there were a number of manifestations of dissident attitude but they were rare and they didn't have wider support. In the provincial town of Gorzów Wielkopolski (Western Poland), Irena and Tadeusz Byrskis tried once more to create a theatre institution in the pre-war Reduta tradition. They had employed dissident poet and playwright Zbigniew Herbert as a literary advisor, and produced his two one-act plays, Drugi pokój ar\ó Jaskinia filozofów (Second Room, The Cave of Philosophers, 1964, directed by Byrskis) after a major struggle with the censors. What was possible in Gorzów was totally unimaginable in Warsaw and Cracow where Herbert's plays were not staged until the '70s.

A sensational premiere of Witkacy's Shoemakers (banned in Gdartsk Seacoast Theatre in 1957) took place in the Wroclaw Student Theatre Quibble (1965, directed by Wtodzimierz Herman). Herman staged this politically grotesque play in a realistic way which was the best choice possible. Funny, catastrophic, ironic dialogues spoken by well trained amateur actors were received enthusiastically by a young public all over Poland. Shoemakers was presented more than 90 times. The way to produce this genial play in drama-repertory theatres was opened.

In the Cracow Rhapsodic Theatre Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk staged Mickiewicz's Forefather's Eve (1961), Goethe's Faust and Wyspiartski's/4^ropo//s (1966). The latter was produced on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Rhapsodic Theatre. Kotlarczyk, a zealous catholic, commissioned a mass in the Cracow Wawel Kings' Castle Cathedral in celebration of the anniversary. The mass was given by his close friend and member of the clandestine Rhapsodic Theatre during Nazi occupation. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Cracow and the future provocations of Skrzynecki and his friends were aimed not only towards Stalinism but also towards the petrified tradition of the 'Cracow noble catholic society'. Bim-Bom's poetry was present in The Cave's... shows but it was combined with sarcastic, critical, ironic slcetches full of self-irony.

The Cave under Rams is the only group of the first generation of student theatre which still exists. It has continued to play an important social and cultural role in the development of the Polish performing arts, influencing four generations of artists, bourgeoisie and tourists coming to the fabulous city of Cracow. It didn't cease to perform even during the Martial Law period (1981-83) staging, among others, the Martial Law Decree as a musical. Skrzynecki with his bohemian lifestyle and his grey beard is today one of the symbols of Cracow's artistic and cultural tradition and potential.

The Polish student theatres' aesthetic and political dissidence opposed the structure of state drama-repertory theatres in all four aspects of the definition of theatre. The social milieu of the young intelligentsia remained the main source of independent theatre creators, their friends, fans and supporters. The community of student theatres' friends and supporters, which had become quite big by the late '50s, was thus a constant potential source of contention.

Protected first by ZMP and then by the relatively independent Union of Polish Students (ZSP), student theatre groups were always more free in the ideological, political and aesthetic aspects of their creation than professional drama-repertory institutions. In the times of political breakthrough, it was obvious that young theatre artists from the student community would be first to join the revolt against totalitarianism. There were several occasions for such manifestations, which I will describe later.

Other founders and creators of independent artistic theatre were young poets and painters. Two initiatives from this milieu in the period of thaw are worth mentioning. The first was Teatr na Tarczyriskiej (Theatre at Tarczyhska Street) founded in Warsaw in June, 1955 by three poets: Miron Biatoszewski (one of the most original and talented poets of the last five decades), Ludwik Bering and Lech Emfazy Stefartski. Being young artists, not connected with any organisation, association or club, they decided to perform in Stefartski's flat at Tarczyhska Street. The choice of such a space was taken from the clandestine home theatre during the time of Nazi occupation. The shows acquired a reputation for political and aesthetic excess. Several dozen spectators sitting on the floor were united in a unique community, playing the role of the chosen, brave oppositionists, a contentious elite. Although these shows were required to have approval from the censor, they had an aura about them of illegal, clandestine political and artistic disobedience. The most important premiere of the Theatre at Tarczyrtska Street was a set of short plays by Biatoszewski Lepy, Szara msza, Wyprawy krzyzowe (Glues, Grey Mass, Crusades), directed by the author (February 17, 1956).

The style of Teatr na Tarczyriskiej was based on children's plays and games, using simple kitchen props and devices to perform, for instance, the stories of kings and princesses. The stage design had to be adjusted to the banal, everyday space of a living room. Plays and dialogues by Biatoszewski which had their premieres at Tarczyr'iska Street have been played in Polish drama, puppet and independent theatres up to the present.

The second independent theatre ensemble established by the artists was Cracow Cricot 2, founded in May, 1956 by Maria Jaremianka and Tadeusz Kantor. The group was named after Theatre Cricot - the company of Cracow painters from the '30s. The goals of the Cricot 2 founders were to associate theatre creation with modern trends in fine arts which meant to break from realistic mise en scène, acting and stage design. The patrons of Cricot 2 were writer and Pope John Paul II. Party officials who at that time were in open conflict with Wojtyta responded immediately to Kotlarczyk's 'offence'. They fired him and dissolved his theatre on July 18, 1967.

1968 brought stormy political events which were provoked by theatre productions. On November 25, 1967 Kazimierz Dejmek showed the premiere of Mickiewicz's Forefather's Eve (Dziady) in the Warsaw National Theatre (he had become its artistic manager in the early '60s). The party-steered critic welcomed the show warmly, stressing its rationalist score. There were even official statements suggesting a possible Russian tour of the show which could be sensational since the anti-Russian and anti-oppressive message of Forefather's Eve had been provoking patriotic feelings and hate toward the occupiers for more than a hundred years.

The idea of the tour was soon abandoned, however, when anti-Russian demonstrations started during and after the presentations of Dziady. There are some well founded suspicions that general Mieczyslaw Moczar, leader of the nationalist fraction in PZPR and the party official responsible for the police and secret services as well as Gomutka's greatest rival, used Dziady to provoke street demonstrations and riots in order to seize power in the party's Central Committee. Secret police agents quite easily provoked storms of applause for anti-Russian statements spoken on stage. This was intolerable as there were signals that the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw was ready to lodge an official protest. At the end of February, 1968 the show was banned. Warsaw students and writers protested. Student demonstrations and mass-meetings started on March 8 and shortly thereafter police and voluntary workers' 'forces of order' clashed with the demonstators. This was followed by strikes and demonstrations at several Polish universities over the next few days. The ban on Dziady gave the intellectuals and students the pretext to express once more their disapproval of post-Stalinist order in Poland, and to protest against the strict control of intellectual and artistic life. During street demonstrations students burned newspapers and shouted: "The press is lying!."

Soon after order had been restored (Gomutka succeeded in convincing 'Soviet comrades' that he was still the Polish leader best-suited to serve their geopolitical goals and interests) and Moczar had been dismissed from all his important posts and duties, came a time of severe repression. Censorship became even more strict, and leaders of the protest were imprisoned or cast away. The events of March, 1968 had allowed Gomulka and other party leaders to start a shameful campaign against Polish citizens of Jewish descent who held important posts in many political, scientific and cultural institutions. Many of them were classified as 'Zionists', supporters of the state of Israel (the Soviet Union supported the Arab states in their aggression against Israel in 1967) Several thousand Polish Jews were forced to leave their homeland, where they had survived German occupation and the Holocaust, in most cases thanks to non-Jewish friends who had risked their lives in hiding them.

Dejmek, although he did not feel guilty, was in disgrace. He was soon fired from his post as artistic manager of the National Theatre following which he gave up his PZPR membership. In 1 974 he returned to Lódz to take over the artistic and general management of Nowy Theatre once more. Today, in his seventies, he is the Minister of Culture and Art, recommended to this post by the Polish Peasant Party (PSL).

23 III. THE BREAKTHROUGH OF 1970-1971

The time of Gomulka was over. He had managed to survive two more years as the Central Committee's first secretary but in December 1970 he was surprised once more, this time by workers' demonstrations and riots in Baltic ports and the shipyards of Gdar^sk, Gdynia and Szczecin. Several hundred people were killed during police, riot police and army attacks. The post of first secretary was taken over by Edward Gierek.

A few days after the Seacoast tragedy, The Theatre Meetings, the most important festival of student theatre of that era, started in tódi. The student theatre movement, rather passive in the period of 'little stabilisation', responded to the events of 1968. The artists of the new, post-thaw generation needed some time to draw artistic conclusions from their political initiation. They were able not only to experience March, 1968 but to see Western performances at the Wroclaw International Festival of Festivals of Student Theatres in 1967 and, above all, in 1969. The shows of Bread and Puppet, Nouvelle Compagnie d'Avignon, Théêtre Création from Lausanne and many other companies gave them the opportunity to experience and analyse new theatrical ways of expression, new political messages, and new staging and acting techniques.

The Wroclaw festival had changed its name to the International Festival of Open Theatre in 1971, giving the young Polish theatre community an opportunity to compare their creations, way of life and ideas with Western trends and productions. The Wroclaw festival was, apart from the Warsaw Theatre of Nations in 1975, the most important institution of artistic exchange for all Polish theatre-makers. Boguslaw Litwiniec, co-founder and general manager of Quibble Theatre, created the festival and was its manager from the first year (1967) to the eighth and last in 1988.

Among the presentations at the Lódz festival were three significant ones which opened up new perspectives for alternative theatre in Poland. The first was Wprowadzenie do... (An Introduction to...) of Teatr Osmego Dnia (The Theatre of the Eight Day) from Poznah (premiere on April 28, 1970, collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak). Production of the show was 'commissioned' (read 'forced') by organisers of the student theatre festival in Lublin which was to take place in April 1970, just after the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth. The company took the problem seriously and demonstrated the consequences of common conformism and forced unity. In the script Raczak juxtaposed many different quotations from Lenin's works, making of them an absurd mixture of slogans. The effect was very comical. Eight Day's leader added to this material some important quotations from Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov (the monologue of the Great Inquisitor) and The Devils (the monologue of Vierkhovienski) showing totalitarian, crazy ideas at the roots of the whole communist system. The conclusion was, however, leftist, revolutionary and revisionist: "Let's make the real socialism more real and human."

The second was Spadanie (The Falling) of STU Theatre from Cracow, a theatrical collage based on the poem by Tadeusz Rózewicz and on many texts of different authors (premiere of the second version: Dec. 19, 1970, author of mise en scène & director: Krzysztof Jasirtski). Jasiriski applied theatre techniques of the counter-culture, and touched on a number of important Polish problems and issues. The second version of the show, inspired by the Seacoast tragedy was much more serious, bold, radical and contentious.

The third show which opened new perspectives for Polish student theatre was W rytmie slor)ca (In the Rhythm of the Sun) of Theatre Kalambur (Quibble) from Wroclaw, based on poems by Urszula Koziol and directed by Boguslaw Litwiniec. It was the first staging of poetry influenced by new ways of acting and mise en scène, invented and applied both in Western theatres and in Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre.

24 The impact of the new wave of student groups on Polish theatre, on political attitudes and the artistic issues of young people, was huge. The new rulers of People's Poland were, however, too busy building up 'national unity' after the national tragedy to bother about young theatre dissidents. Gierek and his camarades seemed more open, modern and easy to contact. Gierek had promised better relations with the West and soon started to borrow billions of dollars from several Western states and private banks. Poland's international debt was constantly growing, becoming an important issue in the second half of the '70s, the era of the organised dissident political movement. The secret police were limited in their actions at that time, as party rulers were afraid of Western economic sanctions.

December, 1971 brought new Lódz Theatre Meetings and three more important student theatre productions.

The first was Jednym tchem (In One Breath) of the Poznart Theatre of the Eight Day based on a series of poems by Stanislaw Barariczak, future dissident and co-founder of The Committee of Defence of Workers in 1976. In One Breath (collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak, premiere on Sept. 9, 1971 during the Student Theatre Festival in Zagreb, Yugoslavia) was one of the most violent accusations of the communist regime. The metaphor of blood donation alluded to the totalitarian nature of the system. Grotowski's 'poor theatre' aesthetics and techniques served as a vehicle for the powerful political message.

The second was Sennik polski (Polish Dream-book) of the Cracow STL) Theatre. It was 'the vivisection of the Polish soul' according to the dreams of, among others, Slowacki, Mickiewicz, Wyspiartski, Konwicki and Mrozek. The material consisted of important quotations from the masterpieces of national literature, providing an ironic, sarcastic analysis of the Polish national character, the history of Poland and our numerous sins and faults. Finally the 'eternal' question was asked (not directly, of course, as the show had been censored): should we fight or collabo- rate with the occupier(s) of the country?

In 1975, the STL) Theatre became the first Polish 'professional independent company' supported by the state entertainment entreprise. Its last great show was Patients, based on fragments of Bulgakov's Master and Marguerite (Nov. 1976, author of mise en scène & director: Krzysztof Jasirtski). Patients was a bitter, wise spectacle taking place in a circus arena. The world was presented to the public as a great prison which, coming just after the strikes, demonstrations and repressions of the summer of 1976, sounded loudly as an obvious allusion.

The third was the 'theatrical declaration' Kolo czy tryptyk (Circle or Triptych) of Theatre 77 from Lódz (premiere on Dec. 19, 1971, directed by Andrzej Podgórski & Bogumit Popow). The beginning of this 'theatrical event' was a 'press conference' on the Gdahsk and Gdynia 'events' in December 1970. The public was then invited to take part in a 'banquet' where everybody ate, drank and tried to forget about those who had been killed. The third part, a mute prayer for the Seacoast riots' victims, made everyone feel guilty. The message of the show was very dramatic and bitter: Polish history has been a series of tragedies caused by our own stupidity. The most important question in 1971 was: were Poles going to remain in a 'vicious circle' of national history or were they ready and able to say "enough' after the third crisis of the communist regime (1956, 1968, 1970)?

The attitude of the drama-repertory theatre artists of the era was rather passive. Very few theatre companies were trying to analyse political, mental and spiritual changes in Poland. The most important among them was Stary (Old) Theatre from Cracow. The creation of three great metteurs en scène and directors, Jerzy Jarocki, Konrad Swinarski and Andrzej Wajda was something extraordinary in the history of Polish theatre. It is hard to describe some of their

25 masterpieces as strictly political or dissident, but their message transgressed the limitations of public discussion of important philosophical and political issues. Therefore, they may be considered as dissident productions. Let me mention Wajda's Biesy (The Devils) by Dostoyevski (1970) and Noc listopadowa (November Night) by Wyspiartski (1974, remade as a marvellous TV spectacle in 1979), Swinarski's Forefather's Eve by Mickiewicz (1973, first staging of Mickiewicz's masterpiece after Dejmek's production in 1 967) and Wyzwolenie (Deliverance) by Wyspiartski, Jarocki's Shoemakers by Witkiewicz (1972) and Sen o bezgrzesznej (The Dream about the One Without Sin), based on the director's own script (1978).

26 IV. 1973-1981. SILENCE AND STORM

In 1972-73 the impact of the student theatres' 'second wave' weakened. Gierek succeeded in stabilising the economy and the 'post-revolutionary' situation of 'small stabilisation' was repeated. People started to consume goods imported from the West, censorship became more strict, and all acts of political independence or disobedience were persecuted. The liberal ZSP was transformed from a kind of students' trade union into the Socialist Union of Polish Students (SZSP), a 'party's arm' in the student community. There was no place for dissidency in theatre.

The student theatre movement was, however, already well rooted in the structure of SZSP, with a net of companies, student cultural centres and festivals. Such a base was strong enough to support relatively independent artistic activity. It was no longer easy, for instance, to dissolve student theatre or a festival. Many student groups profited from this status quo in the late '70s, when the political struggle for Poland's future was being waged by a growing network of anti- communist movements and organisations which provided the first impulse to the fall of the Soviet block.

History accelerated from the mid-'70s. In 1975 a group of intellectuals protested officially against the changes in the Polish People's Republic's Constitution, especially with regard to the declaration of Polish-Soviet 'eternal friendship' which sanctioned the status of Poland as a kind of Soviet quasi-colony.

In June, 1976 the workers from the towns of Radom and Ursus protested against rising food prices. There were several manifestations and riots, including an attack on the PZPR regional premises in Radom, but there were no mortal victims. However; just after the 'events' many workers were arrested, beaten by police agents, judged and ultimately sentenced to many years of prison. These actions caused great resentment and spelled the beginning of Gierek's end.

Several dozen intellectuals (Jacek Kuroh, Adam Michnik and actress Halina Mikolajska, among others) founded the illegal Committee of Defence of Workers (KOR) and started to organise material and judicary help for oppressed people. Soon after, other dissident organisations came to life: Student Committees of Solidarity (SKS), The Movement for Defence of Rights of a Man and a Citizen (ROPCiO), Flying University (an independent educational organisation), and in 1979, the first dissident political party, The Confederation for Independent Poland (KPN). The attitude of party and state officials towards dissidents was ambivalent. The authorities were powerful enough to arrest anybody they wished, but they were very concerned about their image in the West as the Polish national debt in the late '70s was more than 20 billion dollars.

The movement of student theatre (or the theatre of the young intelligentsia) revived thanks to The Theatre of the Eight Day, Provisorium from Lublin, Akademia Ruchu (The Academy of Movement) from Warsaw and many younger groups.

The Academy of Movement was founded in 1974 by an art historian, Wojciech Krukowski and has existed to the present. Its shows, events, interventions, environments and actions of many different kinds were based on the ideas of the 20th century avant-garde in fine arts as well as to counter-culture manifestations.

Autobus (The Bus, 1975) was an impressive seance which drew attention to the spectators' everyday efforts to survive and preserve their dignity in the context of 'real socialism'. The actors were immobile, sitting stock still in the poses well known from the famous 'socio-realist' picture The Bus by Andrzej Wróblewski.

27 Gazeta - nasza codzienna lekcja {A Newspaper, Our Everyday Lesson) was the first independent street theatre show produced in communist Poland. Akademia Ruchu displayed the mechanism of the everyday lie and the simplification of reality. The public laughed at newspapers and at themselves.

Many 'street interventions' aimed at opening people's minds, showing them the oppressive nature of their lives, including everyday gestures and even the architecture around them.

Action Dom (Home) was undertaken a few times in Poland and Italy, in conjunction with the inhabitants of a house who produced, under the care and direction of the artists, a show about their everyday rituals.

The Theatre of the Eight Day's political views radicalised in the mid-'70s, together with the views of the most enlightened segment of the young intelligentsia. The Soviet political and social order was defined as impossible to reform or renovate. The struggle for liberty, for human rights, for joining Europe seemed the only way. On February 28, 1975 the group showed the premiere of a collective creation entitled Musimy poprzestaó na tym, co tu nazwano rajem na ziemi? (Are We Supposed to Confine Ourselves to What Has Been Named Here the Paradise on Earth?). The title itself was provocative and Poznart censors couldn't tolerate it. They ordered the word 'here' to be removed. However, they missed a number of quotations from Solzhenitsyn and Czestaw Milosz, the great Polish poet in exile from 1952. The show was a violent expression of despair over and disgust of living 'here' and 'now'. The closed society of outlaws played expressively by the actors referred to Russian 'underground people', anarchists and terrorists of the 19th Century as well as to contemporary terrorists from the Baader-Meinhof group or Brigatte Rosse. The message was taken from Dostoyevski's The Devils: unlimited liberty leads to unlimited tyranny. All Great Utopias end with concentration camps.

In 1976 the members of the group, together with their friends Stanistaw Barartczak and Adam Michnik, began taking part in the work of KOR. They soon became the victims of repression (48 hour arrests, searches of their flats, bans on presentations of their shows at home and on international tours). The authorities were too weak, however, to dissolve the theatre or arrest its members. For several years, up until 1980, the authorities continued to try to put them in jail for a variety of criminal offences but they were unsuccessful.

The first Eight Day show after 1976 was Przecena dia wszystkich (Sale for Everybody, March 26, 1977, collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak). Up until June 8, 1977 the group was presenting the show unofficially, without the censor's permission, only for a 'specially invited' public. Sale for Everybody was a suggestive, universal vision of the 'sale of everything', including the most valuable, beloved personal beliefs of the company's members. Mass culture from West and East was devouring all authenticity and destroying people's minds. The reality of People's Poland was presented as a grotesque danse macabre of revolts, riots, victims and conformists who were passive and indifferent enough to accept the 'socialist', mass order of the world.

The third great show of Eight Theatre in the late '70s was Ach, jakze godnie zyiiémy (Oh, Have We Lived in Dignity, May 5, 1979, collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak). The show's creators asked the fundamental question about the essence of life 'under an empty sky', without God or any other transcendent value. All European revolutions were 'emptying the sky', leaving people alone and lost in a world without rules. What is man's destiny under an empty sky? What is a man then? A piece of meat? A set of chemical processes? The scene of a 'politburo briefing' was a fabulous parody of party rulers' debates and the boldest example of political cabaret.

28 In Summer, 1979 The Theatre of the Eight Day was professionalised and became the last Polish 'professional independent theatre', after STU, 77, The Academy of Movement and The Quibble. Authorities preferred to maintain direct control over the actions of the theatre. In spite of the professionalisation the repression of the group continued. In 1979 the theatre was forbidden to take part in the Theatre of Nations in Amsterdam and was the target of assault before the presentation of Oh, Have We Lived in Dignity in Warsaw.

The Theatre Provisorium of Lublin showed two important performances: Nasza niedziela (Our Sunday, 1978, directed by Janusz Opryiiski), based on the poetry of Czestaw Milosz and Nie nam iecieó na wyspy szcz^éliwe (It's Not Our Destiny to Fly to Happy Islands, Sept. 1979, collective creation, directed by Janusz Opryhski). The latter showed men's cell in a provincional prison, examining their fate and destiny in a totalitarian country (obviously alluding to the lives of Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Meyerhold and Solzhenitsyn).

There were also several important premieres in drama-repertory theatres, particularly in the Warsaw Powszechny (Public) and Dramatyczny (Dramatic) Theatres. The former presented Sprawa Dantona (The Case of Dantonj by Stanistawa Przybyszewska (1975, directed by Andrzej Wajda) and the Polish premiere of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1976, directed by Zygmunt Hübner, Powszechny's general and artistic manager). The latter finally received permission for a Polish professional world premiere of èlub (The Marriage! by Witold Gombrowicz, the great immigrant writer and plawright who was banned because of his collaboration with the Polish immigrant monthly Kultura in Paris.

The huge political breakthrough of the Summer of 1980 (strikes in Lublin and Seacoast ports and shipyards, the danger of a general strike and Soviet military intervention, agreement between the authorities and strikers on August 31, the fall of Gierek, and permission to found the independent trade union Solidarity) and the peaceful revolution of the 16-month 'Solidarity period' gave Polish theatres an opportunity to speak openly. Censorship didn't exist; in fact, there were no official limitations. The artists associations, including ZASP, finally became independent and their activists were able to work freely.

Drama-repertory theatres began to present forbidden dramaturgy and poetry. There was a series of such shows and recitals, especially after Czeslaw Milosz had been given the literary Nobel Prize in October, 1 980. Wszystkie spektakle zarezerwowane (All Shows Sold Out, Feb. 27, 1981, Public Theatre, Warsaw, directed by Elzbieta Bukowirtska) presented the poetry of Generation'68, including Stanislaw Barar^czak, Julian Kornhauser, Ewa Lipska, Leszek A. Moczulski, Adam Zagajewski and others.

Relac/e (Reports), March 4, 1981, Small Stage of National Theatre, Warsaw, script by Hanna Krall, dir. by Zofia Kucówna: memoirs of and interviews with significant protagonists of the most important events in People's Poland's history: leaders of 'illegal' strikes and party officials.

Powrót Pana Cogito (The Return of Mr. Cogito), poems by Zbigniew Herbert, April 11, 1981, Old Theatre, Cracow, author of the script & director: Tadeusz Malak, former actor of Rhapsodic Theatre.

Sztuczne oddychanie (Rescue Breathing), poems by Stanislaw Barartczak and other representatives of Generation'68, Sept. 13, 1981, Norwid Theatre in Jelenia Góra (West-South corner of Poland), directed by Jacek Zembrzuski.

29 Ambasador (Ambassador!, a play by Slawomir Mrozek, October 22, 1981, Polish Theatre, Warsaw, directed by Kazimierz Dejmek who became the artistic manager of the Polish Theatre in the autumn of 1980. The ambassador of a country which just had been wiped off the map, who was residing in the capital of a superpower, was presented as the Polish ambassador in Moscow.

Oftarz wzniesiony sobie (The Altar Erected for Oneself) by Ireneusz Iredyhski, Nov. 11, 1 981, Polish Theatre, Warsaw, directed by Jan Bratkowski, the first production of a Polish play written after August, 1980 under the influence of Solidarity's anti-communist "peaceful revolution".

Obora (The Byre) by Helmut Kajzar, Dec. 11, 1981, Small Stage of National Theatre, Warsaw, directed by the author. Kajzar was one of the most talented Polish playwrights and theatre directors. The Byre was written as an example of Kajzar's doctrine of 'metaeverydaistic theatre'. The action took place on a great state farm, depicting a gray, tough life, with vodka as the main source of consolation and beyond this, a great yearning for transcendence and for another, better world. It was one of the most moving productions of the 'period of Solidarity' which premiered just two days before the enforcement of Martial Law.

The most unique production took place in Poznart: on June 20, 1981 Nowy (New) Theatre showed the premiere of Oskarzony Czerwiec pi^ódziesi^t szeéó (Accused: June'56), directed by Izabella Cywirtska in collaboration with Janusz Michaiowski. The judiciary documents of the processes that followed the Poznart demonstrations, riots and fights of June, '56 served as the basis for the scenario. The production was sensational and soon became very popular since for 24 years the truth about the Poznart 'events' had been censored. The reaction of the authorities was not immediate but was in fact painful. Cywirtska was imprisoned for three months after Martial Law was enforced.

The reaction of the student theatre community to the Solidarity revolt in general was to give up theatre activities and undertake political ones. The most significant events of the 'Solidarity period' were these three;

1. Festival Student Theatre for Workers in Gdartsk (December 1980) which presented the most contentious shows of the late '70s to the protagonists of the greatest political event of the decade, organised in Solidarity's nest in tandem with ceremonies celebrating the 10th anniversary of December, 1970.

2. Confrontations of the Young Theatre in Lublin (May 1981). The Lublin festival had become the most important occasion for observing the artistic and political development of the theatre of the young intelligentsia, and the festival of 1981 was totally free and full of hope, although artistically ambivalent. The best show at the festival and in the entire brakthrough period was:

3. Wi^cej niz jedno zycie (More than One Life) by The Theatre of the Eight Day (premiere on April 2, 1981, collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak). The action of the show was located in a second rate cabaret or dance party in a café. The singers and comedians changed their identity and transformed themselves into characters taken both from Great History and from provincial, unimportant stories of everyday life. The message went well with the historical events taking place in Poland and with the mood of the public. There had still been trials to degrade human dignity and to force human beings to live in an inhuman way. In spite of Gulag and Auschwitz and all the horrors of last two centuries people preserved the joy of life, of motherhood and their dignity.

30 V. 1981-1989. FROM MARTIAL LAW TO FREEDOM

Martial Law was enforced on the Polish people on December 13, 1981, after 16 months of political struggle between Solidarity and PZPR. Was there a danger of Soviet aggression as in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968)? Nobody knew. What was obvious was that PZPR could no longer tolerate the fast pace of destruction of the post-Stalinist social and cultural order (the economic order remained untouched). It was clear that the 10 million strong revolutionary movement had to be stopped before it could take true revolutionary action.

The enforcement of Martial Law was in fact a coup d'état performed by the Polish army, which formed an Army Committee of National Rescue with general Jaruzelski as its head, which then took control of all the important institutions, enforced the legalisation of Martial Law decrees and ordered the arrest of all Solidarity activists, including its president. Lech Watqsa.

Martial Law was suspended on December 31, 1982 and called off on July 22, 1983 (the National Holiday of People's Poland) but many legal regulations brought into force on December 13, 1981 remained in force until the end of the communist regime.

In the field of culture ail artistic, scientific, regional, social and student associations were suspended (including Solidarity, of course), as well as all cultural institutions (including all kinds of theatres). Permission to perform was given in the winter and spring of 1982 to those artists or activists who were obeying the orders of communist-army authorities. The censor began to act fervently to destroy all of the concessions of the 'Solidarity period'. It seemed that the authorities were hoping to re-establish the post-Stalinist order of the '70s or maybe even of the '60s. This was impossible for people to accept, including the people of Polish theatre.

The first step taken by the theatre community was to boycott the mass media. It appeared impossible to show one's face on TV which was lying to and offending the entire nation. The first-rate actors took this decision spontaneously; there was no consultation or "plotting" involved. The boycott was called off at the end of 1982.

The artists of Polish theatres, immobilised in their homes by the closing of their institutions and by curfew, found proper places to freely express their anger, stress, fear and aggression. Very soon they started to perform in churches and in flats.

'Independent theatre presentations in churches' started 11 days after Martial Law had been enforced. During the Christmas Midnight Mass of December 24, 1981 three actors of Warsaw theatres, Krystyna Królikiewicz, Ewa Smolirtska and Andrzej Szczepkowski gave a poetry recital to a moved crowd gathered in St. Ann church in Warsaw. Szczepkowski, the president of ZASP risked a great deal: imprisonment, 48-hour arrest or assault from 'unidentified perpetrators'.

There were many churches and institutions governed by the Catholic hierarchy which were centres of dissident, independent performing activities: the church at Zytnia Street, St. Stanislas-Kostka church and The Museum of the Archdiocese in Warsaw, the Church in Mistrzej- owice-Nowa Huta in Cracow, the Dominican church in Poznart, many churches in Wroclaw, Gdahsk, and in many other cities, towns and villages.

31 The Theatre in The Museum of Warsaw Archdiocese soon became the greatest independent theatre entreprise in Poland. Its manager and 'spiritus movens' was actress Hanna Skarzanka. In four years she managed to produce dozens of shows, one man/woman shows and recitals. She organised about 700 presentations in Warsaw and about 100 presentations on tours. The greatest artistic achievement of her theatre was Misterium M^ki i Zmartwychwstania (The Mystery of the Passion of Christ and of His Resurrection) by Roman Brandstaetter (Jan. 1 983) which she directed herself.

Jerzy Jarocki produced Eliot's Murder in the Cathedra! in St. John Cathedral in Warsaw together with the actors of the Warsaw Dramatic Theatre (March 9, 1982). The oratory on the struggle between secular and spiritual powers was impressive in this sacred, historical place.

Among the many premieres and presentations which took place in the church at Zytnia Street one should stress the immense mise en scène of Ernest Bryll's Wieczernik (Last Supper), April 5, 1985, directed by Andrzej Wajda, played by the actors of Warsaw theatres. The important point is that the play was written by a well-known poet and playwright especially for the church at Zytnia Street.

The independent Not Only Theatre from Wroclaw was founded by the people connected with Kazimierz Braun's Contemporary Theatre: director Andrzej Makowiecki, writer and philosopher Andrzej Falkiewicz, and actor and poet Boguslaw Kierc. The group was performing in both the churches and flats of the Wroclaw intelligentsia. The best and most famous among their many productions was Wyrok na Sierpieh (Sentence on August'80) which had its premiere on Nov. 15, 1984. The script was based on judiciary documents of the trial of the Solidarity leader in the Lower Silesia region, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. Frasyniuk, released from prison a few days before the premiere, attended the show himself. The intervention of the secret police came too late: all of the actors and spectators had already gone. Not Only Theatre gave several hundred presentations in Wroclaw and in many churches all around Poland.

The Independent group from Gdartsk founded by three actors of Seacoast Theatre, Halina Winiarska, Jerzy Kiszkis and Piotr Suchora performed in Gdahsk churches as well as on tours in many churches in Poland. Their most famous performance was based on The Laments of Jeremiah and had its premiere on March 19, 1982.

Poznart independent theatre, connected with the Dominican church, was founded by the actors of the New Theatre, among others Krystyna Feldman, Lech Lotocki and Wiestaw Komasa.

There were many independent theatre shows in Cracow churches, although there were no theatre companies comparable to those in Wroclaw or Gdartsk. The most important show was the re-staging of Jarocki's Murder in the Cathedra! in the Cracow Wawel Kings' Castle Cathedral with the artists of Old Theatre (April 1, 1982). In addition, on June 9, 1983 Tadeusz Malak showed the premiere of Wit Stwosz (Veit StossJ, one of the greatest mises en scène in independent theatre during Martial Law. The actors and the audience moved from the Basilica of St. Mary to the Old Cloth Hall of Cracow's Old Marketplace. This story about the Cracow activity of a great sculptor from Nürnberg allowed Malak to stress the independence of an artist in his/her relations with public sponsors.

The best known among many 'home theatres' was founded in Warsaw by the director and actors of the show AH Shows So!d Out, Elzbieta Bukowirtska, Ewa Dalkowska, Andrzej Piszczatowski and Maciej Szary. After having played the suspended performance a dozen times they decided to produce another show: 0 przywracaniu porzadku (On Restoring the Order) based on the text written by Stanislaw Barartczak as a reaction to Martial Law (premiere on Nov. 1, 1982). One of

32 the spectators was the general and artistic manager of Powszechny (Public) Theatre, Zygmunt Hübner. The next shows of the Warsaw home theatre were 'satirical miscellany': Kabaret (November, 1983), Degrengolada (Degradation) by Pavel Kohout (Spring, 1984) and Havel's Largo Desolato (1985). The Warsaw home theatre played in many places in the capital and other cities and towns. Its show was infiltrated only once, in Wroclaw, where police and secret police agents sat among the audience.

The actors of independent theatres were often put under 48-hour arrest, their sets were confiscated, and/or they were forced to pay large fines for their 'illegal anti-socialist activity'. Drama-repertory theatres, after being re-opened to the public in Winter or Spring 1982, soon produced plenty of dissident shows. This caused the dismissal of many managers.

On June 9, 1982, the young director Krzysztof Babicki showed the premiere of Ksi^ga Hioba (The Book of Job) in the Cracow Slowacki Theatre. Job's lamentations turned out to be the lamentations of the country and the nation of Poland, and of all the hard times Poles had experienced.

On July 15, 1982 Dejmek showed the premiere of Wyspiariski's Deliverance in the Warsaw Polish Theatre. The show turned out to be one of the most dissident shows of the era (once more against his will). The reactions of the public - vivid, spontaneous, clearly anti-communist - were much overdone. One should understand, however, that the public at that time was desperately looking for any trace of political allusion in all kinds of public performances, and reacting to it in a rather irrational way. A famous incident took place during one of the performances following opening night: people rewarded the players with a standing ovation and threw flowers on the stage not to Halina Mikotajska, a star and co-founder of KOR in 1976, but to her substitute.

Adam Hanuszkiewicz, artistic manager of the National Theatre produced épiewnik Domowy (Home Song-book) based on his own script. Home Song-book premiered on December 31, 1982, the last day of Hanuszkiewicz's management. 19th century songs composed by Moniuszko and Chopin with the words of Polish classic and romantic poets served once more to express the message of hope, despite the oppression.

Ksi^dz Marek (Reverend Marek) by Juliusz Stowacki in Warsaw Dramatic Theatre (January 20, 1983, directed by Krzysztof Zaleski) also had quite a clear message: during every struggle of the Polish nation for independence and freedom there were many traitors who helped the enemy. The associations with Jaruzelski's junta were obvous.

The best and most important manifestation of dissidency in drama-repertory theatres was Dzuma (The Plague) based on texts by Daniel Defoe and Albert Camus (May 6, 1983, author of the script & director Kazimierz Braun, Wspólczesny /Contemporary/ Theatre in Wroclaw). The metaphor of the plague was associated with Martial Law in terms of people's reactions to the danger and the violation of their human rights. The mise en scene was 'total': the entire theatre building served as the place of action, with spectators walking from one place (piece of action) to another. Gaining the authorities' consent to play The plague was very difficult. Every presentation had to be fought for and there were only about 30 of them before the sad final outcome: Braun was fired from his post as general and artistic manager of the Contemporary Theatre in July, 1984.

The quickest reaction to Martial Law in the milieu of alternative theatre was that of Akademia Ruchu. The Warsaw group showed in March, 1982 the spectacle entitled English Lesson (author of the project & director: Wojciech Krukowski). Slogans from captive media were repeated dozens of times in Polish and English in different orders. The associations in spectators' minds

33 were irresistibly funny. The musical background consisted of the songs of one of the most famous punk-rock groups in Poland, Brygada Kryzys.

The next show by the Academy of Movement was Inne tahce (Other Dances), in November, 1982 (author of the project & director: Wojciech Krukowski). Polish punk music and spy signals from the radio formed the musical background for metaphoric images from everyday life in a captive country 'occupied' by its own army.

The next to react was The Theatre of the Eight Day. Members of the company took part in the first street manifestation against Martial Law in Poland (Poznart, February 13, 1982), some of them were put under 48-hour arrest and one was kept in jail for more than a month. On their first opening night of the Martial Law period, they performed Przypowieét (A Fable, June 19, 1982, collective creation directed by Lech Raczak) based on the novel by William Faulkner. The decision of an army unit to stop fighting was a clear allusion to the Polish dilemmas of that time. The Theatre stopped performing A Fable in Autumn, 1 982 when the members of the group came to the conclusion that 'the time of war' influenced their creation too much and prevented them from entering more deeply into the universal problems of 'conditio humana'.

The next Eight Day show was Wzlot (The Ascent) based on the poems by Osip Mandelstam and the memoirs of his wife, Nadezhda (December 2, 1982, author of the script & director: Lech Raczak). The authorities took one of the actors to the army for a couple of weeks of "training" which was a common way of removing a dissident from his community. In this case the goal was clear: not to let Eight Day play. The company produced a new show in two weeks. The life of Mandelstam was a metaphor of the common life of millions of the citizens of our 'better world'.

The Theatre of the Eight Day was still officially being sponsored by the communist state as an 'alternative, independent professional theatre'. The company was thus allowed to take part in festivals in Poland (although international tours were forbidden). Their chance soon came with the newly opened International Street Theatre Festival in Jeienia Góra. The craziest possible idea was conceived by Norwid theatre manager, Alina Obidniak, which was to organise street theatre shows in a country where curfew had been ordered the year before, where even the smallest of street gatherings required permission from the authorities and where people were aggressive and living in constant despair.

In spite of all the obstacles and reservations the Jeienia Góra festival became one of the most important theatrical events of the '80s, giving Polish artists a rare opportunity to observe the creations of their Western colleagues. Besides its international aspects, Obidniak's festival created an opportunity just to have some fun, to relax and forget about stress, and to open one's eyes to the world of joy which was quite unusual in Poland in the '80s.

The Theatre of the Eight Day produced a great open air spectacle especially for Jeienia Góra'83. Raport 2 obl^zonego miasta (A Report from the Besieged City), collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak, based on the poems by Herbert, Barartczak and Raczak was shown in Jeienia Góra on September 7, 1983 on a decrepit parking lot near the Old Marketplace. The evening spectacle was the conclusion of whole-day-actions undertaken by the group's members in many different locations around the city. The final scene was an assault by the unit of Great Conquerors on unarmed citizens. All of the besieged city's inhabitants were executed, including the traitors who had collaborated with the enemy. Eight Day had invented a new type of street show, 'street tragedy', in contrast to Odin Teatret-like fiestas.

34 The next Eight Day Jelenia Góra great spectacle was Cuda i mi^so (Miracles and Meat, collective creation, directed by Lech Raczak), played in September, 1984 in the small Lower Silesian town of Lubomierz. The realistic scenes showing the typical Polish queue before the butcher shop were mixed with metaphorical and poetic ones. The space of the spectacle was arranged along the main street of the town, one kilometer long. The centre was located on the marketplace. The action dramaticised the everyday Polish experience of waiting for meat and miracles. The characters in one scene were human pieces of meat and in another - human pieces of the Holy Spirit.

Miracles and Meat in Lubomierz was one of the last legal presentations of The Theatre of the Eight Day. In June, 1984 the authorities withdrew their material support for the group, confiscated all their sets and projectors, and ordered the company to leave its new premises on the outskirts of Poznart. Starting from Autumn, 1984 Eight Day's existence and activities were illegal. The company performed in churches and its new show was being rehearsed in secret in one of the Poznah student cultural centres.

The premiere of Piolun (Wormwood) had been planned for April 9, 1 985 in the Adam Mickiewicz University Theatre Centre, but it could not take place since the police prohibited the public from entering the hall. During the banquet after the premiere which had not taken place, theatre members and spectators quietly agreed to try again the following day at 3 p.m. The show was performed for this select public without incident, but that evening the hall once again was blocked by police forces. The most astounding thing was that there was no traitor among the approximately 100 people who came to see the underground premiere. The police knew nothing about it.

The star named Wormwood (taken from St. John's Apocalypse) was presented in the show as the patron of Poland. Suggestive scenes showed the execution of an opposition activist, shooting into the crowd during a demonstration, everyday travels: to a wedding, to work, to a funeral and (impossible, prohibited) travel abroad. The next of Eight Day's bold, sarcastic political cabaret scenes was the scene of a trial on Poland performed by the representatives of Communist authorities.

The official premiere of Wormwood took place in Mistrzejowice-Nowa Huta church in Cracow on April 27, 1985 before an audience of about 1500.

The Eight Day's tours in churches in 1984-87 were a unique example of 'avant-garde people's theatre'. Thousands of people came to see the sophisticated shows, the majority of whom were attending a theatre performance for the first time in their lives. It soon turned out, however, that the religious and educational functions of church didn't mix well with avant-garde art.

In 1985 The Theatre of the Eight Day had been invited to take part in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival but only two actors and two technicians received permission from the police to go abroad. The company decided to split. The 'foreign' group prepared the show Auto-da-fé based on the novel Mala Apokalipsa (Little Apocalypse) by Tadeusz Konwicki and some fragments of Wormwood (Auto-da-fé won the Fringe First Award in Edinburgh'85). The 'home' group prepared Little Apocalypse alone. The company reunited in 1988 in Italy where the 'foreign' part had found its premises (the actor, Marcin K^szycki had received 23 refusals to go abroad in less than 3 years). The Theatre of the Eight Day returned to Poland in 1990.

The continued existence of the Theatre Provisorium was a minor miracle as the group lived in the shady margins between the legal and the illegal. Several members of the group had been arrested in the winter of 1982, and two of them were later 'persuaded' to emigrate to the U.S. The group

35 sometimes received permission to present its shows in student cultural centres, especially during festivals (some of them still existed).

The first 'war' show of the group was Wspmnienia z domu umariych (The House of the Dead, 1983, collective creation, dir. by Janusz Opryrtski) based on the texts by Dostoyevski and Gustaw Herling-Grudzirtski. Herling-Grudzirtski was a Polish immigrant novelist, the author of The World Apart, one of the most powerful reports on the Gulag world (the book was, of course, strictly forbidden in People's Poland). Staging the fragments of this book during Martial Law was a kind of madness but the actors who had been imprisoned themselves a few months previously felt this was the best way to express their feelings and thoughts.

The last 'war' show by Provisorium was Pozoga (The Conflagration, 1985, directed by Opryhski, based on the novel by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and texts written by the director and by actors). The first part of the show told a typical story about the beginning of the revolution, with detailed descriptions of assaults, rapes, fires and robberies of ordinary citizens. The second and more interesting part portrayed the everyday life of underground Solidarity activists, hidden in a flat 'somewhere in the city'. The tensions of 'underground life' imposed on thousands of people in 1981-1985 were presented in a realistic way.

In 1984-1985 the activity of Polish dissident theatre diminished. The period of 'normalisation' had come. People were tired of the constant fighting which produced no results. Communist power seemed untouchable, and strong enough to exist for ages surrounded by the hate of a passive nation. Solidarity appeared to lose the 'Jaruzelski war' and was not very active anymore, despite Walesa's spectacular actions and the money coming in from Brussels. Nobody foresaw perestroika.

Before the breakthrough of 1989 only one 'paratheatrical' dissident activity is worth mentioning: the actions of Wroclaw Orange Alternative begun in early 1987 by a group of artists and political activists. They were led by art historian Waldemar Fydrych (nicknamed 'Major'), the creator of the artistic doctrine of 'socialist surrealism'. The happenings of Orange Alternative took place in the centre of Wroclaw's downtown. They were organised on the occasions of official holidays, anniversaries and Celebration Days, for instance The Day of Policeman and Agent of Secret Services, Children's Day, Women's Day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, etc. They were illegal as they were organised without the permission of the Wroclaw authorities and police. What fun it was, however, to see sailors from the battleship Potemkin or dwarfs being arrested! The provocations were clever and well done.

On June 1, 1987 Orange Alternative organised 'a happening to celebrate Children's Day'. The principal roles were played that day by dwarves who gave sweets to passing children. The main event of the celebration was a procession of dwarves and friends with teddy-bears. Unfortunately, both dwarves and teddy-bears were soon arrested and detained at the police station for several hours.

On November 6, 1987 Orange Alternative organised 'celebrations on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Great October Revolution'. The fiesta was begun by the battleship Potemkin (a papier-maché imitation of the historical ship) which emerged on éwidnicka Street together with a man wearing a Lenin mask. After many scenes - the attack of the battleship Aurore on the Winter Palace, a demonstration of Red Army soldiers shouting "Revolution!", a demonstration of Proletarians shouting "We are going to work better!", a demonstration celebrating red borsch and many other manifestations of support for the Great Revolutionary Event - everyone wearing red (a shawl, a cardigan, a coat, a cap) were arrested even if they were only passers by. About 150 people were arrested that evening.

36 Orange Alternative-like happenings spread through the whole country in 1988. They enabled young people to express their political attitude in ways other than the conventional street demonstration. They produced catharses of sorts, as their form released people from the fear of riot police forces (ZOMO). The only risk was a a 48-hour arrest.

After the breakthrough of 1989 when the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki began to rule the country and PZPR had been dissolved, there was no longer a need for dissident theatre. Some important questions, however, remained unanswered: what is the objective social importance of theatre and the performing arts? (Is there such a thing, or is theatre always relative, a product of its close social environment?) Are the performing arts able (and, more importantly, needed) to express the real needs, fears, joys, yearnings, dreams and metaphysical feelings of ordinary people in a normal, democratic society? What is their place in a democratic, free-market social, political and economic order?

We are now all trying to answer these questions, in both parts of Europe during the process of reunification. Our present experiences prove that theatre and the performing arts may serve as a laboratory for new ways of social communication, as a kind of enclave of authentic interhuman contacts in a world dominated by stress, hurriedness and the strict fulfillment of the requirements of social roles.

37 NOTES

1. Jerzy Zawieyski. '0 styl teatru' ('For a Style of Theatre'). Dziennik Polski 29, 1945, p. 6. 2. L. Kruczkowski, 'The State and the Theatre' ('Pahstwo a teatr'). Teatr 3. 1946, p. 5. 3. Nine means of total control of Polish theatres are taken from Kazimierz Braun's book. See: K. Braun, Polish Theatre 1939-1989. Areas of Liberty - Areas of Captivity. Warsaw, 1994, p. 66-69. 4. Józef Maéliriski. 'Teatr Louisa Jouveta' ('The Theatre of Louis Jouvet'). Odrodzenie 24,1948, p. 6-7. 5. Józef Maélirtski. 'Wielka lekcja teatru Obrazcowa' ('The Great Lesson of Obraztsov's Theatre'). Odrodzenie 51-51, 1948, p. 7. 6. Józef Maólirtski. 'Teatr twórczej pasji. Na marginesie wyst^pów Moskiewskiego Teatru Dramatycznego w Polsce' ('Theatre of Creative Passion. Observations of Moscow Dramatic Theatre Polish Tour'). Odrodzenie 18, 1949, p. 3. 7. The quotation from Leo Tolstoi 8. The quotation from Contantin Stanislavsky's speech at the opening of the Moscow Art Theatre's First Studio on March 10, 1911. 9. See: Malgorzata Szejnert. Slawa i infamia. Rozmowa z prof. Bohdanem Korzeniewskim. (Fame and Infamy. A Conversation with Prof. Bohdan Korzeniewski). Ed. Pokolenie, Warsaw, 1988, p. 78-80. 10. Stanislaw W. Balicki. '0 stanie i zadaniach polskiego teatru: referat wygloszony na Zjezdzie Teatralnym' ('On the State and Tasks of Polish Theatre; a Report Delivered during the Theatre Congress'). Teatr 12, 1954, p. 8. 11. The latest, and very competent work was the book by Kumiega. See: Jennifer Kumiega. The Theatre of Grotowski. Methuen, London and New York, 1985.

38 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS AND ARTICLES IN POLISH

V Albert, Andrzej, Najnowsza historia Polski (The Latest History of Poland), Warszawa, Krag, 1986 (clandestine edition).

Almanach stanu wojennego. Kongres Kultury Polskiej (The Almanach of Martial Law. The Congress of Polish Culture), Warszawa, Krag, 1982 (clandestine edition).

Braun, Kazimierz, Teatr polski (1939-1989). Obszary wolnoéci - obszary zniewolenia (Polish Theatre (1939-1989). Areas of Liberty - Areas of Servitude), Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe 'Semper', 1994.

Dziewulska, Malgorzata, Teatr zdradzonego przymierza (Theatre of Betrayed Convenant), Warszawa, PIW, 1985.

Fik, Marta, Kultura polska po Jalcie, kronika lat 1944-1981 (Polish Culture after Jalta, the Chronicle 1944-1981), London, Polonia Book Fund Ltd., 1989.

Fik, Marta, 35 sezonów (35 Seasons), Warszawa, WAiF, 1989.

Fik, Marta, Zamiast teatru (Instead of Theatre), Warszawa, Verba, 1993. (Reviews from the 80s published in independent, clandestine press, incl. reviews of some independent theatre productions).

Gassowski, Szczepan, Zycie teatralne w Polsce Ludowej (Life of Theatre in People's Republic of Poland), Teatr 1984, Nos. 1-12.

Hamlet, Jerzy, Teatr zniewolony (Captived Theatre), Kultura 1984 No. 11. (Independent Political & Cultural monthly which has been edited in France since the 40s).

Hübner, Zygmunt, Teatr i polityka (Theatre and Politics), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1991.

Jawtowska, Aldona, Wiecej niz teatr (More Than Theatre), Warszawa, PIW, 1988. (The book on Polish alternative student theatre).

Komedianci. Rzecz o bojkocie (Pretenders. On the Boycott), ed. by Andrzej Roman in collaboration with Marian Sabat, Paris, Editions Spotkania, 1988. (Interviews with representatives of Polish theatrical milieu on their attitude towards communist power in the 80s. The focus of almost all interviews is the boycott of electronic media in the beginning of martial law).

Marczak-Oborski, Stanistaw, 2ycie teatralne w latach 1944-1964 (Life of Theatre in 1944-1964), Warszawa, PWN, 1968.

Marczak-Oborski, Stanislaw, Teatr polski w latach 1918-1965, teatry dramatyczne (Polish Theatre in 1918-1965), Drama Theatres), Warszawa, PWN, 1985.

Morawiec Elibieta, Powidoki teatru (Theatre's Insights), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1991.

39 Nadzwyczajny Zjazd SPATiF-ZASP (Extraordinary Congress of the Union of Polish Stage Artists), Warszawa, Instytut Wydawniczy Zwi^zków Zawodowych, 1981.

0 dobro teatru polskiego. Materialy ogóinopolskiej narady teatrainej, Warszawa, 2-3.03.1981 (For the Good of Polish Theatre. Materials from the national conference of theatrical milieu), Warszawa, Instytut Wydawniczy Zwiqków Zawodowych, 1981.

Puzyna, Konstanty, Burzliwa pogoda (Stormy Weather), Warszawa, PIW, 1971.

Puzyna, Konstanty, Pótmrok (Semi-darkness), Warszawa, PIW, 1982.

Raszewski, Zbigniew, Raptularz 1967/1968 (Diary 1967/1968), Warszawa, Interim, 1993.

Szejnert, Malgorzata, Slawa i infamia, wywiad z prof. Bohdanem Korzeniewskim (Fame and Infamy, an interview with prof. Bohdan Korzeniewski), Warszawa, Pokolenie, 1988 (clandestine edition).

Teatry studenckie w Polsce (Student Theatres in Poland), Jerzy Koenig, ed., Warszawa, WAiF, 1968.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES IN OTHER LANGUAGES

Czerwiriski, Edward, Contemporary Polish Theatre and Drama (1956-1984), New York, Greenwood Press, 1988.

Hübner, Zymmunt, The Professional's Guilty Conscience. New Theatre Quarterly, No. 15, 1988.

Misiotek, Edmund, Bibliographie théatrale polonaise, 1944-1964, Warszawa, Centre Polonaise de I'lTI, 1965.

Popkin, Henry, Theare in Eastern Europe, The Drama Review, Voi.11, No. 3 (T35), 1967.

Schechner, Richard, Dialog with a Pole (TDR Comment), The Drama Review, Vol.30, No. 3 (T111) 1986.

Tymicki, Jerzy, New Dignity: The Polish Theatre 1970-1985. The Drama Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Till) 1986.

A lot of interesting information can be found in Daniel Gerould's and Alma Law's periodical which has been edited for dozen of years by the Institute of Contemporary East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA), Graduate Center, City University of New York. The name of periodical up to 1 991 was: Soviet and East European Drama, Theatre and Film and from then it has been Slavic and East European Performance.

The address: Daniel Gerould & Alma Law, CASTA, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Str., New York, NY 10036-8099, tel./fax -i-l 212 642-1600.

40 Colofon

The Dissident Muse Critical Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe 1945-1989

organized by De Balie and Theater Instituut Nederland.

Editor Katarina Pejovic Correction Kelly Rigg Production Agatha Regeer Jos van Doesburg

® Theater Instituut Nederland Herengracht 168 1016 BP Amsterdam Nederland tel (31) 20 6235104 fax (31) 20 6237039 email [email protected]

De Balie and Theater Instituut Nederland would like to extend their special thanks to the following organizations for their financial support:

European Cultural Foundation Van Bijieveltstichting Romania THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN ROMANIA 1945-1989

Research by Marian Popescu

Contents :

I Dissidence 2

II Theatre and the Political Regime 5

III Censorship 10

IV Repertory 15

V The Audience 19

VI Theatre Context 21

VII Theatre in Romania Today 23

Notes 25

Annexes: 1. List of most important dissident 26 productions before 1989 2. Bibliography of publications 28 relevant to the research

1 I DISSIDENCE

The notion of Dissidence was completely unknown in Romania until the famous case of writer Paul GomaJ Goma stood up against the Ceausescu regime in 1970 and again, after defecting to France, in 1977 in an attempt to gain support for Carta'77 among the Romanian intelligentsia. Within the artistic and intellectual community, especially among writers and artists, the case awakened an awareness of the full significance of a notion which was to become the nightmare of the Romanian political regime and its propaganda machine.

It is also worth mentioning that dissidence, as a means of expressing views which differ from the official line, is not always an intellectual phenomenon. For instance, between 1945 and 1959, groups of armed resisters hid in the mountains [!] fighting with Securitate and Army forces in a desperate attempt to stop the sovietisation of the country. It was the longest known resistance effort in the East after 1945.^

The Goma case roughly coincided with what is considered to be the most important dissident theatre production in Romania: Lucian Pintilie's production of Gogol's The Government Inspector at the Bulandra Theatre in 1972 [see Annexe 1].

The singular event which led to major changes in Romania's economic and socio-political life, resulting in a tightening of artistic freedom and a progressive limitation of the freedom of expression, was Ceausescu's 'historical' visit to China in the summer of 1971. Cultural policy became a special 'target' in this context. A full system of surveillance and control of the arts was put into effect. In 1971 the decision was taken to establish The Council of Socialist Culture and Education as the only body to deal with cultural affairs. In November of the same year, the theatre was a topic of special debate during a Plenary of the Romanian Communist Party. Special instructions were given to cultural communist activists regarding implementation of the new political and ideological ideas of the regime. This was to put an end to the 1964-1970 more liberal' period in Romania.

The notion of dissidence gained more substantial footing as a result of several factors. First, there were manifestations of some very rare open opposition (i.e. a workers' strike in Brasov in 1977 where Ceausescu was confronted with social and political demands). Second, Radio Free Europe supported dissident gestures and ideas. And third, known and unknown members of the public wrote letters and openly questioned the regime in Bucharest during the period 1971-1989. The first letter sent by a then-unknown French professor in Cluj, Doina Cornea, to Radio Free Europe, was broadcast in August 1982. This 'Letter to those who haven't stopped thinking'^ took the communist authorities by storm.

Romanian theatre began to play a special role in this context, as censorship became heavier and political intervention in cultural matters was carried out openly. Playwrights had no choice but to create allusive situations and lines, developing a kind of Aesopian language of their own. Many of the playwrights we interviewed said that they wrote with the clear understanding of what they were not allowed to write and, for some of them, it was only a matter of resisting the heavy pressure of politics and ideology which meant claims on theatre repertoires and publishing houses. They knew that 100% dissidence was impossible: no one took that risk even if some of them had difficulties with every new play.

On the other hand, since 1971, theatre managers, directors and actors had to withstand hundreds of observations and alterations as requested by theatre authorities and representatives of different levels of censorship [see III]. The Party was very keen on themes and subjects chosen by the playwrights: suicide and death, for instance, if not motivated by political reasons, were

2 rejected by the ideology at the time, as were sophisticated references to the capitalist system and, generally, to Western philosophy and ideology. Any erotic or sexual references were forbidden. Communism discredited completely what was considered damaging for the health of the people, and sexuality, particularly 'disrespectful' sexual activity, was always censored in the scripts as well as in the gestures or attitudes of the actors on stage. This was ironic given that the Party's strongly recommended demographic policy starting in 1968 called for increasing the birth-rate as a way to demonstrate the health of the Romanian nation. Clashes between culture and politics meant that after 1971 the theatre community was allowed only to praise the virtues of communist characters and everyday life. Romanian theatre reacted against this in various ways, including exploitation of the repertoire of classic plays. The idea was that the censors could not make cuts in Shakespeare's Hamlet (although they did nonetheless on occasion, for instance as was the case with Tocilescu's 1986 production with Ion Caramitru playing the lead). This is why the contemporary Romanian play was the Cinderella of the Romanian theatre, strongly censored so as to prevent any dissident tendency or stronger social or political criticism.

Our research points to the fact that only when changes in politics occurred (e.g. Romania's not taking part in the 1 968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, perceived by the West as major dissent among the ranks of the Soviet block; Ceausescu's visit to China in 1971 and the strong campaign to promote him as a major political figure in the East/West and Israeli/Arab conflicts; the famous defection of Genera! Mihai Pacepa, Chief of the Romanian secret services, to the United States in July, 1978) the Central Committee of the Party revisited the cultural policy and permitted hints of criticism related either to 'errors of the past' or to new propaganda aims. Ironically, in every case, people in the arts were asked to reflect these changes and to put themselves in the service of the people. The theatre community in Romania was thus subjected to a long and strenuous process of reacting day by day to this pressure: dissidence was, in fact, more a case of resisting than opposing.

After 1976 and the first Congress of the Council of Socialist Culture and Education, the Party heavily imposed upon artists to praise the virtues and the 'philosophy' of the 'New People' - a concept which was to mark the development of the theatre on the whole. One feature of the system which actually helped the theatre community in part was state subsidy, covering almost 80% of the total costs of a theatre. This meant that theatres could maintain their profile as repertory theatres (with artistic and technical personnel employed on life-time contracts) while disguising the unemployment which officially didn't exist in the former Soviet block.

Incidences of critical theatre multiplied after 1978 and the audience came to feel that the theatre was one of the few places, if not the only one, where people could experience a sense of resistance to political pressure and the decline in the standard of living. This does not mean that there were no plays, playwrights, theatre productions, and theatre management strategies which openly supported or credited the communist regime. Television theatre became a favourite arena for extending the propaganda and political requests of the Party. After 1971 the 'negotiation' of plays (lines, characters, ideas), productions (theatre images, parts of sets, certain actors' theatre language), resulted in a 'complicity' of sorts between a number of playwrights, directors and censors. This context must be further researched as its components, cultural and human, do not yet offer a clear insight into the complexity of the phenomenon. Many of the productions which could be classified as critical theatre in Romania attracted supporters from certain social walks of life: students, writers, legal and medical professionals, as well as simply the fans of a certain theatre (Bulandra, for instance, during the 1965-1986 period). Their support for these productions, especially for classic texts, was expressed through letters addressed to some of the artists, through repeated attendance of the same production (at Bulandra, Pintilie's and Ciulei's, for instance) or through visible acclaim of Theatre from Piatra Neamt's tours in Bucharest (one of the few regional theatres which had a prominent status as a more 'liberal' theatre). The personal

3 testimony of a 20-year veteran theatre critic, as well as discussions with theatre professionals, led to the idea that it was the students and, generally, young people in the audience who strongly supported critical theatre in Romania. Of course, only a selected few of the theatre critics and theatre managers are to be quoted here.

Within the scope of this research, and given the short time I had at my disposal, it seems obvious that Romanian theatre during this period can on the one hand be summed up as 'critical' theatre, providing a high quality of theatre performance and a sense of 'resistance' to the many and various claims of the communist ideology and propaganda. On the other hand, there was a 'parallel', co-existing official theatre culture which emerged from the above-mentioned complicity between some of the artists and their censors.

The notion of dissidence appeared officially for the first time in a Party publication in 1975. The first Dictionary of Politics defines dissidence as a 'disunion' accompanied 'sometimes' by 'separation' related to a political party, coallition of parties, but never to civic disregard of a certain regime.

4 II THEATRE AND THE POLITICAL REGIME

At the very beginning of the reference period, theatres as institutions went through a fast process of re-structuring following a short period of confusion (1945-1947) due to the consequences of the decision at Yalta to leave Romania under Soviet influence. By then, membership of the Romanian Communist Party was no more than 1000. This figure has been known in Romania since the end of the sixties, but it was always falsified to give the impression that the newly installed pro-Soviet regime was a popular option in 1947. It was then that Mihai I, King of Romania, was forced under threat to abdicate the throne and the first popular regime, headed by Petru Groza, came into power. In June, 1948 this government took the decision to nationalise private property which meant that the State owned everything in the country. Private theatre companies disappeared and for the first time, the concept of 'culture for people' was introduced to workers and peasants. One of the first steps towards centralisation in culture was the foundation of the Theatre of the People which opened branches in many cities between 1945-1947. In 1946 a new theatre was opened: Railways Workers' Theatre (now the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest). Its first season (1946/1947) consisted of three Soviet plays, two Romanian and three classics.

After the great purge before the fake elections in 1 946, the first Law of Theatres came into force. In August, 1947, the political authorities established a body called the Superior Council for Playwrighting and Music which was meant to control the activities of theatre and music artists. An Office for Repertory opened in 1948 and distributed a list of 45 rules to be observed by the theatres. I was able to identify only one periodical (Semnalul) which reacted to this undemocratic decision. The government-controlled media monitored the great purges in those years, when major cultural figures in Romania were subjected to rude attacks for their non-adherence to the values of the new regime. Some of the well-known actors and directors (among whom were former members or adepts of a pre-WWII Romanian Fascist party) entered the ranks of the Communist Party either on the basis of their own beliefs or simply as a means to survive. But there were others who stood openly in defiance of the new regime: the case of actress Marioara Voiculescu is still unknown publicly.

Theatres and artists were asked from then on to reflect in their work and art only 'the reality of their time' i.e, that of the workers' and peasants' achievements in building the new socialist nation. Consequently, every aspect of the 'decadent bourgeois culture and way of life' was to be strongly rejected, with disobedience being severely punished.

Following the great political changes in Romania, theatre had to react accordingly to what the political regime identified as 'priorities' for every new phase : 1945-1947, 1947-1954, 1954- 1964, 1964-1971, 1971-1980 and 1980-1989. With the exception of 1964-1971, when playwrighting and theatre policy was more relaxed or 'liberal', all of the other periods saw various kinds of heavy pressure being imposed by the political and cultural authorities. During the first period, for instance, repertoires began to be purged of all Romanian plays by authors who represented the values of the old regime. The Propaganda (in 1945 there still existed a Ministry of Propaganda as a remnant of State structure before the war) insisted on staging Soviet propaganda plays by completely unknown authors (see IV) and making extensive, if not exclusive, use of Stanislavski's theatre technique which was for a long time the only criterion to be used in judging the efficiency of theatre performances in educating the audience.

5 After the Congress of the Alliance of Artists, Writers and Journalists' Unions in October, 1947 it became clear that the new ideology with its philosophy of 'class-struggle' would substitute for art. The agenda of two sessions in a May, 1948 Circle of studies for theatre directors" featured lectures on 'Realism in Theatre', 'The Role of the Artist in Society', 'Class-Struggle in Art' etc. and promised the participation of 'comrades Irina Rachiteanu, Silvestru and Barladeanu...'

Theatres had to modify their repertory in order to 'fight' against decadent theatre, to get rid of any individualistic portrayal of characters on stage, and the set had to reflect the new social way of life of the industrial and agricultural milieu. After that. Propaganda forged a new vocabulary in the arts, fabricated to support the new idea of 'realism' and especially the 'socialist realism'. In all these phases certain descriptions of situations, and even certain words were prohibited. The effects of this still could be spotted even in 1976, when, during the first Congress of Socialist Culture and Education, the nationalist speech delivered by Ceausescu (some 90 pages of a book) stressed again the necessary link between 'art and the people,' for which regional Councils for Socialist Culture and Education were created. It was in this context that the essence of conformism was demonstrated by theatres, by including plays in their repertory which dealt with propaganda theses. Authors such as Aurel Baranga, Lucia Demetrius, Paul Everac, D.R. Popescu and other minor figures wrote some of their plays to prove loyalty to the regime. When defection from Romania became an issue after 1970, the political regime put an official ban on those cases and playwright Paul Everac, for instance, wrote the play Butterfly on a lamp in 1974 to voice the Party condemnation of defectors.

Another over-exploited source of conformism was the many plays and productions created upon request by The Party's Propaganda Section to celebrate personalities in Romanian history. Especially after Ceausescu came into power in 1 964, the artistic community learned that he liked to be compared with great historical figures from the past. But it has to be said that Party documents and the speeches of literary or artistic figures at the time reveal that he was flattered on many occasions for the purposes of gaining a more prominent social status or simply to increase his receptiveness to the intellectual domain.®

Partial relaxation following Stalin's death in 1953 lasted until 1956 (brought to an end by the events in Hungary) during which the political discourse of communist leader Gheorghiu-Dej marked very clearly Romania's move away from Stalinism. Under these circumstances, and due to the fact that between 1945-1947 several important Romanian theatre directors died (Ion Sava, Soare Z. Soare amongst others), there came a new generation of theatre makers. Among them was architect and actor Liviu Ciulei, author of the famous article published by the theatre monthly Teatru! in 1956 on the theatricality of set design in theatre. It had an enormous influence by that time and it was considered a sign of relaxation from political pressure even though, when the article was translated recently into English and published by an American University (Slavic and East European Performance Studies, 1992) its translator said that Ciulei would not entirely agree with it today. Ciulei's set designer, Paul Bortnovschi, says that during that time pressure from Soviet cultural advisers diminished considerably.

At the beginning of the sixties this generation (including Ciulei, Pintilie, David Esrig and Radu Penciulescu) led the way to a new aesthetic and theatre language which allowed the Romanian theatre to protect itself from the many influences and demands of the ideology. This period (1964-1971) also coincided with a breath of fresh air in playwrighting: authors such as Dumitru Solomon, Marin Sorescu and losif Naghiu wrote absurd plays in the more general context of the second wave of European absurdism (coming from the East). During this period the political regime, albeit more relaxed, showed signs of contradictory strategies, especially concerning censorship.

6 Among the few theatre performances seen by Ceausescu (he was Secretary of the Party by then) was Pintilie's production of a new Romanian play, Fools under Moonlight by Theodor Mazilu in 1964, which he personally stopped because he was completely dissatisfied with it from a political point of view.

From my discussions with playwrights, it would appear that they were always conscious of the level at which everyone could compromise. For those who were not open supporters of the system it was just a matter of avoiding censorship and 'negotiating' a new play, character or situation inconvenient for the censor. It is also true, as playwright Adrian Dohotaru says, that Romanian playwrighting was to a great extent 'dependent on conjecture'.

It was very rare that political repression manifested itself in a visible way. During the first two phases of the period, 1 945-1 947 and 1 947-1 954, purges were carried out particularly for political reasons (family background, non-conformist views on politics of the day) and people were forceably dismissed from the theatre companies which employed them. After that it was such bodies as the Press Department or the Propaganda Department of The Central Committee of the Party or, especially after 1971, the Theatre Department of the Council for Socialist Culture and Education which controlled theatre activities and ordered punishment or repression on political grounds or because a play, production, or article in the press was said to be of bad quality. Such punishment required prior approval from a higher level, mainly the Central Committee of the Party or, in the last decade, directly from Elena Ceausescu who was in charge of all cultural and scientific affairs. Usually, as occurred in the famous case of director and film- maker Lucian Pintilie, the respective artist lost the right to work in the theatre or, as in Pintilie's case, in Romania! Pintilie's troubles began during the third performance of The Government inspector, when a high-ranking communist leader, influenced by playwright Aurel Baranga who was seated next to him, took the decision to stop the run of the performance (see 111 and Annexe I). Pintilie lost his right from then on to stage productions in Romania. The punishment affected virtually the entire theatre as its director, Liviu Ciulei, was also dismissed along with the deputy director, and actors in the cast who were party members were banned from the party organisation. Playwright Adrian Dohotaru was dismissed as journalist from a weekly in 1978 because of an inquiry he made about an innocent young man: two weeks after he wrote a play based on that case which was the nightmare of censors. They asked him to make 250 alterations in the text. Dohotaru told me that he identified the Securitate man who kept him under surveillance at that time. He had a difficult time trying to earn his living. Dumitru Solomon's play SOCRATE (1970), which was based on Socrates' trial in ancient Greece, was never put on stage; the author thinks today that the regime associated the trial with the political trials in the East. The play was only published in 1970!

When theatre directors, set-designers, actors, playwrights and theatre critics left the country before 1989 by whatever means (e.g. defection, use of a fellowship) their names were usually erased from all publicity materials of the theatre; they were blacklisted, never to be mentioned in any media. The only exceptions were the artists who received permission to work abroad and eventually came back to the country. The Securitate and, in the case of party members, the Party organisations which existed in every theatre, put pressure on families and relatives. It was very difficult sometimes to discern the gravity of a given situation due to the vagueness of the conditions in which some could defect or 'simply' leave the country without consequence while others could not. One special case was that of the world-famous Romanian born playwright Eugene lonesco, who left Romania before WWII but whose plays have been prohibited since 1971.

7 The prohibition coincided with his commencement of a series of commentaries in the French press and on Radio Free Europe on the political situation in Ceausescu's Romania. A long-term ban was also put on Mircea Eliade's plays because the political regime in Bucharest considered him to be unreliable. But due to differring factions in the Party's hierarchy and censorship offices, some of his studies in religion and philosophy were allowed to be published and one of his plays, Iphigenia, premiered at the National Theatre in Bucharest in 1986.

Defection certainly was considered a major crime during Ceausescu's regime. Punishment was severe and the Party, at ail levels of its hierarchy, stressed repeatedly that these were only 'cases' of a non-political nature. Whenever an artist was punished, as in Pintilie's case, artists' attitudes differed: public protests and direct interventions took place off the record. According to director Sanda Manu, a number of theatre directors wrote letters in support of Pintilie, addressed to the Party Secretary in charge of Propaganda at that time.

For some of the artists emigration was an option, but the conditions and regulations concerning this were very harsh. The Constitution of The Socialist Republic of Romania stipulated very clearly those special cases regarding the rights of Romanian citizens to give up their citizenship or to leave the country and settle elsewhere. Very often applications to leave the country were considered as unpatriotic. Actors, directors, set-designers and a few theatre critics have been deterred by the low-level standards, the unbearable political pressure and lack of elementary rights to leave the country, especially after 1971 when Ceausescu made his radical change in relation to all aspects of culture. After experiencing difficulties with his production of Julius Caesar, Andrei Serban, while working abroad on a grant in 1970, was advised not to return. His prodigious career that started in the States with his world-famous Greek Trilogy, and the fact that he did not undertake dissident activities when he made up his mind to settle in another country, convinced the authorities not to make a case out of it despite the fact that Securitate appeared to be keeping an eye on every Romanian abroad.

There are different opinions regarding the role of theatre festivals in Romania during that period. Especially after 1971 their number increased to the extent where almost every major city in the country organised its own theatre festival, usually every year. There were years when more than 14 or 15 theatre festivals were held, each no less than 10 days long. They were not as diverse as one might think, many being only a selection of performances from the theatre season. The professional organisation 'Arts People in Theatre and Music' (A.T.M.), whose members were theatre and music professionals, played a big part in organising these festivals. Its theatre critics section, chaired by Valentin Silvestru, did much to organise the festivals in conjunction with political and cultural authorities. Many of the artists felt they had played a positive role in providing a place for debate and a unique opportunity to see some of the best productions. My personal experience, having taken part in some of them, concurred with others' (actors Ion Caramitru and Victor Rebengiuc, for instance): festivals were more an expression of the local political authorities' vainglory than any kind of cultural achievement. It was an exceptionally rare occasion when the theatre of the city which organised the festival did not receive an award (the group of critics from A.T.M. originated the idea that all of the festivals should offer awards). For each festival, obligations had to be fulfilled. Artists had to visit industrial units and meet local political and propaganda leaders to demonstrate that they cared about the hard work of socialism. In the event that a dissident production was shown during the festival - selections were supervised by the local cultural authorities - journalists and theatre critics were not allowed to write about it. In a way it was his/her own fight with censorship to publish such articles on critical theatre. In 1984 I wrote and published my own, positive critique of Alex Darie's production of a mediocre Romanian play - Jolly Joker by Tudor Popescu. The Propaganda not only sanctioned Darie and prohibited the production, it also banned my signature in the press for almost one and a half years.®

8 While some of the critics supported many of the innovative trends in Romanian theatre, very few maintained distance from the influence of propaganda items. There were theatre critics during all the phases of the reference period who did not hesitate to pay tribute to the politics and ideology of the day and columnists of the party media or authors of drama and theatre books are obvious examples in the professional milieu.

Books published in Romania after 1989 about the political regime, about communism and the status of culture' demonstrated the extent of the political pressure and the sophisticated architecture of the censorship system (see III) which was incomparable, in certain periods and areas, to other countries in the East. On the whole, the term 'critical' is more appropriate than 'dissident' and it was the work of theatre directors, the leading artistic figures in theatre, that produced the excellence of artistic imagery. Because of this, one could understand how the audience collaborated in the criticism performed every night at theatres which dared to offer such productions. In fact, theatre directors represented vectors of critical ideas and were perceived as such throughout the years of the communist regime. Older or significantly younger, some of them developed an opposition to the official theatre aesthetics. Works of Pintilie, Ciulei (even if he was not considered an open opponent), Valeriu Moisescu, David Esrig, Radu Penciulescu, Andrei Serban or the younger Alexandru Dabija, Victor loan Frunza, Dominic Dembinski among others have been admired for their innovative imagery, which was sometimes prohibited or harshly censored by the authorities. It was in a way a kind of school, a technique of using their talent as a protective device against possible political accusations. On the other hand, it has always been a struggle in the Romanian theatre to get support from those less 'orthodox' individual communists in charge of propaganda or censorship, which could explain the differing situations regarding compromise in or free access to opening night.

9 Ill CENSORSHIP

It is a common historical fact that following periods of great socio-political change in a country, including the implementation of new structures, there arises some form of state-control. Examples include the hard censorship which followed the French Revolution and Cromwell's Britain when all theatre performances were prohibited for over forty years. Coming 'back' to our century, it is an acknowledged fact that the communist system developed a very sophisticated method of censorship, whether institutionalised or disguised in the forms of various official bodies. On many occasions, this was combined with the direct intervention of political leaders in cultural affairs, so that censorship was promptly exercised with no regard for democratic values or freedom of expression. Censorship in Romania seemed like some sort of feudal, barbaric approach to the whole domain of theatre, not to mention the film industry, where the political responsibility of those in charge of censorship was much higher. The continuous expansion of restrictions and taboos over the years created ways of artistic manoeuvres through this jungle of censorship. In addition, attitudes of self-censorship were adopted, considered by many of those interviewed for this research to be one of the worst things that could happen to an artist or a writer. This is still an issue today in Romanian theatre, where the first post-1989 productions which showed nudity on stage, for instance, were not easily accepted despite critical acclaim in the press (e.g. Hausvater's production of an Arrabal play, Purcarete's Decameron, and Frunza's Satyricon).

But self-censorship was and is simply the by-product of a long process: that of taking total control over everything written, published, performed or filmed. It is the legacy of a people subjected to 45 years of close observation by numerous offices, Councils, and Ministries with theatre departments, all using a complicated mechanism to control, supervise and censor all aspects of life. These institutions made lists of prohibited words, and described situations of an intimate nature - human situations considered inconvenient to the ethics of socialism. Censorship was institutionalised from the first days following the war, and it was a result of a system developed within a closed, soon to be totalitarian, society.

1 947 was the first landmark. A Law for Theatres and a Superior Council for Drama and Music were created to ensure the enforcement of the main Soviet propaganda aims. In fact, as set- designer Paul Bortnovschi and director Sanda Manu remember, the first censors were Soviet (someone named Kovalenko was a chief censor until 1950). Their influence only began to wane after the death of Stalin in 1953. Kovalenko, as these witnesses recall, was so 'minute' in his work that he would make changes in the cast! Another task of the new Superior Council was to encourage the staging of original plays. Theatres were obliged to produce two new Romanian plays in the first half of the seasons and those private theatres (which existed until June 1948) which complied this rule could claim a 50% tax deduction. After 1971, The Council of Socialist Culture and Education demanded half of repertory to consist out of new Romanian plays.

A general characteristic of censorship in Romania, imposed by politics and propaganda mechanisms, was that artists and writers should reflect in their work only positive aspects of the new society. 1971 saw a special, indeed the most powerful, reinforcement of this obligation. When Ceausescu came back from China he and his advisors produced the infamous 'Theses of the Central Committee" (thereafter referred to as the 'July Theses'). Repertories were purged en masse and cases of censorship multiplied to the extent that it was very rare to see an uncensored theatre production.

When his play Socrate was published in the monthly Theatre (1969), playwright Dumitru Solomon never imagined he would wait for more than twenty years to see its premiere. (National Theatre in lasi, 1991). The theatre department of the Ministry of Culture maintained over the

10 years that it was simply a matter of theatres in Bucharest and provinces not including the play in their repertories. But this was not true as the author and the directors of several theatres (including Bulandra, Nottara and The National in Timisoara) addressed themselves in written form to the theatre authorities. A fragment of the play was adapted for television by director Ivan Helmer, but it was never released. In 1971 another play by Solomon, Fata Morgana, was stopped by Dumitru Popescu, chief of the Propaganda Department in the Central Committee of the party after only 12 performances. A Notion of Happiness (1985, directed by Valeriu Moisescu) was almost stopped before opening night by the chief of Propaganda from Bucharest; intervention by a party leader (Croitoru) of the communist organisation of Bucharest made the premiere possible. Solomon says that he began writing absurd plays in the sixties, along with Naghiu and Sorescu, because "we found in theatre a way of writing distant and different from how the society was organised by then". The absurd was "a way to say things in a normal manner but in an absurd situation which was exactly the reverse of the Western absurd".

Along with other writers, Adrian Dohotaru experienced incredible 'negotiations' with censorship authorities. For his play. Insomnia, he was asked to make 250(!) cuts and alterations in the text, and to change the title of the play many times. At the end of the 1981 season the play was stopped during general rehearsals at the State theatre in Arad, by the Prime-Vice-president of the Party Regional Council. The main character in the play was a man who couldn't sleep because of innumerable questions put to him by his conscience. Another Dohotaru play, Investigation of a Young Man Who Did Nothing (1978), written after being dismissed as a journalist at a weekly {Flacara), was subjected to many demands from the theatre department of the Council of Socialist Culture and Education because the conflict in the play was viewed as a clash between generations on socio-political grounds. As a result of such frequent 'negotiations', the author told me that the original version ceased to exist!

Some of the writers and artists interviewed for this research pointed out that after 1971 there were many conflicts among the various representatives of the different levels of censorship. Indeed, this is the only way to explain how a censor from one level could block a performance while another one would give his OK for it! This also has to do with the re-orientation of groups of key party members and of people from Securitate, as documents published after 1 989 show, towards a more relaxed socialism in the country.

Alexandru Dabija, who directed Dohotaru's Insomnia in 1978 at Nottara Theatre, remembers those 27 previews with the commission designated to pass judgment on his production. Specifically, he recalls the objections they had to the...set: it was a demolished church on stage but also a bust of Marx! The censors asked him to replace the entire set, finding it politically inconvenient. He also recalls that during those years, Caragiale, the most important Romanian playwright, became the most often prohibited on stage due to the overt criticism his plays contained.

Director Victor loan Frunza noticed a change in the censors' motives. At the beginning of the '80s they argued that they were not censoring work, but making 'ideological' remarks and that, as one censor told him, 'it was the task of the artists to find solutions to these remarks'. Frunza's production of an adaptation of a medieval farce was prohibited at the State Theatre in Oradea in 1986 on the grounds that there was too much 'ambiguity', and that 'reality doesn't look like a nightmare'. He was told to make the necessary changes to resolve these problems. Furniture and Suffering (1980, reviewed by the author for publication in 1981) by Mazilu - one of the most 'difficult' Romanian authors in terms of censorship - had a stamp from the censor on every page when Frunza put in on stage at The Drama Theatre in Galati (1987). He also noticed that in the final years of the period, censors wouldn't say 'that the production had political or ideological

11 problems but that the production was bad, in order to disguise political or ideological inconveniences'. In December, 1989(!) another of his productions of a classic text by Alecsandri, Carnival in lasi, was stopped by the Propaganda and culture authorities after just two performances at The National Theatre in Cluj.

One of Romania's leading artists, and an important figure in the artistic community. Ion Caramitru, noticed the censors' fear of declaring that there were 'political victims' in culture. In the famous case of Pintilie's production of Gogol's The Government inspector, all the censors involved in the case were dismissed by Party authorities. Their Chief, Hie Radulescu, was transferred to another Propaganda job elsewhere in the country -Propaganda Secretary at Hunedoara. In 1974 at Hunedoara, director Adrian Lupu, who staged Georges Dandin by Molière at the theatre in Petrosani, had to witness a very short run (two performances) of the play. The censor didn't like the costumes because they were different from the ones depicted in photos displayed on the walls of the set (which were from a production in the '40s!). The censor asked him why he didn't have the same costumes. Six weeks later, at the Drama Theatre in Baia Mare Lupu staged the only tragic play by Caragiale, Napasta (Engl, approx. 'Calamity') and the same censor accused the production of being 'too expressionist' because the stage was full of candles. Lupu remembers with a smile today that this accusation of being expressionist (and he was not!) followed him to the Drama Theatre in Galati too.

Because political authorities did not want to create dissident cases in culture, they often acted ambiguously. Director Sanda Manu, professor at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, remembers sending a letter to the chief of propaganda in support of Pintilie's prohibited production in 1971. Although she did not receive a reply, she did not experience problems in travelling abroad afterwards. She noticed that censors sometimes displayed a form of dissidence in their own duplicity, which could explain the lack of uniformity in the act of censorship. When she staged a new Romanian play by a doctor-author. Keys of the City of Breda (1986) at the National Theatre in Bucharest, which contained a critical message, she was questioned by the Securitate. Director of the National, Radu Beligan, member of the Central Committee of the Party and an intimate of Ceausescu's, together with Constantin Maciuca, in charge of the Theatre Department at The Ministry of Culture by then, defended the play! Today she says that 'dissidence' in Romanian theatre came out of necessity not of heroism.

Many of those asked about the contents of 'dissidence' in the Romanian theatre agreed that it was not open except in a very few cases (already mentioned), and that the most difficult aspect was to maintain a high artistic profile in the face of the constant threat of political, ideological and artistic censorship. Actor Victor Rebengiuc, a leading figure in the theatre community, believes that "Ceausescu had a mind to suppress the delimitations between professional and amateur theatre." An argument which supports this can be made from the launch of the National Festival Cintarea Romaniei (Praise of Romania) in the mid-seventies. It had a special budget, a huge staff, and a schedule, all of which were focussed year after year on involving thousands of amateur groups from all social strata in a competition(!) in which professional theatres were obliged to take part. Censorship here was not as harsh, remembers playwright Dumitru Solomon who was a member of many juries. 'Amateurs were allowed few liberties but, in the Theatre section of the festival, they were also obliged to use scripts published in a special collection at the Institute for Research in Ethnology'. In fact, as our investigation pointed out, many short plays by Solomon, Sorescu, Everac and D.R. Popescu were frequently staged by these amateurs and student groups. The most courageous student productions came not from the students of Theatre institutes, but from informal groups from the Polytechnique in Bucharest or Timisoara, or from students of Medicine or Philology. Actor Ion Caramitru, famous by then not only for his theatre appearances but also for his creation of the most interesting poetry recitals, says that starting this series of poetry (and musical) shows after 1971, especially by featuring poems by

12 Eminescu (the greatest-ever poet in Romania), together with Dan Grigore, a famous piano-player and composer, provided a unique opportunity for the audience to get a sense of criticism which was otherwise impossible on a theatre stage.

The influence of these nation-wide poetry tours was enormous at the time and, as Caramitru says, it was especially the young people and students who reacted most vividly. His idea was and still is that poetry on stage is a special theatre language which can, in a way, 'say' more than a line in a play. A public reading by Caramitru of one of the most famous poems by Eminescu, Doina, completely forbidden after 1945 because of its anti-Russian message, was first permitted during the 1987/1988 season. He says that the response of the audience was highly remarkable due to a sort of "complicity between the population and the Power based on a strong anti-Soviet feeling". He also witnessed, as 1 did, critical attacks on the regime performed by student comic groups in special performances, but these happened under the protective hand of the Youth Communist Organisation, led by Ceausescu's youngest son who was perceived many years before 1989 as a possible successor to his father.

When a new generation of directors came to the force of Romanian theatre after 1980, they faced heavier pressure than their predecessors. Productions by Dembinski (Caragiale's Master Leonida faces Reaction presented in 1985 at the Drama Theatre in Constanta during a theatre festival for short plays, where I saw it) and Alexandru Darie (Saulescu's only play staged at The Drama Theatre in Oradea in 1984, also shown at the festival), which I wrote about after coming back from the festival, provoked an incredible attack on my article. It came from playwright Paul Everac, notorious for his dogmatism since the '70s and for his habit of always writing letters to the editor on politics, propaganda and culture denouncing deviations from the socialism line. Everac attacked the productions (whose qualities 1 defended in my article), as 'erotic' and as distortions of classical works. Director Dominic Dembinski was accused by cultural authorities of showing a bad quality performance - and this production received an award! He was asked to return the award and was questioned by the Securitate. A special commission composed of political leaders and members of the Central Committee of the Party, writers, and censors from the Ministry of Culture (Mihai Dulea, Ion Dodu Balan, Gigi Trif, and Valeriu Rapeanu) went to the theatre in Constanta to 'verify,' and incriminate in turn, what Everac denounced in his article. Articles in support of that production were written within a short time by theatre critic Valentin Silvestru and playwright Dumitru Solomon. As a result, theatre critic Marian Popescu was banned for a second time by the Council of Socialist Culture and Education (he was forbidden to publish in reviews controlled by the Council in Bucharest for six months).

Dane's production of Jolly-Joker at the State Theatre in Oradea provoked a great scandal at all Propaganda levels when it was presented at the Festival of Comedies in Galati in 1984 (see I). The performance was based on a play by Tudor Popescu about how production at a factory was reported to higher levels. It set off a political reaction from the Prime-Secretary of the Communist Party in the region, who left the theatre during the show to call the Central Committee of the Party in Bucharest! Darie set the plot in the '50s and created powerful images of the megalomania of political leaders of the time. These were perceived as open attacks against the Party's hierarchy in the '80s. My article about this production was published by a weekly in Bucharest which didn't know what had happened during the performance in Galati. It was then that I personally experienced for the first time a primitive censorship, as I was asked by propaganda and cultural authorities to explain my 'attitude' and especially to answer the question, "How dare you write about a forbidden production?!" The ban meant that I was not allowed to write in certain cultural and theatre publications for almost one and a half years.

13 While I may have been aware of how censorship worked before, this experience made me realise for the first time that this 'activity' for which people were being paid, was actually a clearly stratified system with a hierarchy of its own. I was to hear then, in the mid '80s, the same old accusations of being 'decadent' and politically unreliable. These were slogans of the '50s!

Besides its malfunctioning as an institution - as shown by the Incidents when censors or propaganda or cultural officials put forward contradictory views on the same production - censorship in Romania created a whole range of taboos of which writers and artists became aware through rumour, public cases or from the many political sessions in which everyone was obliged to take part. I'd like to quote from a letter by Paul Goma addressed to Heinrich Boll in September, 1973 which has never been answered: "Certainly, the censorship wouldn't acknowledge that it set up taboos. A fact that doesn't prevent it from refusing manuscripts. Here are some of the taboos: prison, collectivisation of agriculture, activists' and Securitate's work, the situation of German-origin people in Transilvania, Romanian-Soviet relations (the taking of Basarabia and Bucovina, behaviour of the 'allies' after the war, the organised sacking after the armistice, constraints imposed on Romania in terms of administration, domestic and international politics, culture, education, economy, defence - even orthography!- then, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Soviet-Chinese conflict and others); then love as being too much, death as being too much, sadness... too sad...; then everyday life's difficulties, bureaucracy, corruption, incoherence of laws, decisions, social inequity... (although Romania is a country without a class- system, there are classes still: high officials are a caste unsubmissive to obligations, with super- rights, not only financial but even juridical., and spiritual). I haven't finished the list. It would be difficult since censorship always makes it richer, modifies it (according to the course of events). Unfortunately, some writers willing to publish make it richer by 'omission and falsification' thus suggesting to censorship new taboos".®

When there was a double censorship - political and ideological on the one hand, that of the cultural authorities on the other -the question of samizdat publications in Romanian theatre is almost rhetorical. There were, as far as this research was able to identify, only a few plays, and they were circulated amongst a close circle of friends and never staged or published (plays by Solomon, Dohotaru amongst others).

14 IV REPERTORY

The structure of the repertory was shaped largely according to the political context, including changes in the overall strategy to develop socialism and communism in Romania. Arising from the many Congresses of the Communist Party (the last one was the XlVth Congress in November 1989) and Plenaries of the Central Committee of the Party, as well from the decisions taken over the years by cultural authorities, were an equal number of 'reorientations' for the repertory theatres. In 1947, a journalist from Semnalul wrote in stupefaction about the newly established 'Norms to make up theatre repertories' and especially about two of its basic principles: 'Let's not disturb social harmony' and 'Let's not allow the intrusion of elements which offend manners'. The journalist commented ironically on both, as the period was one of social confusion and manners still needed to be defined in terms of the New Speech of the communist era. During the first phase, 1945-1947, many Soviet plays by minor authors were imposed on the theatre repertory to help educate Romanian audiences (including the people engaged in building the new society). Mihai Florea, a political activist and theatre historian, described repertory at that time in a book {A Short History of Romanian Theatre, 1970, in Rom.). He wrote, "repertory follows three directions; promotion of Romanian classics, staging the world literature, reevaluation and imposing the new plays which belonged to the revolutionary, socialist theatre". With slight changes these 'directions' were to be observed until 1964 and after 1971 when the repertory situation became more complex. Thus the basic principles which would guide activists' work for decades were forged in the late '40s. Some of those who were to become leading figures in the theatre community, such as actor Radu Beligan or theatre critic Valentin Silvestru, wrote articles in the only theatre publication in Romania before 1990 (Teatrul). They either supported the Soviet influence on Romanian theatre or described the role of Romanian theatre as being a component of the Communist Party's work.®

In general, the first three phases of the period (1 945-1 947, 1 947-1 954, 1 954-1 961) registered a conformism in the choice of topics, which was convenient for the aims of the Propaganda. One of the leading playwrights of the moment, Lucia Demetrius was highly praised for her play, Cumpana (The Ordeal, pr. 1948/1949), which was inspired by a recent decision (June 1948) to nationalise industrial enterprises. Many others could be quoted as well; Minerii (The Miners) by another prominent playwright of the period, Mihail Davidoglu and, especially, Pentru Fericirea Poporului [for the people's happiness), by Aurel Baranga and N. Moraru, both of which played a major part in framing the relationship between theatre and the ideology of the regime. Another must in the repertory was 'historical drama' in praise of the great figures of Romanian history. Playwrights Victor Eftimiu and Camil Petrescu, well known before the war as well as Mihnea Gheorghiu wrote such plays after 1948. An obligation imposed during the entire period was that every celebration or anniversary of a historical event should be reflected in new plays. The founding of the Romanian Communist Party in 1921, the union of Romanian historical provinces in 1 859, the war for Independence in 1 877, the end of the war / 'liberation' of Romania / invasion of the Soviet Army (officially the most important event in the period, 23 August 1944), were celebrated every year with enormous sums of money spent on the ceremonies. In those specific anniversary-years, theatres would put in their repertories plays by Mihnea Gheorghiu, Paul Everac, Dan Tarchila, D.R. Popescu, Paul Anghel, Horia Lovinescu and others. Some of these plays were well written in addition to their ideological marks.

At the beginning of the '50s a new theme and new subjects appeared: the struggle of the masses to give up the old, pre-war social regime and the role communists played in the process. The concept of 'drama' (mainly 'social drama') was ideologically re-invented to impose new values. Plays by Baranga, Laurentiu Fulga, Davidoglu, Demetrius, Everac, Mihai Beniuc and others voiced the concepts of the new culture in theatre. A complex figure among them was playwright Horia Lovinescu. Although he might have been guilty of compromising with the new regime

15 during his early years, to a certain extent his writing career provides an example of how an intellectual maintained his creativity while sometimes paying tribute to censorship and self- censorship.

The beginning of the '60s saw a 'relaxation' in repertory and publishing; absurd plays were written by Romanian authors along with dramas by D.R. Popescu, Sorescu, Solomon, Alexandru Sever or Romulus Guga who established themselves as playwrights in Romanian theatre. The plays written at that time explored areas which previously had been prohibited, including torments of the soul, and soft comedies (Alexandru Mirodan). Playwright Dumitru Solomon says that in order to avoid political or ideological clashes a writer would choose issues of a minor caliber, which in no case could be considered 'an attack on the roots of the regime,' or would write in an allusive manner. As did other playwrights, he found shelter in framing a plot, a situation, or a character within a strong 'cultural' reference system such as, for instance in his case, outstanding figures of ancient Greek philosophy in plays like Socrate, Platan, Diogene, or The Praise of Folly (Erasmus), The Agamemnon Mistery by losif Naghiu, or Sorescu's The Cold, written after 1970. After 1970, every one of these writers had difficulties in 'negotiating' with censorship concerning their plays. Actor Ion Caramitru says about Sorescu's The Cold (pr. March 1971) that it was censored on political grounds because of a clash of sorts: the play was set in the time of the infamous Vlad the Impaler and depicted his fights with the Turks. The author was asked to make cuts whenever ethnic designations (Turk, Greek) appeared because of 20th century diplomatic relations between Romania and the respective countries! It seems that ever since, such references in plays were politically questionable. Adrian Dohotaru remembers that one of the strategies he used to avoid clashes of this kind was to focus the socio-political conflict on a family history, as he did in Inquiry on a Young Man Who Did Nothing. Amazingly, one of the plays by Caragiale (Romanian playwright, 1850-1912, who chose to leave Romania at the end of his life and died in Berlin), 0 Scrisoare Pierduta (A Lost Letter) was a 'favourite' target of the censors especially whenever directors Lucian Pintilie, Alexa Visarion, Mircea Cornisteanu, or Dominic Dembinski made innovative interpretations of this excellent playwright. Because the play is about elections, political and cultural authorities were very careful about approving every new premiere of the play. Playwright Dumitru Solomon now believes that most of the new Romanian plays were potential grounds for political criticism of the censors.

Alexandru Tocilescu's production of Hamlet in 1985 at the Bulandra Theatre proved to be ideologically questionable. The revised translation of the play and the fact that Horatio died in the end, along with many other situations in the performances, caused great debates at various official levels. Caramitru (who played Hamlet) says that during one of the meetings a Party official suggested a number of cuts in Shakespeare's play! He warned the official that this would blatantly reveal that Shakespeare was being censored in Romania. Eventually, the production went ahead and enjoyed enormous success for years. The same was true for Catalina Buzoianu's production based on the novel Dimineata Pierduta (The Lost Morning) by writer Gabriela Adamesteanu (at Bulandra). In this case, although the story refers to Romanian society before the war, the audience experienced a sense of criticism of its own background.

In all of the situations described in this paper so far, the quality of the best Romanian actors growing year by year was, together with the innovative mind of many directors and set- designers, an imbatable 'atout' which created many times 'the very essence of the critical theatre in Romania.' This could explain why the imposition of mediocre new Romanian plays in the repertory sometimes provided an opportunity to establish a sort of complicity between the audience and the actors.

In the very core of this complicity based on a special code was the hall-mark of reinterpretation of classics, a territory in which censors often lacked imagination. In a way, the appeal of the

16 classic plays was a sort of oasis for Romanian directors and theatre managers as well as a strategy of enormous importance for the excellence of the Romanian theatre after 1964. Up until then primarily Russian classics were staged, and it was the Romanian Caragiale, in a series of productions by director Sica Alexandrescu, who established the standard realism in the first two decades of the period. The influence of these Caragiale productions was enormous as some of the leading actors from the old generation, as well as the younger ones, were extremely talented. In those years (1948, A Lost Letter, 1 949, A Stormy Night, 1951, Carnival Farces] these Alexandrescu productions and other classics were challenged by another, younger generation of directors whose sense of realism was different (Moni Ghelerter, Crin Teodorescu, Lucian Giurchescu). But Liviu Ciulei forged a new language of realism on stage which was able to defend the acquisitions of a new aesthetics in theatre: it was called 'magic realism'. His productions of Buchner's Leonce and Lena (pr. March 1970) and Caragiale's A Lost Letter (pr. January 1972) started a new trend in Romanian theatre. He was not alone as Lucian Pintilie worked at the Bulandra Theatre by that time.

The directors who made use of the classics - with Shakespeare at the top of the list followed by Chekhov and closer to us, Ibsen -as Ciulei, Pintilie, Esrig, Aureliu Manea, Penciulescu, Andrei Serban, Purcarete, Mihai Maniutiu, Alexandru Darie, Dembinski, Frunza and others made their own way to the core of the dramatic, comic, tragic or grotesque humanity that could speak to the audience across any political or ideological barrier. It is their special gift to transcend mere criticism and penetrate the infinite complexity of the human being. Ion Caramitru says today, "classic texts were preferred because the plot on stage could be located in an indefinite time thus letting allusion spread all over". The same opinion is shared by director Alexandru Dabija when he staged texts by Molière and Caragiale. His production of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhómme (pr. December 1989) openly portrayed the main character as Ceausescu!

One of the main characteristics of directors working on classic texts is that - at least in their best productions - they've never been seduced by the easy up-beat commentaries on the present state of things. Instead, they are able vividly to portray the hopes and fears of mankind that inevitably attracts audiences. In Ciulei's production of The Tempest by Shakespeare at Bulandra (1976) Prospero's island was imagined as a deserted land of destroyed culture, with a pile of books spread from place to place along with fragments of antiquities so as to always remind us of a distant past from which we all came to witness a hope for possible happiness.

Rehearsals for this production were long and difficult, as was the case with many others. However, they differed from rehearsals of a contemporary play. In the case of the latter, the play itself was subject to many readings by censors and, in some cases, by political officials charged with cultural affairs. After 1971, committees of chosen artists and representatives of other social strata began to function in all theatres. They were meant to strengthen vigilance in repertory problems. These were later replaced by the Committees of Working People! In one way or another, these groups had been functioning since 1946-1947 but they were not entitled to make decisions of their own. It was a cosmetic democracy extended to theatre too.

The decision to put a play in the repertory had to be approved by the Theatre Department of the Ministry of Culture or (depending on the period) the Council for Socialist Education and Culture. In fact, theatres were obliged to submit their repertory projects to these bodies and wait for approval. Approval was given either in writing by stamped documents or verbally (approval over the phone was a frequent means of avoiding responsibility in the event of a scandal or a political or ideological clash). After approval was received, the theatre director would decide to begin a new production once the director and cast were known. Budgets for productions were individually checked and approved, first by the director of the theatre and then by the economic authorities. Theatres never spent much money on publicity; in the absence of a market-economy.

17 theatre provided an inexpensive and rare opportunity to spend an evening out and experience a cultural event. The rehearsal process could last for months, this being considered an advantage owing to the system in which theatre operated. The lack of pressure in marketing and the minimal concern for ticket-sales, induced a specific rhythm of work in Romanian directors (who are now finding it a challenge when working abroad according to Western standards).

Romanian theatre continued making a celebration out of the opening night(s), even when numerous difficulties arose in planning the premiere. It was usually announced two weeks in advance at best! There were (and are) rarely previews and the press night comes usually between the 4th and 7th performance, and sometimes even later. In certain circumstances theatres were judged according to the number of premiers per season, and depending on financial and economic arrangements, many theatres followed the 'unorthodox' procedure of staging one or two performances of a new play at the end of a theatre season, and reporting it as a premiere only at the beginning of the next.

Difficulties also arose due to the sometimes very late approval of plays. Foreign authors were often an issue. Some of them were unable to obtain a 'Romanian theatre visa' as was the case with Eugene lonesco after 1971, Harold Pinter with some of his plays. Bond, Howard Barker, Eastern authors of absurd plays or playwrights who 'promoted' western values. Approval was given for those writers and plays that represented leftist tendencies or promoted socialist values. For instance, the fortune of Italian Aldo Nicolaj on Romanian stages is exemplary. Brecht was present in the repertory in the '60s, mainly as a result of Giurchescu's productions at the Comedy Theatre. After that, he was considered inconvenient and disappeared. Other contemporary foreign authors with one or some of their plays were: Buero Vallejo of Spain, Camus, Arthur Miller, Durrenmatt; Mrozek and Gombrowicz as Eastern exceptions a.o.

One of the objections often raised by cultural officials regarding the many requests for foreign plays was that royalties had to be paid in hard currency. However, playwright Dumitru Solomon believes that this was sometimes given simply as an excuse to refuse requests. Even when there were translations of new foreign plays in circulation (an organisation called ATM undertook to edit a series of them), the situation did not improve. Theatre repertory was in fact very carefully 'edited' and only when allies from within the propaganda structures intervened, were some theatres 'lucky' enough to achieve their goals.

18 V THE AUDIENCE

This research should have included more about the complexities of life in Romania during the period 1 945-1 989 in order to explain the sort of complicity that was born effectively in 1 971. At that time, things began to deteriorate - the everyday life of an entire nation along with its expectations and aspirations, the relationship between the theatre and audience, and the sanctuary that many Romanians found in 'culture and learning'. The regime erected barriers to gaining information in various ways at different times. Party documents dated after 1971 show an increasing tendency towards nationalism and humanistic culture began to suffer serious damage through restrictions, falsifications and prescriptions of a political and ideological nature. It may be significant that within two years, 1971-1972, after Ceausescu's visit to China, the following steps were taken: A law for defending state secrets (which restricted certain civic rights) was enacted; in November, 1971 the new Council of Socialist Culture and Education was established; in 1972, a project was designed to establish 'norms of living and working for communists'; and later that year, the newly-founded Council held its first session with theatre activists. This series of political and ideological events, chosen from a much longer list, points to the hardening of all kinds of conditions related to the readjustment of economic, social and cultural domains, according to the reinforcement of politics in Romania at that time. Pressure increased to join the ranks of the Communist Party in order to achieve a professional career; 1968 was still fresh in people's minds, when Ceausescu refused to let the Romanian Army invade Czechoslovakia and forced writers and artists to give credit to the Party out of a continued anti-Soviet sentiment. Many war survivors could not forget the savage behaviour of Soviet troops in Romania, an 'ally' by then (since august 1944), and Moscow's constant refusal to recognise the part Romania played in shortening WW II by at least 'six months' (which has only recently been recognised by many Western historians). The tangible result of Soviet influence after the war amounts to 20 years of financial compensation paid by Romania to the Soviet Union. Even now, after 1989 and following high-level meetings between Romanian and Russian officials, a huge part of the Romanian treasury remains in Moscow!

The complicity 1 mentioned was also an effect of the 'reservation' mentality which shaped Romanian psychology and outlook. When one lives in a world of fabrications, escapism becomes one's second nature and creates a duplicity out of one's own living. That explains the reaction of theatre audiences to the very nature of the art of theatre representation which manifested itself through a kind of 'tension and easiness in getting the hidden message of culture.'

As a result of a cultural policy that began at the end of the '40s, the network of theatre institutions expanded in 20 years to 39 theatres, with a proportional increase in audience size. In 1959 there were more than 11.000 performances, attended by 4.3 million people in these 39 theatres. According to an analysis by Pavel Campeanu (published in 1975 in Teatrul Romanesc contemporan, Romanian Contemporary Theatre 1944-1974), drawn from the available official sources (published for the years 1948, 1950 and 1955-1972), the average annual theatre attendance was 4.2 million people. Taking this figure as a reference, he determined that the best attended theatre seasons were 1960-1965, and the worst 1969-1972.

The composition of the audience changed through the years, reflecting the general tendencies of the society's development and the diversified profile of theatres. After 1970, as big industries quickly developed, thousands of people moved to the cities in hope of changing their social status. This obviously affected the composition of the audience. Perhaps more significant, however, was the increased attendance of young people, which likely occurred after a 1971 political decision led to the increase of university profiles (new faculties, more students). In addition, workers and people from other institutions were obliged to go in organised groups to the theatre, with tickets sold through the unions in work-places. In fact, after the great earthquake of

19 March, 1 977 when Ceausescu ordered massive cuts, amongst other things, of theatre subsidies, theatres successfully appealed for economic support from commercial enterprises in a joint operation with local political authorities!

An amazing number of excellent directors and actors emerged nearly every year, having graduated from theatre institutes around the country. As a result, theatre as a place for relaxation began to be favored amongst the very few possibilities for entertainment (Television, radio and especially film industry were strictly controlled). Following the previews requested by censorship (the most difficult moment, from both a human and artistic standpoint), the performance went on, providing the audience each night with a genuine cultural experience, as well as an opportunity to get to the core of the 'message' artists offered on stage.

This 'message' came through on several levels. On the surface was a glimpse into the difficulties of everyday life and the new morals of the socialist society. This was easy to convey on stage, particularly in light of the hardening of the general situation in the country. In this way, the play shaped an attitude and a perspective. This was especially the case with premieres of Caragiale's comedies and a number of Romanian plays and classics. When Pintilie staged Caragiale's Carnival's Farces, he pointed directly to the world in which we were all living. It was an obvious portrayal of how sad it felt to be Romanian under the circumstances at the time. It showed a world of mystified sentiments, of cowardice, accusing the silent compromise and the lack of open questioning. When Dembinski put the two actors in Caragiale's Master Leonids faces the Reaction in a huge bed under a cover made completely out of journals, he obviously was attacking the official and party media which spread lies daily in order to persuade the nation that things were going well.

The audience was keen to absorb any criticism or critical reference to the system and was sometimes disappointed in even a very good production if it contained no such hints. It was this perpetual state of waiting for something to happen in Romania, some major change, some improvement in the law or the system, that helped create the sort of special communication channels between stage and audience. And, of course, there was the total presence of Ceausescu everywhere. When life has been shaped according to propaganda models, and regulations have been enforced as a tribute to the new idea of reality, one can easily understand why theatre as a 'public' place meant so much to the audience. Living in a closed society, rumours of critical theatre or of an outstanding actor's presence in a premiere spread immediately; long before the opening, the actors themselves were conscious - and made others aware as well - of the risks that might arise from a new piece of critical theatre. When actor Victor Rebengiuc appeared on stage in Buzoianu's production of A Lost Morning, he attempted to stir up discontent with the totalitarian aspects of communism. Ion Caramitru in Hamlet was also aware of the ethical importance of the part he played, especially when the prince plotted with the actors concerning the performance to be given for the King.

20 VI THEATRE CONTEXT

It is a characteristic of the Romanian theatre community to welcome every new theatre festival in the country. For reasons described many times, theatre festivals were considered unique opportunities for the theatre community to meet and talk about theatre concepts, issues and trends. It is a well-known fact that many of these festivals originated in the former ATM - Association for art people working in Theatre and Music - within the Theatre Critics Section, chaired by critic Valentin Silvestru. He was a leading personality by that time; he began his career in the early '40s, and was the author of many theatre books. He is a controversial figure now, as his connections with the regime, i.e. political and propaganda authorities, are beyond question. He shaped a concept of theatre criticism at that time, known as 'criticism in action,' a sort of activism which became the mark of many theatre critics with whom he organised many of the theatre festivals in the country. Nevertheless, this did not imply a search for funds or managerial skills, as he knew that the self-pride of the local authorities was reliable. At any rate, the theatre festivals were held annually (with a few exceptions) and there were seasons when 1 6 festivals were held, all giving awards!!). Valentin Silvestru organised the juries, their components, supervised the award session etc. Many actors and directors say today that he was 'present' everywhere, which to many meant a lot. The debates organised by the group of critics from ATM were carefully 'edited' and it was rare that an opinion which was critical towards the theatre context or which contained innuendos of a political or ideological nature would pass unsanctioned. Leading figures of the theatre community in Romania today, including Ion Caramitru, Victor Rebengiuc and others, state that the theatre festivals were a consequence of local political interest in reporting to higher levels the dynamics of culture in the region. Local officials hoped to receive good marks for their efforts in building a socialist society. However it must be said that some local political leaders really helped organise the theatre festivals in their city, and it is as a result of their efforts that audiences in the provinces were sometimes able to see the best of Romanian theatre at the time. Given the lack of information on international theatre and the small size of the theatre community in Romania, it is understable why these festivals had their importance, aside from the simple fact of their being an opportunity to meet and talk.

The possible channels to communicate with the international theatre community were few. Opportunities occurred mainly during tours of foreign theatre companies in Romania, and they provided a glimpse of what was going on, especially in Europe. They also generated opportunities for some artists to work abroad (when and if they returned they would spread news informally, which was especially important after the'SOs when a decision was taken to limit meetings of individuals in private or public places).

Notable international tours included: the Berliner Ensemble (GDR) in May, 1959 with two Brecht productions; ThéStre de la Cité Villeurbane led by Roger Planchon with two plays by Molière and Dumas (an adaptation) in May, 1963; La Comédie Francaise in May, 1964 with two plays by Molière and Musset; l'Odéon with two plays by Beaumarchais and lonesco in May, 1965; the State Theatre from Leningrad with plays by Schwartz, J. Kilty and Suhovo-Kobilin in October, 1965; Vieux Colombier with plays by Hugo and Claudel in May, 1966; perhaps the most important of all, the Royal Shakespeare Company with Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare in October, 1972; Cheek by Jowl (UK) and The Royal National Theatre from London. There were many others and their presence started debates within the professional milieu as well as, for instance, the BBC TV series of Shakespeare's plays broadcasted in Romania.

21 Until 1979 the Romanian theatre companies, especially the Bulandra Theatre, the National Theatre and others, were able to tour abroad, albeit not often, under the auspices of the organisation of the only state Agency called ARIA, with the proviso that there be at least one Romanian play in the repertory of the tour. After the great scandal with Pintilie's The Government Inspector in 1971 Bulandra Theatre, as Ion Caramitru often says, was 'home-arrested' for the years leading up to 1989.

22 VII THEATRE IN ROMANIA TODAY

Nearly six years after the death of the Ceausescus and the officially proclaimed change of the political regime in Romania, including the abolition of censorship, theatre is now faced with a strenuous and complicated process of adapting itself to a new and ill-defined economic and socio-political context. New theatres have appeared, subsidised by the Ministry of Culture (Masca, Excelsior, Mundi) and the Theatre in Tg. Jiu is the only stable independent company (Levant, which started with official subsidies). Because of the increasing influence of UNITER, the Romanian theatre organisation established in February, 1990, and especially its intervention in general theatre policy, theatre authorities have had to propose measures to re-shape the old- fashioned structure of theatre institutions. So far, they have completely failed in doing so. Romanian theatres are linked to their buildings and it is very rare for a company to exist without a building. Their maintenance costs are paid by the state. The subsidies, accounting for about 80- 90% of the total costs, reveal that over 60% is spent on salaries for the, on average, 70-80 full- time paid people (in the case of the single auditorium theatres), and over 120 people in the case of the six National theatres and those with two auditoriums. Only in the last two years have short-term contracts for actors been introduced, primarily for the young graduates of the state- owned and private Theatre Academies. No theatre employs artists according to a careful and long-planned repertory, but this is partly due to the fact that subsidies are irregular and theatre managers are often forced to improvise.

Romanian theatres are repertory theatres and this is a long standing tradition which contributes to the richness and excellence of its best productions. Rehearsal times are very long compared to Western norms, lasting two months and sometimes much longer. This explains to a certain extent the lack of dynamism in theatres and also the absence (with few exceptions) of other paths in search of new theatrical forms. In addition, there is a total disregard for new plays by Romanian and foreign authors. The theatres don't have a readership system, and even though UNITER launched the first play-contest, an example followed by the Ministry of Culture and two or three regional theatres, theatres and directors are nonetheless reluctant to offer new plays. A reasonable explanation is to be found in this research (see Ml and IV) but it is also true that theatre schools don't train or encourage actors and student directors in this direction. Finally, after breaking its isolation, Romanian theatre ventured into the European theatre (especially with tours - over 90 of them, many of which were originated by UNITER).

The fact remains that the best Romanian theatre, created by directors such as Andrei Serban (during his three-year return to Romania), Silviu Purcarete (with the National in Craiova), Mihai Maniutiu (with Odeon Theatre and the National in Cluj), Alexandru Tocilescu (with Bulandra), Liviu Ciulei and Alexandru Darie (Bulandra and Comedy Theatre), Cristian Pepino (with Tandarica Puppet Theatre), Victor loan Frunza (with the National in Cluj and Tirgu Mures), Tompa Gabor (with the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj) and many others, rely on the exceptional quality of the work of the actors.

One might yet notice that there is a considerable gap between the best Romanian theatre and the remaining productions. The paucity of this medium level can be explained in many ways in terms of local audiences, the degree of information, the courage to accept challenges, etc.

Because politics is still so present in society and everyday life, because the past history of the country is yet to be truly known and the determination to change is still under question (by Romanian political opposition and European bodies) - even if efforts have been made by the current ruling party and its government - and because of the contextual circumstances of Central and Eastern Europe at present, theatre as Art faces a real crisis. This crisis exists in terms of a moral recovery after totalitarianism, of management, technical conditions and the targeting of

23 audiences. But what 1 believe to be unique in the Romanian theatre - and this has been noticed not only by domestic observers but also by foreign experts - is its genuine production of excellent works of contemporary theatre in times of great pressure. The decades before 1989 might have resulted in an inner, deeply rooted resistance against what is imposed from outside.

The current situation is even more difficult than before because - as occurred throughout Eastern Europe - with the disappearance of a single 'target' (communism, the dictator, censorship) critical theatre has to identify new targets. Decisions taken last summer, which led to re- centralisation in culture and the dependence of all theatres on the Ministry of Culture for their funds, tour opportunities (apart from those organised by UNITER) and repertoires (which are more relaxed now), perhaps have created space for other forms of critical theatre in Romania. The newly acquired liberties and the new realities of society (organised crime, corruption, sex etc.) need some time to be reflected in the theatre. Classics remain the beloved treasure of Romanian Theatre. The playwrights who emerged after 1989, Alina Mungiu, Horia Garbea, Clelia Ifrim, Marcel Tohatan and others rarely have been able to find their way to the stage. UNITEXT, the publishing house of UNITER, has published some of their work and has started a new theatre publication, Semnal Teatral, a bi-monthly with English and French sections meant to reflect and inform about new trends in Romanian theatre and on the European stage.

Theatre production (with 5-6 premieres a season, on average) has to adjust to the increasing rate of inflation (1 US dollar/2000 lei when the average monthly salary is 160 000 lei), which is a real challenge when sponsorship incentives are not yet developed and corporations are mainly interested in sponsoring sport and music events.

A stimulus for encouraging creativity in theatre and promoting Romanian theatre abroad has been the establishment of UNITER, which since 1993 has launched many projects and programmes concerning young artists, placements, tours, theatre in education, support of artists in difficulty, new writing, co-productions, literary agency and publications. UNITER is also an advisory board for theatre affairs in the country, despite the fact that theatre authorities are not entirely happy with this organisation whose members include the best theatre artists in the country. UNITER takes a stand whenever the professional rights of its members are in danger or theatre authorities undertake measures affecting the theatre community.

As 1996 is an election-year in some of the countries involved in this research, it will be interesting to follow-up the subsequent developments in theatre in each of these countries.

24 NOTES

1. Paul Goma - Scrisori intredeschise. Singur impotriva lor/Letters half-open. Alone against Them, Multiprint Publishing House, 1995.

2. Povestea Elisabetei Rizea/The Story of Elisabeta Rizea, (it's the story of armed and longest resistance in Europe, in the mountains in Romania after 1945). Humanitas publishing House, 1993. - TV Series Memorial of Suffering realised by Lucia Hossu-Longin.

3. Doina Cornea - Scrisori deschise/Open Letters. Humanitas publishing House, 1991.

4. Ana Selejan - Romania in timpul primului razboi cultural, vol 2, p.243, Trans Pres, 1992.

5. Congresui Educatiei Politice si Culturii Socialiste/Congress of Political Education and Socialist Cultur, June 2-4, 1976, Editura politica.

6. Teatrul Azi no. 1/1991, a monthly theatre publication.

7. Books by Ana Selejan, Ghita lonescu, Katherine Verdery, Paul Goma - see Annexe II and Dan Petrescu & Liviu Cangeopol - Ce-ar mai fi de spus. Convorbiri Hbere intr-o tara ocupata/What else should be said. Free conversations in an occupied country, Minerva publishing House, 1990.

8. Paul Goma - id., p. 12.

9. Teatrul nos. 4/1 960 and 11 /I 961 (articles by Radu Beligan) and nos. 1 /I 956 and 8/1 961 (articles by Valentin Silvestru).

25 ANNEXE I

List of most important dissident productions before 1989

1. The Government Inspector by Gogol, directed by Lucian PINTILIE at Buiandra Theatre Bucharest, premiered September 23, 1972.

The circumstances surrounding this premiere were heavily determined by the decisions in culture taken by Ceausescu upon returning from his visit to China in the summer of 1971. Immediately after the visit, he elaborated the famous 'Theses from July' which were meant as the only guide and rule for the national culture in the future. As a result, Commissions were formed to view every theatre production and film in order to give an OK before going public. It was one of these commissions which saw The Government Inspector, and its members were Ion Brad, Vice-President of the Council of Culture and Socialist Education, Amza Saceanu, President of the Culture Committee of Bucharest, and Constantin Maciuca, Director of the Theatre Department in The Council. Ion Brad, who chaired the commission, gave its OK and reported to his superior, a famous propaganda figure at that time, Dumitru Popescu, President of the Council but also propaganda Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party.

The opening took place on the night of September 23. The third performance was attended by another political leader and a well-known playwright. Eye-witnesses I interviewed said that the two became increasingly uncomfortable. Ceausescu was informed about the nature of Pintilie's production which was, apparently, similar to a Soviet production of the play by Tovstogonov by the theatre in Leningrad which was on tour in Moscow, soon to bew banned. Ceausescu was led to the opinion that Pintilie's production mocked Brezshnev, Kremlin leader at that time. Ion Brad declared in 1991 that he went directly to Ceausescu to explain that the performance didn't have any 'problems' but Ceausescu reportedly said that the international context and Romanian-Soviet relationship had to be taken into account and that artists should be asked to explain their error and repent.

On September 30, 1972, for the first time in the history of the Romanian contemporary theatre, an official ban on a theatre production was put: in Scinteia, the Communist Party's main journal, a communiqué of the Council of Culture and Socialist Education was published in which the following was stated;

"A great number of theatre-goers addressed to The Council of Culture and Socialist Education to express their protest and discomfort against the way Gogol's The Government Inspector has been staged at the Buiandra theatre. The staging and the adaptation of the play distorted the play of the great writer, an attitude which is incompatible with the role of the Romanian theatre - a tribune of authentic presentation of the values of national and universal culture. The Bureau of The Council decided to suspend the production and to prohibit its presentation on all stages in the country in such form and it will take measures that such things won't happen again in the cultural life in Romania."

The cultural authorities requested the theatre personnel to organise a meeting where actors in the cast, the director of the theatre and the leader of the Party Organisation in the theatre would admit their error. This faked meeting went 'well' (some of the people there said out of the sides of their mouths that they were wrong etc.) but the surprise (as I've been told) came from a carpenter who stood up and said that the production was one of the most interesting ones he'd ever seen and that he couldn't understand the purpose of the meeting.

26 The measures taken by the political, propaganda and cultural authorities were as follows: Liviu Ciulei, the famous Romanian theatre director and General Manager of the theatre was dismissed along with deputy, Maxim Crisan; the director of the play, Lucian Pintilie, was denied forever the right to work in Romanian theatre and was given a passport valid for all countries (he left Romania two years later and was to become one of the most respectable theatre directors in Europe as well as a film-maker); actors with political positions in the theatre were politically sanctioned (including the famous actor Toma Caragiu); all of the members of the Commission which gave green light to the production were assigned to other jobs.

2. Jolly-Joker by Tudor Popescu, directed by Alexandru Darie at The State Theatre in Oradea, premiered 1984.

The production opened in 1984 and although it had 'problems' with censorship, it stayed in the repertory for almost a season (during which only a few performances were given). In October, 1985, it was invited to the Festival of Comedy in Galati. It was there that the political leader of the region saw it and informed the political authorities in Bucharest of the nature of the play, which was highly inconvenient for the political regime. The author of this research, who wrote a very positive critique on it - the only one published - was denied the right to publish in some Bucharest publications, serving a 'sentence' of between 6 months and 1 8 months.

3. The Darkness by losif Naghiu, directed by Valeriu Moisescu at Bulandra Theatre, premiered November 17, 1970. The production was accused by the Party journal Scinteia (article signed by Nicoiae Dragos) of 'presenting the intellectual in Romania as being under pressure of brutal forces' which was highly inconvenient for the regime. The production of Moisescu was prohibited in June 1971 and the sanction was approved by the National Conference of Theatre People (July 23, 1971) which incriminated 'that bloody Aesopian language as Lenin called it'.

4. Master Leonida faces the Reaction by Caragiale, directed by Dominic Dembinski at The Drama Theatre in Constanta, premiered in 1984 and presented at the Theatre festival in Oradea, December 1984. A great scandal erupted when (following my article on the production) playwright Paul Everac accused the work of being 'erotic' and a 'distortion' of the work of a Romanian national playwright. Once back home, the production was prohibited by the political and cultural authorities in the region and director Dembinski was interrogated by Securitate. In the meantime a Commission was formed to go to Constanta and see the performance. It was composed of political and cultural people, and a censor (Mihai Dulea from the Central Committee of the Party, Ion Dodu Balan from the University of Bucharest, Gigi Trif, Head of Theatre Department of the Council and literary historian Valeriu Rapeanu). The accusations were sustained and a ban was put on Dembinski's production.

Note : As in many cases, not only in Romania, the complexity of dissidence in performing arts (especially after Gorbatchev came into power) should be very carefully studied as secret police and censorship began to slightly shift - that is, certain groups and individuals but not on the whole -from the main stream of hard socialism and communism. In Romania, for instance, there are views that some cases of dissidence (by writers and artists) were planned by the 'dissident' groups within the mentioned bodies.

27 ANNEXE II

Bibliography of publications relevant to the research

I Reference books on Romanian Theatre published within the period. (They are heavily marked by the propaganda and are in Romanian).

1. Teatru! in RomSnia dupë 23 August 1944 (Theatre in Romania after 23 of August 1944), Academy of Popular Republic of Romania, Institute of The History of Art, 1959.

2. Teatrul romSnesc contemporan 1944-1974 (Contemporary Romanian Theatre 1944-1974), co-ordinators Simion Alterescu & Ion Zamfirescu, Academy of Social and Political Sciences of The Socialist Republic of Romania, Institute of The History of Art, 1975, Meridiane Publishing House.

3. Mihai Florea - Scurta istorie a teatrului romSnesc (A Short History of The Romanian Theatre), 1970, Meridiane Publishing House.

4. Teatrul, a monthly theatre publication, 1956-1989, edited by The Ministry of Culture and The Writers' Union,

5. 0 antologie a dramaturgiei romênesti 1944-1977 (An Anthology of Romanian Drama 1944- 1977", 2 vols., edited by Valeriu Rapeanu, 1978, Eminescu Publishing House.

II Publications in English. (They are heavily marked by Propaganda).

1. The Theatre in the Rumanian People's Republic, Meridians, 1961.

2. An Abridged History of Romanian Theatre, 1983, Institute of The History of Art, Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania (sic).

III Publications in French. (Useful for the CV's of many directors).

1. Teatrul. Supplement è I'occasion de la réunion internationale sur Ie thème: "Développement professionel du jeun metteur en scène, 1969.

IV Books on Drama and Theatre by Romanian theatre critics and historians. (They are all in Romanian and I'll only give authors' names) . N. Barbu, Ion Cocora, Romulus Diaconescu, Paul Everac, Dinu Kivu, Mircea Ghitulescu, loan Massof, losif Naghiu, Stefan Oprea, Marian Popescu, Dinu Sararu, Valentin Silvestru, Dumitru Solomon.

V Books published abroad on Romanian Theatre

1. Gheorghe Stanomir - Romanian Drama since 1944, thesis at Freiburg University, 1976.

2. John Elsom - Cold War Theatre (Ch. Romania), Routledge, 1992.

3. ITI World of Theatre, publication of The International Theatre Institute (appears every two years, see "Romania").

28 VI Reference books on the situation in Romania

1. Katherine Verdery - National Ideology under Socialism. Identity and Cultural politics in Ceausescu's Romania, University of California Press, 1991 (Rom. ed. 1994, Humanitas).

2. Ghita lonescu - Communism in Romania, Oxford University Press, 1962 (Rom. ed. 1994, Litera).

3. Ion Mihai Pacepa - Red Horizons. Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, Regnery Gateway, Washington DC(n.d.), (c) 1987, (Rom.ed. 1992, Venus).

4. Ana Selejan - Romania in timpul primului razboi cultural, 2 vols./"Romania during the first cultural War"(l-lntellectuals'Betrayal; II - Re-education and Persecution), 1992, Trans Pres (in Rom.).

5. Catherine Durandin - Nicolae Ceausescu. Verites et menonges d'un roi communiste, Albin Michel, 1990(Rom.ed. 1992, Nemo).

6. Une histoire de la democratie en Europe (ed.by Antoine de Baecque), Le Monde Editeur.

VII Romanian Communist Party Documents

Note: Many of the Congresses' Proceedings have been translated into foreign language and are now very difficult to find in the great Romanian originals. For instance, due to re-arrangements of warehouses, as I've been told, Ceausescu's speeches are not in the public card index at The National Library of Romania, neither of the journals from 1945 on controlled by the Communist Party.

* Plenaries and Congresses of The Council for Socialist Culture and Education (1976, 1983) - in Romanian.

VIII Other works

Note: A lot of books, mainly Memoires, have been published in recent years, very important as they reveal new, unknown or little known aspects of Ideology and Propaganda pressure or the forms the oppression manifested in Romania after 1945. These are by N. Steinhardt, Mircea Zaciu, Paul Goma, Nicolae Breban a.o. In Romanian.

29 Former Soviet Union THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN THE SOVIET UNION 1945-1989

Research by Sergei Ostrovsky (Moscow-London)^

"... The primary mission of a theatre enterprise is to produce artistic works of high moral standard, which will enhance the communist education of the people.

According to established regulation, [theatre] must create a varied repertoire which would be in the interest of the Soviet people and would serve the goals of the communist education of the people." Charter of the Socialist State Theatre and Show Business Enterprise. Moscow. 1969^

Contents :

Introduction 2

I. Definition: 3 Dissident Theatre versus Dissidence in Theatre

II Theatre as an Official Institution 5

III Artistic Controversy as a form of Dissidence: 14 History and Examples

Notes 39

Bibliography 40 INTRODUCTION

This report is not about political debates of today nor it is about belatedly taking sides in past political debates, struggles or the ultimate moral choice within the Soviet political system. This report is about the phenomena of political and artistic dissidence within the Soviet theatre, which today can only be considered as a part of theatre history. This report is about the real love-hate relationship between theatre and the totalitarian state.

The once giant country and nuclear superpower is now referred to as the 'former Soviet Union'. Many issues discussed in this report are applicable only to the former Soviet theatre and today are a thing of the past. The Soviet theatre art to maneuver within a politically repressive system - both on and off stage - is now all but history. Financial considerations have replaced political concerns. But for decades the Soviet theatre existed as if in a Wonderland. Its significance and its role in the political and social life of the society were great. Today one ought to keep a scholarly distance and academic outlook on the subject. There have been too many hot political debates among theatre practitioners and scholars alike, that were long on political accusations and personal insults but short on facts, real issues, and reliable and complete information. This report is an attempt to fill in some informational gaps.

2 I. DEFINITION; DISSIDENT THEATRE VERSUS DISSIDENCE IN THEATRE

Despite the general subject of the conference being a history of the dissident theatre, we should redefine the subject of this report. It is dedicated not to the dissident theatre in the Soviet Union but to dissidence in the Soviet theatre. There is a substantial difference between the two concepts as far as Soviet traditions are concerned.

The concept of 'dissident theatre' can be perceived as a general theatre movement or an individual theatre company actively engaged in transparent and conscious opposition to the dominant political regime and its ideology. On the other hand, 'dissidence in theatre' stands for sporadic and controversial artistic efforts, experiments, politically incorrect public pronouncements and politically scandalous private behavior of individual actors, directors, or critics who worked within the well regulated world of the Soviet theatre. The former was never the case in the Soviet Union. The latter is much more reflective of the situation in the USSR.

The word 'dissident' was almost never used in the theatre context. It was never applied to theatre in the same way as it was to describe individual efforts of political dissidents, or dissident literature (and drama in its literary substance), fine art, anti-Soviet political groups and their publications. The word was used to describe underground political and religious groups consisting of refusniks, renegade military and security officers, teachers of Hebrew, defecting diplomats, free thinking writers, artists of the underground avant-garde, composers, and individuals from other walks of life and occupations, Soviet dissidents were in open opposition, they were prosecuted accordingly, and there are dozens if not hundreds of volumes written about this in the West and more recently in Russia.

Dissidence was an individual decision, and often dissidents formed small groups which could never obtain any official status. Occasionally dissidents would use an existing low-profile study or writers' group or even a registered society, or a gallery as a 'roof for their meetings and as informal support groups for those just arrested or awaiting arrest or prosecuted in some other way. To the best of our knowledge theatre was never known for being such a 'roof for dissident activity. Theatre in the Soviet Union had always been the art of compromise. Theatre in the Soviet Union was an official institution and a collective art, and as such could never be dissident by definition. However, controversial plays, productions, and experiments were often labeled as 'anti-Soviet' or as 'controversial' and thus were dissident by nature.

Whenever a hint, a sign, a smell, or any other indication of dissidence appeared in theatre it always manifested itself very quietly and subtly. Slight artistic deviations from the approved political line can be detected today by only a very sensitive scholar. Dissidence (for the lack of a better word) can be traced in a few official letters exchanged, or in some discussion inside the theatre, or in a private conversation recorded later as a memoir or as a post-factual interview.

A scholar of dissident theatre in Russia finds himself in the role of an interpreter whose job is not to interpret words literally, but to decipher a real meaning behind misleading words, expressions, official decisions and orders. Still, there was never a theatre of open political opposition to the dominant ideology in the Soviet Union. Unlike many dissident political groups, theatre companies hardly ever engaged in an open struggle or argument with the totalitarian state. Theatre was the most public of arts, it was created collectively by many people most of whom would never in their worst nightmares dream of being accused of dissidence. Theatre was carefully controlled by means of the carrot and stick approach. On the surface this control brought excellent results. Under the surface, dissidence was often there, expressed through individual efforts of theatre workers. However, a theatre stage often projected images and provoked thoughts that were dissident. They came into opposition with

3 the officially recommended packages of images and thoughts. Ocasionally a production would spark controversy and subsequently be closed down or censored. Sometimes it happened immediately after opening night. Sometimes after a dress rehearsal censors would accuse a play of 'dissident thinking' or inakomyslie - 'other thinking'. How did this work? What ideas were rendered controversial? Where the dissidence in theatre was coming from, and what was theatre up against? In this report we will discuss two general areas: the area of creative activity and its product; and the area of the official bureaucratic framework within which all theatres existed and against which we can measure the existence and levels of dissidence. We'll start with the latter.

4 II. THEATRE AS AN OFFICIAL INSTITUTION

GEOPOLITICAL SUBORDINATION

As an institution, theatre in the Soviet Union always enjoyed a high level of attention from the state. This was both a blessing and a curse. Little changed in terms of setup, finance and control of Soviet drama theatres between 1945 and the late 1980s. As any other part of the industry - the industry of entertainment - drama theatre was financed under orders from the central planning authorities. There was relatively little flexibility available to financial and administrative managers of theatres. All drama theatres in the USSR were divided into a few categories in accordance with the geo-political setup of the Soviet Union and were meant to service the 'cultural needs' of the Soviet population primarily in larger cities. The USSR consisted of 1 5 Soviet Republics, which were divided into regions, and contained cities, towns and villages. Theatres were usually assigned to and controlled by central authorities on four main levels: the city level; the regional level; the republic level; and - the highest - the Union level.

Theatre budget, number of employees, level of censorship, and many other variables depended on the location and subordination of a particular theatre. Thus, for example, the financial structure and everyday existence of a city theatre in Azerbajan would be comparable to a similar sized city theatre in Estonia. However they would be different from any republican level theatre. The Soviet government did not like to make much of the fact that in terms of artistic work, national and cultural traditions, repertoire, acting and directing styles these two hypothetical city theatres, though similar in size and organization, would bear no more resemblance to each other than a small theatre in Stockholm and a small theatre in Teheran.

The whole idea of the Soviet Union as a country which united peoples of different nationalities and backgrounds around the same package of ideology, police control and economic model did not agree with the notion of too much creative diversity in theatre. Again, all theatres were built according to the same management model. Superficially, ethnic diversity was acknowledged in the language of performance and to a certain extent in repertoire. Thus the capitals of all republics other than Russia usually had two main drama theatres or two companies sharing the same building - one performing in the Russian language and another in the national language. Regardless of ethnic diversity a theatre would be controlled and supported by the city authorities; republican authorities and\or the central Soviet authorities. Often it would be a combination of some or all of them.

MOSCOW-CENTRIST VIEW

In this report we focus primarily on theatres in Moscow. Firstly because any manifestations of dissidence were more obvious on the Moscow stage than anywhere else. Dissidence does not exist by itself. It only exists as the antithesis to the thesis of political and ideological dominance. The latter was of course most obvious in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Secondly, in Moscow you could find theatres of all types of subordination and administrative structure. This will allow us to discuss how theatre directors and creators of production could play one authority against the other in an attempt to secure certain artistic ideas and interpretations on stage. Thirdly, Moscow was the city where all the strongest theatres from around the country would traditionally come on tour during the summer months. During these tours one could compare the differences in interpretations of the same plays between Moscow and national or provincial theatres; or the choice of repertoire; or the tone of theatre reviews dedicated to touring companies versus Moscow theatres. In the republics and Russian provinces theatre life mostly repeated the Moscow shapes and forms both on administrative and on creative levels. With the few notable exceptions of several theatres from Leningrad, the Baltics and Georgia tours of other national or provincial theatres produced little excitement in Moscow. Having declared this unapologetic if slightly simplified Moscow-centrist view we hope that it will be beneficial to a reader of this report, as all

5 political and artistic processes in the Soviet theatre will beconne more transparent.

THEATRE & AUTHORITIES: ADMINISTRATIVE & CENSORSHIP SUBORDINATION

We outlined the issue of geopolitical subordination of the Soviet theatre. We ought now to see which authorities came into close contact with drama theatre. Since we deal primarily with issues of artistic content and political implications of theatre work, we will leave aside purely economic, financial or legal aspects of the relationship between theatre and the state.

CENSORS: GLAVLIT AND ACCEPTANCE COMMISSIONS

Glavlit was a formal censorship organization, which ensured that no play (or any other literary work) was published or performed without its approval and registration number. Glavlit mostly dealt with publishing houses. Theatres normally had relatively little to do with Glavlit, since they usually selected published plays for production. However, occasionally a theatre would select or commission an unpublished play. In this case it was necessary to secure approval of Glavlit. However, the real censors for theatre were not Glavlit, but Production Acceptance Commissions. Such commissions were responsible for viewing a new production and 'accepting' it for public performance by signing an 'Act of Acceptance'. These commissions usually consisted of various officials depending on circumstances and category (subordination) of a particular theatre. For the most part they were formed of employees from the following organizations.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY: IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENTS

The main institution of power in the USSR was - as is well known - the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). As far as the CPSU was concerned, theatre had a dual 'personality' in the Soviet Union. On one hand, as mentioned earlier, it was a form of entertainment meant to satisfy the cultural needs of the population. On the other hand, by its very nature it had the tradition, ability and even mission to affect people's way of thinking, looking at the world around them, experiencing a variety of emotional sensation. In other words, it had the potential ability to provoke and shape people's ideas. In this latter capacity, therefore, theatre was placed firmly in the realm of ideology. For the party there was nothing more important in the Soviet Union then ideology. It was certainly much more important than money. The CPSU Ideology and Propaganda departments were ultimately responsible for ensuring the ideological purity and loyalty of any theatre as a potential ideology tool. CPSU had offices everywhere, from the Central Committee offices on Staraya Ploshad' in Moscow down to republican, regional, city, town, and district levels. Every office had a group dedicated to ideology and propaganda. Sometimes it was a large department with hundreds of officers; sometimes it was just one person responsible for the job.

As far as theatres were concerned, a relevant CPSU ideology department was the most powerful source of approval or disapproval of their activity. Approval meant increased financial means, higher status, special favors to the theatre and its employees including new apartments, cars, or just the right to use a Communist party summer vacation resort, etc. Disapproval usually meant various types of punishment for individuals who caused disapproval: usually the director or playwright or both.

COMMUNIST PARTY: THEATRE IN-HOUSE COMMITTEE

It is lesser known that all Soviet theatres had a CPSU organization (committee) in house. The size of this in-house CPSU organization varied according to the size of the theatre, but usually was approximately 30% of all employees. The Secretary of an in-house party committee had a lot of political power and influence. This person - an actor, director, or administrator - was in a difficult situation, which required a lot of skill to compromise. Sometimes he or she was seen as a victim trying to protect his or her colleagues within theatre, and sometimes as an

6 executioner who carried out or even provoi

CULTURAL AUTHORITIES; MINISTRY, DIRECTORATES AND DEPARTMENTS

The Ministry of Culture (on the federal and republican level) and the Directorate and the Department of Culture (on the regional and city levels) were parts of the Soviet government with immediate responsibility for arts. Within these offices of culture there was always a dedicated group or department responsible for drama theatre. They were responsible for routine supervision of theatres and were in charge of dealing with requests from theatres, ensured that theatres carried out orders of the Ministry, nominated popular actors to the titles of 'Honoured Artist' and 'People's Artist', and so on. On the city level there always was a Directorate or Department of Culture as a part of the City Executive Council, the equivalent of a mayor's office. People who worked in the drama theatre section - they were called inspectors - were the immediate supervisors of every drama theatre in the city.

MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

The central role of the army and military institutions in the Soviet Union is well known. Due to the enormous size of the Soviet army it resembled a state within a state. The army had its own infrastructure complete with housing projects for the officers, hospitals, police, a separate judicial system, a variety of newspapers and journals, and ... theatre. There were several military theatres across the country, but there was only one Central theatre - in Moscow. It was (and is) based in the largest theatre building in the country, built in the early 1930s in the shape of a star. Its stage is large enough and specially reinforced to carry a real tank, which was featured in several pre-war productions. The theatre is financed from the Ministry of Defense budget. All artistic issues, censorship and general control was undertaken by the Political Directorate of the Soviet Army (GlavPUR). The mission of the theatre, which had a large and civilian company, originally was to provide entertainment for the troops. But gradually the army took it upon itself to generally contribute to the improvement of culture in the society. With enormous economic means at its disposal it certainly was able to support a theatre no less easily than the Ministry of Culture. The latter interfered relatively little with the affairs of TsATSA on the assumption that GlavPUR would be no less effective in censorship and control matters. While members of the company would not dream of being in any way dissident, they were in fact in a more privileged position not only economically but also artistically. Military censors were less paranoid then civilian ones. The army had to deal with such serious matters as invading Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, or cleaning up the Chernobyl power station. On the grand scale of things theatre was just not serious enough. Moreover, GlavPUR presented a united disciplined and polite front when dealing with theatre. TsATSA was their only Moscow theatre, they were proud of it and often they were less arrogant when dealing with and disciplining theatre than their civilian colleagues were. Nor was there the slow torture of dealing with a multiplicity of overlapping cultural authorities as there was in the civilian world, where things that might have been green lighted on one level would be suddenly stopped on another level. TsATSA of course paid their patrons back with the kind of loyalty rarely found in other Moscow theatres, especially the ones described above. Obviously, this was not fertile soil for dissidence, with few notable exceptions which will be discussed in detail later in this report.

7 OTHER ORGANIZATIONS

On an informal level the KGB, Ministry of Interior and other police institutions could have (and occasionally had) some impact on theatre. This happened, however, to a much lesser extent then is usually assumed. Still, in Moscow all city districts were covered by the city police (militia) and KGB departments and thus theatres located in those districts were technically under surveillance along with any other organization or individual. Besides, there were some officers and generals within the security services who were interested in theatre for various reasons, and who occasionally had some impact on individual theatres or productions. Several universities and institutes had amateur or semi-amateur theatres and studios under their roof. We will not spend much time on these, as they were with few exceptions on the sidelines of theatre life in the capital.

DIVISION OF CONTROL

Depending on the theatre category (subordination) some of the authorities described above were involved in theatre affairs to a larger or lesser extent. In Moscow there were theatres of all categories. For example, the Moscow Art Theatre had the highest - federal category. This meant that the Ideology and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Ministry of Culture of the USSR were closely involved in its supervision. Whereas an average Moscow drama theatre such as the Gogol Drama Theatre or the Pushkin Drama Theatre were of the lower - city - category. They rarely came into contact with powerful federal organizations. Instead, their immediate supervisors - known as inspectors - came from the Drama Theatre Department, a part of the Directorate for Culture, a part of the City Executive Council, an executive body of the Moscow Soviet of People's Deputies. It was against this official, formal background of supervision that dissidence in theatre existed.

LEVERAGE AS A RESULT OF CENTRAL AUTHORITY DIVERSITY

It would seem that with such a large variety of authorities who all had some power over theatre there would not be even a hope of producing on stage anything remotely creative or controversial without being accused of dissidence, with repercussions to follow. This was not quite the case. For example, Moscow theatres often showed inherently dissident productions, and this was where the number of controlling authorities was the greatest; whereas in the provinces, with fewer high-powered Soviet officials, control was often much more rigid. A good Russian saying states that 'seven nannies can never keep eye on a baby'. In rough translation this means that seven nannies can never look after a baby as well as just one person. In the provinces Soviet authorities often presented a united and conservative front and acted as 'one nanny'. They were afraid to show even the slightest deviation from the official Moscow line. Out of this fear they were much more inclined to have a steam roll approach in censorship. With Moscow far away, provincial theatre would rarely if ever appeal to higher powers to change local decisions. Moscow, on the contrary, was a territory with seven or more powerful chief nannies, where riskier theatre games were possible and where rewards tended to be higher and punishments more dramatic. It was often possible for a theatre to play one office of authority against the other and to cultivate positive relationship with a variety of powerful political figures.

Most theatres in Moscow, especially popular ones, were linked to institutions of power with dozens of strings: formal and informal, official and personal, obvious and half-obvious and hidden. In the Byzantine world of Moscow politics theatre played the role of a valuable commodity, a convenient pawn, a useful and generally enjoyable institution. The example of the Taganka Theatre certainly demonstrates this. We will discuss this example along with others later in this report.

8 TYPICAL REWARDS & PUNISHMENTS

At the authorities' disposals there were various and numerous ways to reward or punish a theatre worker. It is impossible to discuss every possible combination, but we will outline a few of the most popular ones for actors and directors - first the reward, then the punishment. It would be wrong to say that all rewards were given for political loyalty. Some of them took into account talent, popularity and experience of an actor or director. As a rule however, the higher the reward the closer attention was paid to loyalty.

For most rewards an actor or director had to be nominated by his\her own theatre. One had to go through formal and informal deliberation processes in all theatre 'branches of power' - trade union, artistic board, communist organization, executive and artistic management, and komsomol - the communist youth organization if the person was young. The most popular rewards were official titles. There were several of them; ■ An Honoured Arts Worker of the Republic (this could be Russia or any other of the 14 Soviet republics); ■ An Honoured Artist of the Republic; ■ A People's Artist of the Republic; ■ A People's Artist of the Soviet Union. Each of these titles carried proportional privileges: increased salary, more authority and power in one's theatre in both artistic and administrative issues, better working and living conditions, more opportunity for travel abroad. Other awards not specifically designed for the men of arts were no less effective. Official state awards included the famous medal of the Hero of Socialist Labour and promotions to various political organizations such as the Peace Committee and Society for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Less formal but still effective rewards included easier access to things which were in desperately short supply in the USSR. To list just a few from material to artistic they included: allocation of a better accommodation (a larger apartment or a dacha in the countryside); subsidized and easy travel abroad; permission to buy a car at a state controlled price; access to better food supplies; occasional money prizes; more freedom in choosing plays and topics for theatre directors.

Punishment was, in short, a denial of the desirable things listed above. Theatre directors, whose jobs were traditionally considered most important and therefore most sensitive, were the first to be punished. If an artist was a member of the communist party - which for a director was often a pre-requisite for a successful career and opportunity to have his own theatre - then any disciplinary action came via party channels. The worst scenario was expulsion from the party and the stripping of Soviet citizenship - as happened with Yuri Lyubimov, the artistic director of Taganka Theatre. The mildest punishment was an oral reprimand, without being registered in the personal file of the party member. Popular actors, on the other hand, were the first to be rewarded. While talent and popularity played an important role, genuine political loyalty was of paramount importance.

EXAMPLE

Vladimir Vysotskiy was one of the most popular and well-loved actors in the Soviet Union. He was a member of Taganka Theatre company and was famous for his songs for which he wrote both the text and the tune. His solo guitar songs were popular with millions of people. In theatre he played important characters: Lopakhin in Cherry Orchard, Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Hamlet. In film he did not play much, but the few roles that he did play were hits: detective Zheglov in The Meeting Place Cannot be Changed and the White army officer in ... Served Two Friends to name just a couple. Despite his phenomenal national popularity across all social groups he could never even be considered for any of the official awards. In fact, his life was made difficult by the reluctance of film directors to cast him, by the refusal to invite him to give concerts in the large concert halls, by rejection and official criticism of his songs, and by constant difficulties with issuing him visas to go abroad. Vysotskiy just was not loyal enough. He did not fit the standard image of a popular actor beloved by the Soviet

9 people, although this was exactly what he was. His songs were full of ironic and dramatic images considered by the authorities to be controversial. He sang about Siberia and the people sent to camps there; about alcoholics and their view of the bitchy life; about ordinary men and women dumbfounded by society to the extreme; about the dirt and blood of wars; about the dirt and blood and risks of being an artist. He also drank too much and was married to a French movie star. This did not help matters. In 1980, when Vysotskiy died in his early forties, his unannounced funerals turned into events attended by thousands of people in Moscow. Hundreds of thousands more grieved around the country.

Ironically Vysotskiy, who was officially perceived by the Ministry of Culture and the CPSU ideology officials as an unstable and fairly dissident person, was equally loved by many high level Soviet officials in all corridors of power: from the KGB, Border Guards and the Ministry of Interior to customs, army, fire brigades and many others. This was indicative of a very Soviet phenomena, in which there was a gap between the official line and informal personal relationships. While the official line was to harass and discourage Vysotskiy, on the personal level his admirers were prepared to break numerous rules and regulations to do him a favor. Thus both attitudes co-existed. He could never be sure whether he would be granted an exit visa to go abroad, yet once it was granted the paperwork would take no time at all and many employees of the Ministry of Interior would do everything to make his trip easier. He was greeted at the borders, warmly welcomed without checking by customs, let go by traffic police after exceeding speed limits (and they did not mind him driving a Mercedes in the least). This phenomena applied not just to Vysotskiy, but to many other artists in similar situations.

Very few drama theatre people emigrated. For most of them, especially actors, this meant the end of an often successful career in Moscow, and separation from the Russian-language culture. For a drama actor this was a fatal situation. Those who did were able to visit Russia again only at the very end of the 1980s or early 1990s. Within the theatre community there was usually quiet moral support and respect for those who got into trouble with the authorities.

DISSIDENCE: POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC; CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS

As mentioned previously, the word 'dissidence' rarely if ever was used In relation to theatre. Instead, plays and productions were referred to as being 'controversial'. These elements of artistic, ethical or political controversy did not appear on stage as a conscious act of anti-Soviet thinking. Rather these deviations from the established artistic and political models were a result of the individual talents of a playwright, director, stage designer, or an actor. Later in this report we will discuss the work of several theatre directors whose productions were always popular with the audience but whose relationship with the authorities were rather complicated. These Moscow-based directors - Yuri Lyubimov, Anatoli Efros, Oleg Efremov, Mark Zakharov, Mark Rozovski, Anatoli Vasiliev, Roman Viktyuk - were very different from each other professionally and personally. Yet, among dozens of other directors notable in Moscow and in the country, these few represented what could be described as a certain dissidence in theatre.

Theirs was not a conscious political dissidence. Rather, it was an artistic one. None of those who clashed with the Ministry of Culture or other authorities on artistic or creative grounds was ever a political dissident. Few of them were even members of the Communist Party. They did not question or fight against the Soviet regime. On the contrary, they accepted it as a given circumstance. All they wanted as talented artists was liberty in selection and interpretation of drama. The rigid Soviet ideology machine limited and interfered with this freedom of expression in a variety of ways. This interference and imposition of certain ideas and images led often to directors being in conflict with the authorities, who would label a play or production as 'controversial', or 'wrong', or 'of low artistic value' or 'confused' or 'degrading and offensive for the Soviet audience', etc. Unlike well known political dissidents

10 such as writer Solzhenitsyn, politician Shcharanski, or academic Sakharov none of the theatre people broke the Soviet law, which considered anti-Soviet activity and propaganda (i.e. dissidence) a serious criminal offense punishable by exile or imprisonment in the camps or in a psychiatric hospital. Yet occasionally their talent and imagination produced results which did not fit within the boundaries established by the Soviet ideology system.

Imagination and talent belong to the subconscious. Most of the politically and artistically controversial productions belonged to a subconscious dissidence and were not calculatedly dissident in the Soviet understanding of the concept. Many members of the Russian intelligentsia and indeed many Russian people had a passively dissident attitude toward the Soviet system. This is why any theatre production that appealed to this attitude, even in the slightest way, enjoyed success with the audience. The success of a play was often due to the controversial ideas provoked by a production. It was also in direct proportion to the level of censorship and negative reaction by the supervisory authorities. Whenever a rumour circulated that the authorities were unhappy with a production for political reasons, the unofficial rating of this production among the Moscow intelligentsia would go up. Naturally, theatre practitioners were partial to such an essential part of theatre as success. They desired this success. This presented them with a dilemma: to produce a politically correct play, which will be welcomed by the authorities but neglected by the audience or to do a production which is likely to cause difficulties with the authorities but will bring admiration from the audience. Every company and every theatre director made this choice by themselves.

There was no famous little theatre hidden away from the authorities where an anti-Soviet play could be produced with great effect. There was no stage where the text recited by an actor would be openly dissident and critical of the existing political regime. These things existed, but not in public theatre. Dissidence in its pure form existed in underground galleries and private literary circles, in secret human rights discussions and publications, and it existed behind barbed wire in the 'correction camps'. Dissidence in its pure form did not exist in the privileged world of theatre, which was, among other things, an official institution. The best and most controversial productions spoke often in Aesopian or humorous language. Nevertheless, behind a production were a theatre director and his company who were essentially loyal to the Soviet system, though passively (or creatively) dissident on their own artistic turf.

FROM IDEA TO PREMIERE: THE OFFICIAL PATH

Before moving to a discussion of artistic issues and specific examples of controversial productions we need to conclude this part with a demonstration of the typical route taken by a play being produced in theatre: from idea to premiere. Of course, there were certain differences in every theatre but we are only trying to show the general mechanism. This is necessary to further outline the formal setup against which elements of dissidence become more evident.

Obviously, to begin with a play had to be chosen for production. Later we will discuss the artistic and political dilemmas of such choice. At the moment we will concentrate on general formal issues. A play could come to a director's attention by dozens of different routes. It could be brought by a dramaturg, or a fellow director, or an actor, or a playwright, or recommended by someone, or seen in a book or a journal, etc. Once the play was being considered the initial question would be about its status.

■ Status of a play. If a play - Russian or foreign - was published in the USSR this meant that it had passed the Glavlit censorship discussed earlier in this report and theatre was free to produce it. Sometimes a play was not published but had been written and purchased by the Ministry of Culture (on federal or republican level) as a 'valuable' piece of drama recommended for production in Soviet theatres. This meant that theatre was free to obtain it from the Ministry

11 and to produce it. Occasionally theatres would commission authors to produce a play specifically for the theatre. Once the play was written it was the responsibility of the theatre to send it to the Glavlit censors who would read it and approve or disapprove for publication/production. Glavlit did not differentiate between how a piece of literature was made public - whether in written form or in a form of production. Glavlit either allowed something to be distributed to the public or it did not. Censors never caused problems for theatres directly. Theatre never dealt directly with Glavlit. When an unpublished play had to be sent for approval it was first sent from the theatre to the Ministry of Culture Repertoire Commission and in some cases to the city/regional Party Committee. The Ministry then sent the play to Glavlit and after approval handed it back down to the theatre. Playwrights for the most part did not violate the written rules. They did not engage openly in anti-Soviet propaganda, nor did they include pornographic or erotic episodes, nor did they propagate war, etc. These rules were well known and could be found in a variety of legal sources. If there was any hidden dissidence in plays produced by the Soviet theatre it existed between the lines and was often not noticed by Glavlit censors. What is read between the lines depends on the reader. In Moscow alone several theatre directors were masters of reading between the lines first for their actors, and then through actors for the audience.

■ Artistic Board. Every theatre in the USSR had an in-house Artistic Board (sometimes translated as Artistic Council). Members of the Board had fairly broad powers in regard to repertoire choice and other in-house matters which involved the company. There were several people who were permanently represented on the Board: Executive Management Director, Artistic Director; the Chairman of the in-house Trade Union committee; the Secretary of the in-house Communist Party committee; the Secretary of the in-house Komsomol (Communist Youth Union). Other members were elected by secret vote by prominent actors and other members of the company. If the majority agreed concerning the play's merits, the Artistic Director accepted the play for production. The Board discussed the play whether published or unpublished. If the play made the Communist chief uncomfortable it could be discussed additionally at the

■ In-house Communist Party Committee. Members of the Committee (all Communists, of course) played a dual role. On one hand, they were members of the company and thus supposedly were part of the artistic intelligentsia. It was in their professional interest to select the best play and to protect it from excessive censorship. On the other hand, they were - for career advancement or other reasons - members of the Party and had to obey Party discipline and reported higher up to the District, City and even Central Party Committees, depending on the category and prominence of a theatre. Members and the Secretary of the Committee were often caught between a rock and a hard place. They always tried to reconcile often irreconcilable contradictions: moral, artistic and political. More often then not they represented a conservative, rigid hard political line compared to the other, non-communists in theatre. Occasionally, however, the most creative and subconsciously dissident theatre directors and actors who were not communists needed an angel-protector among the loyal Communists. They needed someone who had the clout to protect, for example, a chosen play from interference from higher up Party authorities. One of the best known examples of such a treasured Communist in the Moscow theatre community was Nikolai Dupak, an executive management director who worked with rebellious theatre directors Yuri Lyubimov and Anatoli Efros. We will discuss his role and relationship with directors later in this report.

■ Executive Order. Assuming that the play passed or was in the process of passing Glavlit, passed the Artistic Board and was accepted by the artistic director then the executive management director issued the Executive Order to begin rehearsals with the cast and with budget being approved simultaneously.

12 I

■ Acceptance Commission. Once the rehearsals were over an Acceptance Commission was invited for a run through. This commission consisted of officials representing central authorities discussed earlier in this report. Which officials were in the commission depended on a particular theatre. Generally speaking there were always representatives from the Ministry of Culture and the City Directorate of Culture. Occasionally there would be representatives from the City, Regional, Republican or Central Party Committees, or officers of GlavPUR for the army theatres. During the run through no one was usually allowed in the audience except for the Acceptance Commission, artistic director, and the director of the play.

■ Discussion with the Acceptance Commission took place after the performance either at the theatre or in the offices of the Ministry (or Directorate) of Culture. The fate of production was often decided during this discussion. According to a long Soviet tradition very few of these crucial discussions were ever recorded on paper. The most important things were said, not written. The very few remaining notes and memoirs about these discussions provide an invaluable source for a historian of dissidence in the Soviet theatre. We will discuss this at length later in this report. Once the members of the Acceptance Commission agreed to accept a new production they signed the act of acceptance.

■ The Act of Acceptance. This was a short one-page form, which gave details about production and members of the commission, and stated that the new production was to be accepted for public performance. There were often comments which expressed conditions for acceptance. These ranged from a few words about deficiencies of design to several lines about whole episodes of the show that needed to be shortened or excluded. In the case of a controversial production when the commission would have hundreds of censorship comments and corrections, no Act of Acceptance would be signed. Very few official records of such numerous corrections survive. They were often made orally and noted informally by director or dramaturg. Still, we know for example that production of The Warsaw Melody at the Vakhtangov theatre received 124 such corrections. Sometimes this was just the first step on the road to kill a play. Sometimes, if all corrections were made, and the production was thus raped and changed from its original form the acceptance commission would come again and sign the Act of Acceptance. Once the Act was signed a higher up official from the Ministry of Culture would sign the production poster.

■ The Production Poster. With signed poster in hand the theatre executive director would sign the premiere order.

■ The Premier Order. In the order the date for opening night would be set. Usually this would happen a few days after the Acceptance Order and the poster were signed by relevant officials.

■ Opening Night would take place on a set date, but prior to the official opening night the new production would be played several times, substituted for other plays scheduled in the regular repertoire.

13 III. ARTISTIC CONTROVERSY AS A FORM OF DISSIDENCE: HISTORY AND EXAMPLES

GENERAL OVERVIEW

Until the death of Stalin in 1953 there was no politically or artistically controversial Soviet theatre to speak of. Soviet art in general, and theatre in particular, was donninated by the style of 'socialist realism'. This was not just a 'big style' similar to many totalitarian regimes. It was labeled as 'creative method' approved by the CPSU as the only accepted approach in Soviet art. This method was based on few principles. It recognized the presence of objective reality but stressed that this objective reality was a result of struggle or interaction between particular social forces. It insisted that an artist look at objective reality from a particular social and political point of view. The Soviet state recognized that any artist reflected reality in his work in a particular way. And the state was deeply suspicious if not paranoid about this reflection. This issue was of immense importance to the Soviet state which was often more concerned with the projected image of reality than with reality itself. Any Soviet artist was expected to reflect reality through the filter of communist society values. Anyone attempting to show reality with photographic precision could be accused of committing the 'bourgeois naturalism' sin. Similarly, those who became too concerned with experimenting with various aesthetic forms and alternative ways of showing reality could be accused of 'empty formalism'. During the Stalin regime these accusations were frequently brought forward and claimed many victims in theatre, fine art and literature. However, more often than not this repression had less to do with actual artistic content. This was just a convenient way of disciplining artists and ensuring party control over the arts. This also meant that non-realistic drama, including the classics of absurdism - Beckett, lonesco to name just a few - was looked at with suspicion and not allowed by Glavlit.

EXAMPLE

What did this mean in reality for theatre? By the mid-1950s the rigid method of socialist realism resulted in productions with predictable conflicts, situations, characters and dialogues. To many Soviet leaders with their fairly primitive understanding and perception of art, drama was always the most sensitive form. Political leaders thought of drama as the most immediate and direct reflection of life: it had actual dialogues between actual characters involved in actual life situations. This verisimilitude of drama attracted much official attention and therefore hurt theatre. From a variety of sources we can trace the preoccupation of Stalin with drama and theatre. In at least one case Stalin acted as an editor, censor and almost co-author of a play written by a popular playwright in the 1930s. Aleksandr Afinogenov, the playwright, asked Stalin to read and mark his new play called The Lie. He wrote to Stalin in April, 1933: "Dear losif Vissarionovich, I am sending you my play The Lie about which I wrote to you five months ago and spoke with you. I shall be happy to have every direction of yours, every mark in the margins, should you find it [the play] worthy of your attention. In Moscow MAT I and MAT II want to produce to play simultaneously. I would like to hear your opinion about this as well. With Communist regards, A. Afinogenov."^ Stalin obliged. The entire play, devoted to a conflict at a factory, is full of Stalin's marks and notes. They all strive to bring the situation in the play into line with whatever current political interest of Stalin dictated, regardless of any dramatic rules and the author's ideas. It was also Stalin who liked the Moscow Art Theatre production of The Turbins by Mikhail Bulgakov. Stalin saw the play many times and this perhaps saved Bulgakov's life in the late thirties. Perhaps in some perverse way Stalin, who controlled life in reality, received additional satisfaction in controlling life on stage too. Political leaders' intimate involvement in theatre continued well past Stalin's death.

14 MILESTONES FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV

The post-war situation in the Soviet theatre had been prepared by a variety of events, publications and official rules introduced in the 1930s. A stream of officially approved articles lashing out against 'formalism and naturalism' appeared in press in 1936.

One article most relevant to theatre, entitled Confusion Instead of Music, was published as an editorial in Pravda on 28 January 1936. The article criticized Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a new opera by Shostakovich, for being 'vulgar and primitive'. The official CC newspaper described the music as being "consciously created 'upside down' in order to avoid any comparison with classical opera music, when there is nothing in common with symphony, with simple easily accessible language of music. This is an example of borrowing for opera and music the most negative features of meyerkholdian art at its most intense. This is a leftist confusion instead of natural, humane music.""

This was correctly understood by theatre as an order to produce things that are simple, traditional, and easily understood by the new Soviet audience. The Meyerkhold theatre was soon closed down and the great revolutionary director was arrested and killed.

Shortly before the war the government Committee for Art Affairs issued Order No.779-a (24 December, 1940) on Improvement of Theatre Repertoire Guidance. This document praised a number of plays that would remain in the repertoire of the Soviet theatre for years to come: The Man with a Gun and The Kremlin Chimes by Pogodin, Lenin in 73/5 by Kapler and Zlatogorova, Bolshevik by Del, Field Marshall Kutuzov by Soloviov, Bogdan Khmelnitski by Korneichuk, Commander Suvorov by Bakhterev and Razumovskiy. These plays were mediocre at best, and portrayed either historical successes of the Russian army or more current achievements of the Bolsheviks. Still, authors of the Order were not fully satisfied with the repertoire policies. The Order ascertained: "Theatres failed to change their repertoire so as to fully satisfy the increased audience standards. Soviet audience expects from theatres highly artistic works which would reflect most important sides of communist development, our victories and achievements, would show the best people of our country and builders of communism, would cultivate high moral and social qualities of the new man both in his private and social life. Soviet playwrights face a responsible task of producing prominent artistic works about development of communism, heroics of the Red Army, and of fostering in every citizen the great feel of patriotism. This has to form a base for the choice of plays by Soviet playwrights for theatre repertoire. This has to be a principal guidance for theatres working with playwrights on new Soviet plays. The use of best plays from Russian classics and Western drama [...] must contribute to fulfillment of the communist education goals."

To help achieve all of the above, the Committee ordered among other things to "[...] Organize the state order for plays to most prominent playwrights covering the following topics: a), defense of the USSR, patriotism, love for one's motherland; b.) achievements of the socialist development; c.) the victory of kolkhoz system and the people of the new [Soviet] village; d.) moral appearance of the Soviet person; e.) Soviet school and education of the new generation; f.) the Soviet family."®

There can be little doubt that this order was faithfully fulfilled. This was just one regulatory document for theatre among many other similar ones.

Post-war attention to theatre was just as intense as before. Shortly after the war two very talented theatre directors disappeared from theatre life. Aleksander Tairov was fired and his Kamerny theatre closed, and Solomon Mikhoels, a leading Jewish actor and director died in a suspicious car accident in Minsk. The late 1940s also saw one of the most infamous campaigns connected with theatre. This was a campaign against theatre critics. Most of the critics accused were Jewish. They were suspected and criticised for being cosmopolitan and

15 betraying Soviet theatre.

The post-war hierarchy of theatres was firmly established. On the top of the ladder was the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). It was officially known as the first and the main national theatre. One could see all the problems experienced by the Soviet theatre in general just by looking at the MAT repertoire and stage practice. The method of socialist realism and its destructive influence was very much in evidence there. In drama this meant conflicts, which were constructed in the most artificial way to show the struggle of good people with even better people for a happy life for everybody. Since according to official propaganda there were no serious conflicts in the Soviet society, the majority of plays lacked dramatic conflicts as well. The reality of Soviet life was falsified. There was a taboo on the mention of disasters related to the Soviet-style socialist economy and politics. Acting was an attempt to show 'the type' rather than a particular character. Interaction of types - it was established - was more capable of showing the life of the society then some small conflicts of individuals. This generalized acting and directing style produced dull false shows but earned MAT annual Stalin prizes for its work. Smaller theatres were more or less similar to MAT both in their work and their desire to be noticed and commended for their work. Financially the state took on the full burden of maintaining theatre, and theatres rarely experienced serious problems in getting their desired budgets. Unlike theatre, which was considered a part of the propaganda system, the Soviet economy, especially in the villages, was not so lucky.

The important XXth CPSU Congress, which took place in February 1956 criticized some of Stalin's mistakes, including the 'personality cult' and brought to prominence Nikita Khrushchev, the new General Secretary of the CPSU. Between 1956 and approximately 1968-70, until the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, there was a time of the so-called Khrushchev thaw. This thaw brought about a new generation of Soviet intelligentsia - writers, artists, people of theatre and new drama. It was against this political and cultural background that the two theatres most associated with artistic and even political dissidence were established; Sovremennik (1956) and Taganka (1964).

SOVREMENNIK THEATRE

It fell upon a graduate of the MAT Theatre School-Studio to establish a new Moscow theatre, which can be considered at the root of artistic dissidence in the Soviet theatre. It also fell upon him to attempt reform of MAT decades later, with productions of politically controversial plays, and to become one of the most recognized, talented, prominent and progressive actors and directors of the Soviet theatre. His name was Oleg Efremov, and his new theatre was called Sovremennik, which means the Contemporary in Russian. Sovremennik theatre was founded in 1956 and thus became known informally as the XXth Congress theatre. Without the Khrushchev thaw a new theatre with the agenda advocated by Sovremennik would have been impossible.

Sovremennik was not charged or inspired with pure political protest. On the contrary, its founders dreamt of restoring the fresh spirit and genuine art of the Moscow Art Theatre before it suffered from too much benevolent attention by the state. The theatre was born as an artistic protest against this 'dead art' of the official Soviet theatre system, represented in their eyes by MAT. This new artistic inspiration, however, proved to be quite revolutionary.

In one of his speeches Efremov recalled the time of foundation of Sovremennik; "After the XXth Congress there was a remarkable reaction of people toward all those lying theatres. Spectators simply stopped going there. Many theatres saw empty stalls. MAT became empty too. By that time MAT degraded, and it went in the direction opposite to the ideas that secured its fame among the Russian intelligentsia. After the war MAT would lead and justify various political campaigns, for example a campaign around the so called 'no-conflict theory'. Every year the theatre would be awarded the Stalin prize, and many actors and directors lived their lives from one prize to the next. Repertoire policy and casting

16 were subjected to the goal of getting the prize. This was, if you like, surrender of all positions."®

In the beginning Sovremennik called itself a MAT studio. Anyone familiar with the history of the Moscow Art Theatre history knows that it had a tradition of having smaller studios affiliated to it. Sovremennik declared a continuation of this tradition. But MAT did not need or want it. It detected a hidden threat in the very existence of a new theatre. Soon after the foundation of Sovremennik, its formal links with MAT were cut.

The artistic dissidence of Sovremennik was not connected with a powerful theatre director, as was the case with later developments. The three major foundations upon which this theatre experiment was based were: the new and unusual administrative structure of the theatre, new drama and new repertoire, and a fresh attitude toward acting. Again, all of these changes have to be understood and considered against the general theatre background represented at the time by MAT. Sovremennik was the first post-war theatre to be conceived and organized not by order from above but rather by a creative movement of a few young actors trained at the MAT School and led by Oleg Efremov. Although later Sovremennik adopted all the forms and structure of a regular established theatre, in the beginning it was very different. There was a general idea of a studio where artistic values, honesty and talent were put above all. This was reflected in the organizational structure of the theatre.

In the beginning this was just a group of young actors who mostly had jobs in other established theatres and who would gather in their spare time at night, to rehearse and to dream about their own theatre. There were also MAT School students among the first actors of Sovremennik. All of them knew that in large theatres and especially at MAT they had very little chance of being cast in any important part in any potentially significant production. In a majority of existing theatres, and especially in their alma mater - MAT - there was a rigid principle of producing a play. All the power of decisions at MAT, all the real influence, was in the hands of a few old actors who were showered with Stalin prizes and official titles assigned to them by the state. For years young actors at MAT were doomed to be part of mass scenes only and any part that had even a few lines in it was fought for by senior actors. It came to a ridiculous point when, for example in the MAT Three Sisters production, young women parts written by Chekhov were played by actresses well past fifty years of age. These actresses were, however, living legends of MAT and possessed all the right credentials and political power for being cast in a play.

Young talented actors just needed an outlet for their desire to work. And Sovremennik was It. Eventually after some lobbying at the Ministry of Culture and other official organizations Efremov was able to get the financing and legal approval for a new theatre. The very name of the theatre - Sovremennik meant that its founders were obsessed with the idea of being in synch with the new exciting post-Stalin times. They were and considered themselves to be the loyal and talented children of the XXth Congress. In retrospect they were of course just as much under the influence of the Soviet propaganda machine as anybody else. But they reacted differently. Yes, they wanted to show on stage their contemporaries, the very Soviet people who just recently won the war, who were building and rebuilding the wonderful new society. But Sovremennik, unlike MAT and many other theatres, attempted to select the plays and act in them in such a way as to show the real people with real problems and real conflicts, and not just the still born types found on many stages in Moscow and other cities. Sovremennik was thus a realistic theatre at a time when in Soviet art realism was paid only lip service and in fact no longer existed. Not coincidentally Sovremennik looked for its artistic models in the past of MAT and in the present of modern European art, the art of Italian neorealism, French cinema and English drama. Efremov stressed again and again that he was trying to build a theatre where people thought alike in both an artistic and moral sense as well as a political sense. He was building a theatre where nobody had any official titles, where everybody was young. He was building a theatre where people believed in the XXth Congress

17 ideas and where falsehoods and lies were considered major sins while they were a quietly accepted practice in other theatres. The social agenda was immensely important to Efremov and the co-founders of Sovremennik. They believed in their ability to bring on stage socially important issues and to do it as truthfully as possibly. What they could not see, of course, was that this was a contradiction in terms. The state, to which they were so loyal, was not really interested in these issues being discussed openly. However, on the wave of the XXth Congress the Sovremennik aspirations were half-heartedly welcomed and the theatre was approved.

Sovremennik became a magnet for other young and creative professionals. Writers, poets, critics, and other actors gathered around the new theatre, participated in informal meetings and discussions of plays, produced little concerts and talked to each other and to sympathetic audiences. The existence of this theatre provided a physical place where many young bright educated urban professionals felt they could share common feelings and concerns. Sovremen- nik was a product and the epicenter of the Soviet sixties generation. One reason why the state never cracked down on these activities was that the sixties generation consisted of ultimately loyal Soviet people who might have questioned Stalin's methods but did not question the Soviet regime. There were very few political dissidents among these theatre people. Other professional circles produced political dissidents who would go to jail or to the camps for their activity against the Soviet state, for their struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union. More often then not these people came from less glamorous occupations than the celebrated actors and performers.

It is remarkable that in its manifesto called The Program of the Studio of Young Actors, the founders of Sovremennik confirmed their loyalty to the method of socialist realism. One can argue that this was just political lip service and that the concept of 'socialist realism' could be stretched or contracted at will. Perhaps there is some truth to this. But in fact, if there ever was an entertaining and artistically viable theatre working in this method, it was Sovremennik.

From a purely theatrical point of view the acting style of Sovremennik was different from MAT and other theatres. Everyone expected Sovremennik to turn to traditions of Meyerkhold, to experiment with theatrical forms. Instead Sovremennik actors true to their program tried to act in the very best traditions of the Stanislavsky method and they succeeded. MAT actors who were thought to be the best among Stanislavsky method followers were, in fact, unable to deliver the same fresh and realistic performance of a human character as the Sovremennik actors.

Mikhail Kozakov, one of the future stars in Sovremennik remembered MAT at that time with a critical attitude: "MAT actors were so self-satisfied and existed in comfort, they totally lost fresh feelings of sadness, or suppressed desires. They did not have any desire so much were they corrupted by honorary titles, medals and privileges. What kind of chekhovian sadness or pulsating feelings could they act? None!"'

Sovremennik acting produced the same type of sensation as a young child saying in his naivete that the emperor had no clothes on. It was this combination of the perceived invulnerability of youth and the actual talent of Sovremennik stars such as Efremov, Tabakov, Evstigneev, Tolmacheva, Volchek, Kozakov and others that made productions of the new theatre instantly successful.

Another reason for success was the choice of repertoire. Sovremennik opened with AHve Forever by Rozov. The playwright was on the front and wounded during the war, and wrote a play that was refreshingly different from the most pompous and false plays about victory, heroism and battles shown on other stages. Rozov's was a story of several young people caught in a complex relationship with each other, complicated further by the horrible reality of war. It was a play where conflicts occurred not on the battlefield but rather in the quiet of a

18 private room where characters revealed themselves from often unexpected sides. Another play In Search of Joy (1957) had at its center a young man played by Oleg Tabakov who in one episode was seen smashing old furniture in his flat in protest against all this airless everyday routine, which he detested as strongly as he favored new and exciting life out there. What exactly that exciting life out there was, was not quite clear, but the point of protest against Philistinism was made. And this too was rarely seen on the Moscow stage at the time. But Efremov's desire to reflect on the life of society had its limits. He was not allowed to produce a new Solzhenitsyn play Deer and Shalashovka, for example.

To achieve its artistic, ethical and moral goals Sovremennik was originally structured in the most democratic way. In the Charter of the theatre the 'good old' principles of any Soviet organization were present including the role for the in-house party committee, etc. Yet professionally there were some important points. For example any actor had the right to prepare any part individually and to show it to the Aritistic Board. The latter was obliged to audition a member of the company for this particular part. Members of the company were made equal to each other. This last condition once was put on trial when in 1962 Sovremennik was offered a chance to petition and possibly to receive the official title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation for a few of its leading actors: Efremov, Tabakov, Evstigneev, Tolmacheva. At a general meeting the company voted against this petition, because official titles would bring inequality. All of this slowly changed; the process was sped up by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Two years later Efremov left the theatre to become the new artistic director of MAT. By 1 970 Sovremennik quietly and fully turned into an established theatre barely different from many others. Most of the actors stayed with the company, but its democratic, creative and moderately rebellious appeal faded away.

TAGANKA THEATRE

The period between 1956 and 1968 is often referred to as the golden time of the Soviet theatre. If Sovremennik was a romantic and pure child of the changing post-XXth Congress times, then Taganka proved to be a difficult and rebellious teenager from its foundation in the mid-sixties and a stubborn grown up for over twenty years until the end of the 1 980s. If any theatre in the Soviet Union came very close to being dissident - it was Taganka. Taganka, often referred to as an anti-Soviet theatre, was perhaps the most Soviet theatre by its nature. Yuri Lyubimov, a member of the party and a former actor in the NKVD entertainment brigade, had his own communist ideals. But as was usually the case, the Soviet state was weary of artists with genuine communist or any other political ideals. Lyubimov soon found himself to be far to the left of the Soviet communist regime. This led to several well known and well publicized clashes between Taganka theatre and the state. An unusual result of this for a prominent Soviet theatre director was Lyubimov's emigration and loss of Soviet citizenship in the early 1980s. These conflicts make up a large part of the history of dissidence in the Soviet theatre.

Again, as was the case with Sovremennik, an outsider could never suspect Lyubimov of being covertly anti-Soviet. Quite to the contrary, he was too Soviet, trying to say things about the October revolution, the war, and the society - all the most important topics for Soviet culture - in a new, creative, fresh way. Where Sovremennik chose to go back to Stanislavsky and discovered genuine art there, Lyubimov went outside of the existing and approved list of plays and methods, to poetry and to avant-garde theatre techniques. Lyubimov's revolutionary zeal was potentially much more dangerous for the state than the intelligent aestheticism of Sovremennik. The latter was a purely artistic dissident, trying to revive the MAT genuine art. The former was coming close to dissenting from the approved and safe ways of delivering a political message. Lyubimov was on the verge of producing a show that would cross the line into political dissidence. Authorities were deeply suspicious of his revolutionary productions all along. Finally his production AHve (Zhivoy) by Boris Mozhaev was banned in 1968, which can be seen as the dramatic beginning of the Soviet theatre's decent into two more decades of rigid censorship and struggle to preserve anything that was

19 creative and talented in theatre from being destroyed.

Perversely, this struggle gave many talented directors and theatre companies the additional energy and incentive to come up with interesting and subtle artistic solutions. They banged their heads against the wall but in the process some very bright ideas and images appeared on stage.

Lyubimov's struggle for his productions is a good illustration of the complex and ever changing relationship between theatre and the state. It also shows what topics, ideas and reminiscences annoyed the authorities. Still, it is almost impossible to come up with a list of such topics as the authorities' annoyance would shift from one topic to another depending on a particular theatre, production, and the political climate in the country at any given moment.

It is important to note here that because of the repertoire structure of the Soviet theatre a production once allowed for public performance would normally stay a in repertoire for years if not decades. Thus authorities' paranoia can be understood. They only had a chance to make sure that a show is politically correct before it was allowed to be performed publicly. Once this happened no one would want to admit that they allowed a play that should not have been allowed in the first place. This created for Lyubimov and his non-traditional, rebellious theatre additional difficulties. Here are just a few examples.

EXAMPLES

Taganka theatre began with a very successful production of Brecht's Good Man of Sechuan, which was directed by a young actor of the Vakhtangov theatre and presented as a graduation performance at the Vakhtangov Theatre School, known also as the Shchukin School. The graduating class of 1963 became the core of Taganka theatre and Yuri Lyubimov was its artistic director. The most prominent members of the Moscow intelligentsia either saw the play or talked about it the next morning. Within a year it was in the repertoire of the new theatre officially called the Drama and Comedy Theatre, situated on Taganka Square in Moscow - hence the short name. From a forn^al point of view Taganka Theatre was no more and no less than a city drama theatre. By formal status it was no different from the Pushkin Theatre or Gogol Theatre. Yet on a theatre map of Moscow the latter two were hardly noticeable, while Taganka had its tickets sold out for what seemed like years ahead of time; its productions sparked all kinds of controversy and the Mafia of ticket scalpers controlled all approaches to the theatre every night. Taganka traditionally was considered the most dissident theatre.

Good Man of Sechuan by Brecht became instantly popular. It demonstrated a new or rather well forgotten technique of pure theatricality and montage of poetry, music and acting. In an attempt to fulfill Brecht's principles Lyubimov tried to achieve the alienation effect and have his actors 'jump' in and out of their characters. At the time the only acceptable aesthetic and method was that of Stanislavsky. Even Sovremennik pronounced this to be the only method and achieved excellent results by seriously and creatively applying it. Lyubimov, on the contrary, suggested a different theatre aesthetic. Obviously, the same political changes that helped establish Sovremennik allowed Lyubimov to continue his play with the Meyerkhold heritage. Soon after Taganka opened the portrait of Meyerkhold was exhibited in the foyer along with portraits of Brecht and Stanislavsky. To people of theatre and historians this was reminiscent of Meyerkhold theatre, which had been closed in the late 1930s and its director and founder executed. Since then the name of Meyerkhold was never publicly mentioned and studies of his art, let alone its application on stage, were discouraged.

Lyubimov with the choice of his plays proved that he was most interested in theatre as a medium of social and political commentary. He would deliver his political and social message through techniques alien to other theatres. Like a circus juggler he would use elements of poetry reading, pantomime, dance, song, and circus performance to achieve in the end a

20 synthethis of all these forms in one theatre performance.

Productions of Brecht's play were followed by Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed in April of 1965, Dead and Alive, a poetic performance in November of 1965, and Listen!, based on Mayakovsky poetry in November of 1967. All of these productions were a success with the audience. None of them, however, were based on a proper play. Lyubimov was clearly more interested at the time in creating a performance as a montage of attractions rather then dealing with an existing play. He often repeated that in creating his theatre he looked for his aesthetic roots to old Russian street performers who were known for their skill in public entertainment, rough satire and often offensive humor, Lyubimov's other passion was good poetry. The combination of the two produced a self-proclaimed 'poetic theatre' where literature (any literature) was used as raw material for theatrical performance. With his fierce left-wing political temperament Lyubimov chose literary material that other directors would turn to only if they had to please the state. Revolutionary pieces by Reed and Mayakovsky allowed immediate interaction with the audience - another trademark of the early Taganka. In Dead and Alive many poems by Soviet poets were combined so as to give a fresh look and feel for the war, which in other theatres was often shown through boring and politically correct 'war plays' that had all but the truth about the war in them.

Dead and Alive was dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the victory. In 1965, with Khrushchev just recently dismissed from his post, the political situation in the capital was one of confusion. In the Kremlin there were groups trying to continue Khrushschev's line and their opponents who wanted to rehabilitate the name of Stalin. Struggle at the top was always projected down the party apparat, including the organizations responsible for the culture. Despite a generally positive relationship between the theatre and the authorities up until then, the war theme turned out to be a sensitive one. In his choice of poets and poetry for the show Lyubimov apparently was trying not merely to speak about the war but also about the 1930s generation that fought during the war having gone through the Stalin genocide. In the center of the performance were poems by Boris Pasternak, Olga Bertgolz, David Samoylov and others who directly or indirectly were known for their controversial views in the past. Thus Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, a few others spent time in the GULAG or were on the black lists of cultural authorities. The Culture Directorate (CD) was unhappy about the production for two reasons: there was too much emphasis put on the Stalin theme, and many poets used in the show were Jews. One of Lyubimov's friends and protectors in the Kremlin named Delyusin remembered: "Enemies of the show prepared a list of apparently Jewish poets: Pasternak, Samoylov, Kazakevich, Kogan, and even Kul'chitskiy [who was ethnic Russian]. Lyubimov was openly told that he produced a Jewish show."® Despite pronounced Soviet internationalist ethnic policy nobody was surprised by this expression of anti-Semitism; the utter hypocrisy of the party on this issue was well known. CD demanded to change one episode where at the sound of a Pasternak poem actors lit a memorial fire, or so-called 'Eternal Fire'. Authorities insisted that it was wrong to honor Pasternak to such an extent as to light the Eternal Fire for him. Under pressure Lyubimov changed the scene and staged it just as before but made the actors simply stand around the Eternal Fire bowl in silence while the fire would not light. According to those who saw the show this was a very moving moment.

Despite Lyubimov's attempts to find compromise and to make some changes officials from CD were determined to ban the show. Lyubimov then appealed to a number of high-posted Kremlin advisors, some of whom he knew through Delyusin and who certainly knew about Lyubimov and his popular theatre. Most of these advisors worked under Yuri Andropov who was then in charge of the Central Committee of international communist affairs in socialist countries. While Andropov was fairly neutral in the pro- and anti-Stalin debate most of his advisors were from the anti-Stalin camp. Still, they had no immediate responsibility for cultural affairs. Neither did Andropov. Interestingly, this did not stop several of his closest aides such as Delyusin, Burlatskiy, Arbatov, and Shakhnazarov from taking the matter of Lyubimov's performance to Andropov. This was an example of Kremlin diplomacy when one

21 sometimes could find protectors just because one was being oppressed by their adversaries and because one knew someone in the inside circle. Lyubimov was invited to meet Andropov and spent more then an hour speaking to him. Without promising anything Andropov asked the office of the Minister of Culture to look into this matter more carefully. In fact, he could do this in combination with any other action: he could call someone on the phone and have an informal chat with someone from the Moscow City Communist Party Committee, or he could speak afterwards with the Minister of Culture, or he could do nothing at all. Anyway, the struggle whether to allow the show dragged on. The issue was discussed several times in the Directorate of Culture; at the Kirov District Party Committee (Taganka was geographically located in the Kirov district); the Ministry of Culture of the USSR; the Department of Culture of the Central Committee; the Military Commission of the Soviet Writers Union. Approximately 20 important changes were made in the show and at least 10 different versions of the script exist. Most of the references to Stalin and the regime were taken out, controversial text was changed for a more neutral one, and some episodes were taken out completely. Still, Lyubimov resisted pressure to include in the text several recommended writers whose works about war were politically correct but absolutely false and disingenuous, among them Sholokhov, Vishnevskiy, Aleksei Tolstoy. Finally, public performance was allowed, and despite all the changes it was a triumph with the audience. It also provoked a flurry of negative press, reflective of changing political winds. Especially furious was the military press, namely The Red Star daily. After an especially negative publication a reader named Solopin sent a letter to Mikhail Suslov, the member of the Politburo responsible for ideology and propaganda. A copy of this letter was sent to the theatre. Letters like this were dangerous, because they could be used as an excuse for severe repression. Often such letters were solicited. Solopin's letter, written in the autumn of 1968, in part read: "Dear workers of the Soviet theatre! [...] Newspaper The Red Star raised alarm about politically immature plays flooding theatre stages, including Dead and Alive. It is not a coincidence that the army press is concerned with this issue. All omissions and mistakes in communist education are reflected [...] in the minds of our young men who do the honorable military service. This affects the morale of our army. Today the class struggle is so tense that one cannot ignore this fact. The times have not come yet when an artist may abandon his class positions and consider all social aspects only as an eternal struggle of 'GOOD and EVIL'. [...] Art must lead the people in the struggle for communism. This is why every artist must feel himself as a communist and an educator. His talent is just a weapon in influencing the spiritual world of his parish. The stage is not there just for entertainment of audience. This is one of the channels for our party to manage their views, tastes, sympathies and antipathies. [...] Stalin has been dead for 15 years now and there is no threat to the Soviet people of returning personality cult. Nevertheless you force feed audience with the horrors of Stalinism, exaggerating the negative sides of the class struggle at that time. You blacken the Soviet model of socialism, revise everything without reason, planting doubt, nihilism, political passiveness. The older generation knows that Stalin with all his misgivings and sins created SOCIALIST CAMP. While we fought against his cult our class enemies found ways to demoralize some of our brothers' communist parties, clash them with us, destroy socialist camp, and make new deathly war more real [...]."®

This letter was indicative of the times. With the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Brezhnev and Suslov firmly in power, the turn toward a more stiff Stalinist political climate was inevitable. This climate proved increasingly suffocating for theatre, especially for Taganka. This can be clearly seen in an example of the show that was eventually banned for public performance - A/ive by Boris Mozhaev.

Boris Mozhaev belonged to the so-called group of 'village writers'. He knew the real life of the Soviet village well and based the play on his novel also called Alive. In the center of the play was a simple Russian peasant named Fedor Kuz'kin. Kuz'kin was made both a simpleton on the surface and a folk hero - humorous, slightly cynical, and lucky. Through the misfortunes of his life the unbearable existence of the Russian countryside was shown in a satirical

22 manner. On stage, metaphors and semantical images provoi

These very 'hard situations' were what got Taganka in trouble.

In the official Soviet mythology the concept of the Village always occupied an important place along with the War, the Revolution, Lenin, Young People. Official Soviet mythology would be too large a subject to discuss here. But even the topics mentioned above give an idea of what topics made authorities responsible for culture nervous. The primary reason for this nervous- ness was of course the fact that the entire history and reality of the revolution, the Second World War, the role of Lenin, the life of peasantry were falsified. Equally sensitive was the concept of young people: the state recognized that with young generations they had a chance to start brainwashing early and make it very effective. They were indeed successful in educating people born after the revolution into what is known today as the Soviet society. As far as the village was concerned - its real disastrous situation in the Soviet Union is well known. Stalin was convinced that peasants with their notion of private ownership of land, cattle, and agricultural instruments represented potential enemies to the hegemony of the proletariat and to the Soviet state. As a result, the entire Russian peasantry was severely oppressed. Enforced expropriation of private property, exile of wealthier hard-working peasants, enforced joining of kolkhozes (collective farms), artificially low wages, and the prices the state paid for bread led to disastrous results. The Russian economy, which was traditionally based on the agricultural sector, was wrecked. The suffering of the peasants was enormous but not well publicized. In the village people died of starvation by the thousands. They were denied internal travel passports so they could not leave their villages. Their wages were switched from monetary payments to so-called 'labor days' which were just marks in an official journal kept by the chairman of the kolkhoz and which in reality meant slave labour. Their tangible rewards were paid in kind with cloth r^iterial, vodka, shoes, etc. They often subsisted on whatever food they could steal from tie. i' own kolkhoz. During the war, the Soviet village was further devastated by the disapp!:D--jnce of the most healthy men drafted into the army and by impossible orders from Moscow and regional centers demanding them to produce more food to feed the army and the country. While paying lip service to the unity of peasants with the Soviet workers, the Soviet state in fact relegated peasants to the role of second class citizens. The village was destroyed economically, as well as in its traditional moral and community values. In the usual Soviet manner a solution was found in manipulating the minds of people by substituting any knowledge of reality with projected image. The entire urban population of the Soviet Union was bombarded with media articles, literature, films, and plays portraying the village as a peaceful haven of plenty. Not only did films like Kuban's Cossacks show mountains of food, rich harvests, and the merry enthusiasm of peasants singing happily while doing most enjoyable work, they also developed and planted the archetype of a Soviet peasant. This archetype made a peasant look almost Aryan in his or her Russianness. Healthy blond women with blue eyes and broad smiles, slightly shy big men easily capable of doing the hardest work, and kind humorous old men and women representing wisdom and ultimate loyalty to the Bolshevik cause were the dominant majority. They were shown to be the backbone of the Soviet village. Occasionally they had to fight against minor individual enemies such as rich evil peasants opposed to collectivization in the early 1 930s, or against callous inexperienced bureaucrats sent from the city and unable to provide true Bolshevik leadership. Whenever the village appeared on a theatre stage it was usually placed in a realistic, even naturalistic stage design complete with angles of village houses (izba) with little windows, old fashioned ovens, little things of everyday life such as wooden spoons.

23 accordions, water buckets, pieces of red cloth here and there, and of course a portrait of Lenin occupying the place of an icon. Actors were dressed in bulky costumes, and spoke in a manner which in the city was thought of as typical for the village.

In the 1960s several 'village writers' such as Mozhaev, Fedor Abramov, Sergei Zalygin saw a window of opportunity to publish novels, which more or less truthfully described the real life of the Soviet village. Lyubimov was inspired by Mozhaev's play because it offered him a chance to deal with a socially explosive and thus theatrically attractive issue. The play also gave him a foundation do produce in his favorite way, by rejecting realistic pretense and producing an entertaining show complete with funny and crude folk rhymes. He touched on many painful issues of unfair treatment of peasants in a light and ironic manner, using as his mouthpiece the naive yet wise, joke cracking Fedor Kuz'kin. Kuz'kin became to the Soviet village what the brave soldier Shveik, created by Gashek, was to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First World War.

Again, Lyubimov did not have any anti-Soviet agenda. He remained as loyal as ever to the system. His sin in this case was, as usual, to be a talented and socially sensitive artist who wanted to show the system in unusual and more creative ways and to touch on socially explosive issues. As many members of the intelligentsia in the 1960s he perceived himself as doing his country good. But the state was of the opposite opinion. The timing was particularly wrong. By 1968 there were several public trials of dissident writers: Sinyavskiy, Daniel, Ginzburg, and Galanskov were convicted for their publications and sentenced to 5 to 7 years in correctional camps. Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter about the dangers of censorship. There was political volatility in Poland and Dubchek came to power in Czechoslovakia.

In 1968, hopeful but weary, Mozhaev and Lyubimov wrote to the authorities about their creative approach in the new show: "We rejected naturalistic way of showing evade scenes [...]. In our show there are no poor village houses sinking to one side, no old fences, no offices with impressive accountants' desks. [...]. The village is shown in an abstract manner. On an open stage (without curtain) there are birch trees symbolizing open space, countryside landscape and wilderness of Russia. Symbolism of the village is also fairly abstract. On birch trees there hang objects of village life. [...] There is no Kuz'kin's house. We do not consider necessary to show realistic elements in order to achieve dramatic effect. On the contrary, when comic scenes take place outside it sustains optimism, sparkling power of the main hero's character, his unbreakable belief in the ultimate fairness of the laws of our socialist society.'"^ Even taking into account that this was written for the authorities in order to secure production and thus had to be diplomatic, one can hardly suspect Lyubimov of being completely disingenuous and having a hidden anti-Soviet agenda. Then the trouble with AHve began.

After the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee in April of 1968, control over theatre and other arts was stiffened. Events in Czechoslovakia made the Soviet regime nervous. The new Lyubimov production was a very convenient target for the local authorities to demonstrate their vigilance and struggle against potentially anti-Soviet pieces of art. AHve went through a series of run-throughs but was never allowed for public performance until late 1980s. Just a simple list of measures taken by the authorities to disallow AHve gives some idea of the extensive 'menu' that was always at the authorities' disposal. First, the Kirov local district CPSU committee 'recommended to the City Directorate of Culture to consider enforcing leadership of Taganka Theatre'. In reality this meant the replacement of Lyubimov with another artistic director. Then, at a theatre conference in Moscow, one of the eldest MAT actresses criticized Taganka Theatre. The fact that she did not see a single play there did not seem to matter.

Lyubimov's favorite tactics of involving a wide circle of celebrities in discussions about his production, and of appealing over local apparatchicks' heads to higher authorities did not bring results this time. Using his personal contacts he appealed to Brezhnev and even

24 received a telephone call from Brezhnev's office assuring him that everything would be all right. Lyubimov was never fired, but this did not change the fate of his production. In the beginning of 1969 Lyubimov made another attempt. He arranged for a visit to the theatre of Ekaterina Furtseva, the then Minister of Culture. She was known to be a rather eccentric woman given to mood swings and might have the courage to allow something single handedly. Unfortunately for Lyubimov, her mood swung in the wrong direction this time. She ordered everyone out of the audience except for her assistants, Lyubimov and the in-house secretary of the communist committee. After the run through discussion and attempts to defend the show infuriated her. She left in hysterics cursing the theatre and its director,

As a result, in March of 1 969 an official order was issued by the Head of the City Directorate of Culture to stop any further work on the play and to exclude it from the repertoire. Lyubimov made numerous attempts to revive the show after that. When a new Minister of Culture was appointed he would write letters again and again and use his contacts but everything was to no avail. The new Minister, Petr Demichev - a chemist by training and cautious conservative apparatchik by nature - never even considered taking responsibility for allowing the production, which was once banned. In fact, during the 1970s thing turned out to be much grimmer then anyone ever expected in the 1960s. Lyubimov's stubbornness in trying to revive the show annoyed authorities. In 1975 they staged a whole farce in order to bury AHve once and for all. The Ministry of Culture moderated a formal discussion between theatre and Ministry of Agriculture officials, including some actual kolkhozniks who were selected and given prior instructions by the Ministry. These kolkhozniks were supposed to criticize the show from the point of view of 'real people'. The line given to them by both ministries was that they would have to thank and praise actors but severely criticize director, playwright and condemn the whole production. They obliged. For many of them this was their first ever visit to a theatre. This discussion was a vivid implementation of the Bolshevik principles that art must serve the people and must be understood by the people. For Lyubimov this was a no-win situation. These people could never understand his art. Today, even despite the inadequate transcription of the discussion, one can still hear some genuine shock and desperation in Lyubimov's words addressed to Voronkov, one of the senior officials at the Ministry of Culture: "I am so upset, Konstantin Vasil'evich, dear. Why did you create this awful atmosphere when you clash people of art with people whom we deeply respect and appreciate? This is wrong. This is absolutely wrong. We all work toward common cause. But you again divided the audience into 'our people' and 'not our people'. Forgive me."'^ Had Lyubimov been less talented and more cynical like so many other theatre directors in Moscow he would not have had these problems. His main artistic strength was also a political weakness; he was just not cynical enough. He still believed in some 'common cause' and despite ail his savvy was shocked by what he thought was 'wrong' things done by government officials. He never had a notion of the whole system being completely wrong. In this, Lyubimov's agony was close to that of Meyerkhol'd who was destroyed by the very political system he championed. AHve was revived by old Lyubimov and finally performed for the public in February of 1989, twenty one years after it was created.

Despite and partly due to all the trouble with AHve, Taganka Theatre reached peaks of popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s. Lyubimov fully mastered the art of political maneuver in order to preserve other productions that might have fallen short of AHve in political controversy but were still scandalous in their social subtext. Taganka Theatre enjoyed the attention of the Western press and foreign diplomats in Moscow, and Soviet authorities always took this into account. Besides, the theatre became a sort of semi-forbidden fruit, which was particularly sweet. It was not an erotic strip-tease, but it frequently was a political one. And it proved to be irresistible. Tickets for Taganka productions of Wooden Horses by Abramov, Master and Margarita based on the Bulgakov novel, Hamlet, and House on Ennbankment by Yuri Trifonov were all sold out months or even years ahead of time. In fact, tickets were just never available from box office. Like so many deficit goods they were only available for the chosen few, or in the black market along with caviar, cars, furniture, salami and so many other goods. As a result, in the audience there was a majority of people with

25 some links to the black market - salesmen, car technicians, currency dealers, etc., or with professions appreciated by the black market - doctors, dentists, lawyers. Another group consisted of the people for whom getting tickets was no problem - the very people who would cause so much grief for Lyubimov, people from the higher echelons of the party apparat and cultural authorities. The latter group would also use Taganka tickets as a precious bonus given to their doctors, car technicians, or drivers. The Moscow intelligentsia was mostly represented by theatre and artistic celebrities. Simple members of the intelligentsia, especially the so-called 'technical intelligentsia' who considered Taganka almost a spiritual shrine, had to go through great difficulties to get in.

Lyubimov came into open conflict with authorities in 1982 when his production of the Russian classical play Boris Godunov by Pushkin was also banned. At a time when the struggle for power in the Kremlin was running in full force at the death bed of Brezhnev, Lyubimov staged the play, which had at its center the struggle for power in the old tsarist Russia with the impostor Dimitri as the heir. Some of Lyubimov's remarks during rehearsals and discussions with actors were recorded and later published in Teatr monthly magazine.'^ A few of them give some insight into the director's thinking process and ideas of political subplot. In others one can detect Lyubimov's aesthetic loyalty to Brecht. For example: "[In the beginning - S.0] a group of actors enters - and they agree between themselves here and now who will play whom. Then they change into different costumes, from different times and peoples. Someone in a Civil War leather jacket, another wears military coat, another in a peasant cotton coat and in tapti.* .... It must be absolutely clear: where actor is in his character and where he has jumped out of his character; where he is one from a crowd and where he is a tsar. I want you to constantly switch from singing to drama and back to singing. The whole ensemble has to be part of the action."

Lyubimov's explanations of the play run in parallel with reminders of Soviet political realities and of his own personal complications with authorities over the show. For example: "This is a serious play. But one must not shy away from humor. Political plays always have a comic side to them. It's not for nothing that so many jokes were made about serious politicians, including even Stalin. [...] They asked me yesterday in the Directorate [of Culture -S.O.] what is the meaning of final exit of actor through the audience. I think they must have an ill imagination to see in this what they apparently saw: that 'this is a humiliation of the audience. Are we supposed to shout [repeating Pushkin's lines -S.0] long live tsar?!'. But I told them: 'No, this is just an appeal to those who are indifferently sitting in the audience. Shout! Why are you silent? Long live tsar!' We do not have any hidden agenda. But I will bow to the ultimatum demands. I will change the finale. Our theatre is tired. Otherwise there would be another conflict. And so then we would all continue to discuss instead of doing our work. They constantly make it difficult. 1 am fed up with it. [...] Yesterday I had a difficult meeting at the Directorate of Culture, which lasted many hours. Sometimes there seemed to be a total gap between us. But then they would give me more sushki** with tea. And the whole thing would start again. Until we hit another dead end. So I would get more tea. And sushki again. But I would eat them. I would only drink tea. Finally decision was made to allow us to perform today to an audience." The ecstatic happiness of actors' soon changed to gloom. The decision Lyubimov had referred to was changed again. One and a half hours before the start of the show there was a telephone call from the office of the Minister of Culture prohibiting its public performance. The Taganka box office had to give money back for the tickets sold.

During rehearsals of the 'Kremlin' episode of the play Lyubimov constantly invoked the political memory of the actors to achieve his goals. For example: "Today we are just as badly informed as during the times of Boris Godunov. And up there [indicates higher authorities - S.0] they live today just like they did then. Similarly they misinterpret facts in a horrible way. Similarly they discuss all the inner news: who embezzled money, and who resigned. [Addresses two actors playing Shuyskiy and Vorotynskiy, the two

26 aristocrats who, according to the play, are left to guard Moscow at the time of political change and confusion - S.O.] You have an important government assignment. You are respon- sible for the entire city. You must feel like me today being extremely interested who will replace Suslov?*** Will the new person allow free speech or not? We can not avoid being political today."

This production proved to be more that Lyubimov could get away with. Besides, in the early 1980s this was a different Lyubimov. He was now married to a foreigner, a Hungarian woman with a fierce anti-Soviet attitude. He had enjoyed some success in the West with his productions. He was less willing to put up with the challenges constantly thrown at him by the Soviet system. Yet another threat to him coming from a Soviet embassy in London, at the opening of his production Crime and Punishment tipped the scales. Lyubimov decided not to return to Russia, and eventually obtained an Israeli passport since his wife was Jewish. Soviet authorities attempted to discredit and intimidate Lyubimov abroad. The story of a Soviet diplomat in London named Filatov who told Lyubimov: "You committed a crime, so the punishment will follow" is well known. In Moscow the Ministry of Culture's search for a new Taganka artistic director ended in the dramatic appointment of Anatoli Efros, one of the most brilliant Moscow theatre directors. Unfortunately, for ethical reasons this was the wrong job for him at the wrong time. He could hardly cope with the internal conflict and outside pressure connected with Taganka. Efros died of a heart attack, and his death was undoubtedly hastened by the situation at the theatre. Lyubimov did not return to Moscow until long after perestroika began in Russia, and even now tends to spend little time in his motherland. The story of Boris Godunov and Lyubimov's 'riot' are well described in a book by the late Aleksandr Gershkovich.'"

Taganka under the leadership of Yuri Lyubimov was certainly the most openly controversial theatre, which came closer to the notion of being dissident than any other Moscow company. Yet at the same time it certainly enjoyed a privileged position and took advantage of high-placed protectors in the party apparat and among influential groups and members of the public. There were however subtle signs of controversy and moderate dissidence in many other theatres as well. In the section below we will briefly touch upon a variety of isolated incidents, or local developments in different theatres, which might add a little more to the understanding of the general post-war situation in the Moscow theatre.

OTHER DIRECTORS & THEATRES

In this section several directors and theatres relevant to our subject will be considered. They include:

Anatoiiy Efros: The Central Children's Theatre & Malaya Bronnaya Theatre Mark Zakharov & Lenkom Theatre Roman Viktyuk The Central Theatre of the Soviet Army Avant-garde, Fringe & Local theatres

In any other report each of the above would certainly deserve a long and detailed treatment. However, since our primary goal is to outline dissident and controversial elements in the Soviet theatre, we ought to distribute space and attention accordingly. From this perspective the directors and theatres mentioned above are not as important as Oleg Efremov's Sovremennik Theatre or Yuri Lyubimov's Taganka Theatre. Still it would be utterly unfair not to mention these others at all, even though they were significantly less controversial. If the section about Lyubimov occupies several pages, and the one about Efros or Sturua merely a paragraph this only reflects on their respective involvement in artistic and political dissidence. It does not reflect on their overall role in the Soviet theatre. We will attempt to present a kaleidoscope of situations and artistic dilemmas involving these directors and theatres in the form of a concise outline.

27 Anatoliy Efros was one of the most talented Moscow theatre directors of his generation. He was never on the cutting edge of political controversy (as Lyubimov), nor was he in charge of any one theatre which nnade theatre history (as Efremov). Until the last years of his career Efros was never an artistic director or the sole leader of a theatre. Until the last few years of his life he was never involved in any political scandals of theatre. He was, however, a very influential force in the Moscow (and national) theatre community, for he was a brilliant director. His early works at the Central Children's Theatre introduced new (or well forgotten) heights of verisimilitude. His actors were often told that only dogs could be more natural on stage. They took it as a compliment. In the late 1950s and 1960s the theatre for children certainly enjoyed more creative freedom, and Efros used it to the fullest. The core of his repertoire were plays by Viktor Rozov who was a new fresh voice in Soviet drama and Efros made it heard from the stage. Later, in the 1970s his productions of Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol at the Malaya Bronnaya theatre earned him a national reputation for brilliance. He produced Three Sisters, Month in the Country, and The Marriage without any hints or regard for any political situation that was around him at the time. He managed to produce Russian classical drama as a pure artistic exercise with intelligent acting and unmistakable spiritual atmosphere. This atmosphere was achieved through small details: a broken guitar string, or a combination of costumes or a sudden musical chord. The dissidence of Efros manifested itself precisely in his non-involvement in any cliches or repertoire choices encouraged by a variety of approved sources: from politically loyal theatre critics to the official repertoire recommendation letters sent from the Directorate of Culture. His brilliant 1982 productions of Tartuffe as an invited director at the Moscow Art Theatre became an example of the Aesopian language that theatre could speak. The gray, simultaneously attractive and repulsive figure of the great hypocrite played by Stanislav Lyubshin projected massive hidden energy. It was the sexual energy of a seducer combined with the potential energy of a dangerously powerful politician. Efros did not change the classical text. There were no hints from the actor or stage design that this was actually a story about our time and society. But the very detachment from any superficial innuendoes gave this production a potential for being most controversial and dissident. After this play one could reflect upon the whole Soviet society based on hypocrisy and illusions. It was not as simple as this, there were many other themes involved, but this dissident potential is important to us. Efros strove and fought for pure, creative theatre both on and off-stage.

EXAMPLES

Internal struggle at the Malay Bronnay Theatre described in this example was typical and representative of other Soviet theatres as well. From several unpublished transcripts of Artistic Board meetings at the Malaya Bronnaya theatre we can get an idea of what kind of struggle this was. Consider for example a discussion, which took place at the end of the 1976-77 season, in May. Nikolai Dupak, the management director was concerned about the lack of modern Soviet plays in repertoire: "Our attention in the next season we must concen- trate on creating modern Soviet repertoire [...]. The diversity of themes and genres in repertoire is not just an ideological issue which must always keep in mind, but it is a primary creative challenge as well."'® What this meant in reality was that Dupak was concerned with too many titles in the repertoire which did not reflect Soviet life. This lack of balance in a repertoire dominated by Russian classical plays or foreign plays could cause trouble with the Ministry of Culture and the Directorate of Culture. Lev Durov, one of the leading actors and an aspiring director remarked: "Why do you put us in such position? Why do you turn us into some marionette puppets? I am not allowed to produce a classical play. Thus for the whole year I will be without a [directing] job. This whole year I am supposed to be looking for some mythical Soviet play, while not being allowed to produce a classical one. Please discharge me then from any [directing] work. Let others produce, and I will just sit on the sidelines [...] I understand everything perfectly well. I did not even take my proposal of the Forest [by Aleksandr Ostrovsky - S.0] to the managing director, because I know that our theatre is looking for a Soviet play. This search will continue for another three months, but still I would not be allowed to do Forest. 1 have this urge to work. I need to try myself as a director [...]

28 Dunaev [the artistic director - S.0]. Until we find a Soviet play there can be no discussion about a classical one.'"® Why would the search for a Soviet play take that long one might ask? The truth was that any creative theatre person knew that most politically correct Soviet plays were of appallingly poor quality. To find one that was passable from all points of view and not over-produced all over Moscow was very difficult. More than half a year later, in December of 1977 the Malaya Bronnaya Artistic Board returned to the discussion of repertoire and artistic policies of the theatre. But before this discussion had a chance to start, an agitated Efros interrupted the meeting: "I want to say about another thing, which is of great concern to all of us. I came yesterday to the theatre and was stunned and shocked by the news that Dupak was not elected to the theatre Communist party committee. Chairman [Dupak - S.O.] I ask you to take this subject off the agenda and not to discuss it."" What is going on? Why was Efros, who was usually publicly indifferent to activities of the Communist party in his theatre, so upset? This was a situation typical of many theatres. In this case Nikolai Dupak, the managing director, was known as an official who appreciated art and artist and who made a great effort to protect directors and theatre in their creative work against the interference of authorities. Such individuals were invaluable to theatres where artistic issues were still important. Obviously, one wants a protector to have as much power as possible. Membership in the in-house Communist party committee (or committee as it was often called) was one of the most powerful ones. The non-election of Dupak meant that someone who was behind Efros and the artistic efforts of Malaya Bronnaya lost a lot of power to protect them. It is important to mention that in the course of his career Dupak was also a one-time managing director of Taganka Theatre. Talented directors who had managing directors supporting them and their artistic endeavors were very lucky. Unfortunately, not everyone could boast of such an ally. Dupak's protest against Efros' attempt to bring the matter up for public discussion is understandable. There were several reasons. First, according to written and unwritten rules, internal party matters could only be discussed by members of the party. Obviously, there were some non-communists on the Artistic Board. Such incidental discussion could only hurt Dupak further. Secondly, all the voting members of the in-house party committee were members of the company. Thus their decision was a reflection of internal theatre politics complete with struggle and intrigue. Efros' rage would only give his and Dupak's enemies further satisfaction. Thirdly, if there was any recourse it had to be advanced quietly and behind the scenes, and there would have to be previously agreed tactics shared by Dupak and Efros. Efros' improvised speech without Dupak's prior knowledge just complicated things. But let us return to the transcript for one last time. One speech worthy of our attention is by Arkady Peselev. Peselev was a little known and not very successful actor. He was, however, a decent man in the opinion of many members of the company. He was also the Secretary (Head) of the in-house party committee. He was a typical choice for this top position, since usually second-rate actors but decent people were promoted to such important roles in theatre. Peselev was obviously distressed that during the secret ballot Dupak was not voted onto the committee. But Peselev felt that he had to calm the anger of the Artistic Board, to pacify the situation: "We do not make it a secret that in the in-house party organization - and this is the setup of our society - we do allow ourselves to discuss the repertoire policy of our theatre, level of morale in the company, and general management issues, [...] and financial issues. The Communist party must invade [sic! - S.0] all aspects of our theatre life. [...] I would not over dramatize the yesterday's incident [the vote - S.0]. I want to assure you that [...] all comrades concerned with the situation inside our theatre fully trust Nikolai [Dupak], including our District party committee, the City party committee and the Directorate of Culture. [...] Yesterday's event was not a tragedy. [...] But I ask you for help as the secretary of our party organization in connection with this. I ask you to take seriously and not be ironic about educational work undertaken by our artistic and management directors, the party, local trade union, komsomol [ Communist Youth organization - S.0], and to attend socially important events in our theatre."'® This sheds some light on some aspects of life inside the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, which was highly representative of other theatres as well.

29 MARK ZAKHAROV AND LENKOM THEATRE

If there were a concept of a successful commercial Broadway-type theatre in Moscow - which there was not - Mark Zakharov would be recognized as a godfather of such theatre. He has been the artistic director of Lenkom theatre for several decades now. Lenkom has always been by far the most commercially successful theatre in Moscow. Many Lenkom actors became national film stars over the years. Zakharov's productions with few exceptions were immediate hits and remained in the repertoire for years with the box office completely sold out. Zakharov also directed several highly successful television films, published many articles, and appeared in countless TV and radio interviews. Witty irony is his personal trademark. His exceptional abilities as a public figure and a diplomatic politician combined with excellent intuition for the right play or script at the right time allowed him to produce and perform several plays that would be considered more controversial had they been done by anybody else. The first Soviet attempt of a rock opera, or rather a musical drama called Juno and Avos written by poet Andrei Voznesenskiy and composer Aleksei Rybnikov was one of the loudest (literally) successes on a Moscow stage. The play was based on a romantic story of count Rezanov who organized a trade mission to California in the 1 8th century where he fell in love with the governor's daughter but died on his way back in Russia before they could be married. As Rezanov's ships called Juno and Avos navigated their way in the Atlantic Ocean, Zakharov navigated his through the sounds of a live rock-band, episodes involving the Russian Orthodox church, and even erotic elements, which were so soft they were hardly noticeable. Still all of these things were anathema to Soviet cultural authorities to a greater or lesser extent. Not that persuading them came easy to Zakharov. Negotiations between the director and the Directorate of Culture Acceptance Commission were tense and complicated. Zakharov never publicly complained about any of his difficulties to the same extent that Lyubimov did, for example. His tactics were to quietly make some concessions, agree to compromise but eventually ensure the public performance of a play. The best example of this was his production of Optimistic Tragedy by Vishnevskiy.

Zakharov had to produce something for an important date - the anniversary of Revolution. He chose this textbook play about the heroic deeds of a female Bolshevik commissar on a revolutionary yet anarchic military ship. This could hardly be an inspirational repertoire choice. He hoped that the play itself would protect him and earn him enough credit to allow a later production of something more of his own choice. The entire history of previous productions including the famous pre-war Tairov production created cliches that seemed cast in stone. The female Commissar would always be dressed in a leather jacket bravely handling unruly sailors with an iron man's will. Zakharov's safe dissidence in this show was to do away with most cliches. Zakharov dressed his Commissar in a beautiful white dress and showed her femininity rather than her masculinity. Scenes of her breaking the sailors' anarchic spirit became more dramatic. Zakharov also cast his best actors in the show, rather then giving them a break from this 'must do' play. Such popular actors as Leonov, Abdulov, Karachentsov, and Inna Churikova gave more weight and depth to their characters than the play warranted. They even seemed to suggest a certain hidden meaning in their lines. This meaning often just was not there but the audience was happy to fantasize about it.

Other 'political' productions of Zakharov in the late 1970s and early 1980s left little to fantasy. He openly played with fire, and got away with it. Or perhaps he only did it because he knew he would get away with it. However, this was irrelevant from the audience's point of view. What the audience saw was for example Shatrov's play Blue Horses on Red Grass where one day in the life of Lenin was shown, while Lenin himself was played by an actor who had no physical resemblance to the great leader. Moreover, the production had no resemblance to countless others about the great leader. Perhaps for the first time it was a play where political issues were discussed openly and in a refreshingly sharp manner. How could he get away with such a bold move, one may ask? Perhaps he got away with it exactly because this was such a bold move. Besides, most of the most controversial lines in the play were words borrowed from actual Lenin writings. Under the banner of returning to true Lenin

30 teachings Zakharov managed to produce an entertaining show.

There was one play, however, produced in the early eighties, which was not allowed for public performance, and yet Zakharov would not change anything in it. He would simply show the same production to the next Acceptance Commission again and again until the political situation changed and the performance was allowed in the mid-80s. This was a play by Ludmila Petrushevskaya called Three Young Women in Blue. There were no politics discussed; it was the simple story of a single mother trying to find happiness against all odds. If there was a subtly feminist drama in the Soviet theatre at the time this was the one. The happy ending of the play seemed to be artificially unbelievable and very relative. But the problems facing this single mother appeared graphic and believable: from an offensively low salary for someone very well educated to unbearable conditions of life with a small child to ugly arguments with friends and relatives to the humiliating search for a man to support her. This picture of life expressed with restraint rang true.

This did not go down well with cultural authorities, which could not allow for real life to be shown without the requisite distortions. Proscribed distortions differed depending on production, but under no circumstances could the audience be allowed to think that what they just saw on stage was not about some isolated incident or individual people, but that it was actually representative of the Soviet society. It was fine to criticize or show in an unfavorable light individuals or isolated incidents. But there could be no negative comment or shadow cast over the Soviet society as a whole.

Normally Zakharov, as many other directors, would be prepared to sacrifice some episodes in order to keep the show. He had done this before. He always knew how much he could compromise. But in this case he decided not to compromise. Three Young Women was banned, but Zakharov kept showing it to the censors year after year, until the mid-1 980s when it was finally allowed without any major changes.

CENSORSHIP IN ACTION: EXAMPLE OF THE SOVIET ARMY THEATRE

A curious illustration to the point of compromise can be drawn from the unlikeliest of sources - the Central Theatre of the Soviet Army (TsATSA).

On several occasions, TsATSA produced shows that were not to the liking of GlavPUR. One such occasion was the play Test by Boris Vasiliev, which was not allowed for public performance in 1954. Another play initially allowed but then taken out of the repertoire after ten performances was Recovery by Ion Drutse in 1 984. In our example we will trace a case of a play that was finally allowed for performance but in a form unrecognizable to those who initially produced it. A classic Soviet lobotomy was performed on it. This was a play called The Knights from Usvyat based on a novel by Evgeniy Nosov and produced by Aleksandr Vilkin. The play was about three days in the life of a small Russian village called Usvyaty. It begins on the day of 22 June 1941, when people in the village first learned about the beginning of the war, and shows their reaction to the news over the next two days. Through one small village Nosov showed the whole tragedy of the upcoming war. One of the more comprehensive reviews published in Teatr monthly magazine registered that something was wrong with the show. Irina Silina, the author of the review, actually wrote about the show at two different stages - the first when she saw it during a preview, and the second after the intervention by GlavPUR. Most likely she did not know the details of this intervention, and certainly would not have mentioned it in the article. Although Silina was by no means on the forefront of liberal and courageous theatre criticism, she was able to adequately register some change in the production. The critic was impressed by the first version: it showed the true tragedy of simple Russian folk for whom this war was the worst evil, who only wanted to live and harvest but did not want to die on the front. The directing and acting deeply revealed the sorrow and fear of these people, their isolation from both the advances of civilization and the daily Stalinist propaganda which was most effective in large cities. There was a feeling of

31 true tragedy in that first version. The final version was nothing like it. Silina wrote in a postscript to her article; "The atmosphere of the action has changed. The once overwhelming nerve of the production, the overwhelmingly believable acting are gone. Instead, there is now some artificial coating of predetermined cheerfulness, alien both to Nosov's novel and Vilkin's directing style. There is some deliberate optimism [...] in every moment of action. It looks as if theatre was suddenly scared of the tragic explosion of the first version and 'reinterpreted' the given story. As if someone decided it wrong to subject audience to psychological burden. Someone's cold hand wiped off deep colors from the finished painting. The company now plays an ubiquitous version of a war time story. They play human drama in a 'modern' way - dryly, rationally without emotional output. [...] Now there is no alarm in this play, no dramatic tension. The attitude toward the situation is made smoother, bleaker. There is this victorious tone from the very beginning. Even acting has changed. After the main message of the play was made more primitive, acting has become more primitive as well. Sharp, memorable characterization gave way to artificial verisimilitude, light approximation, which does not require any particular emotional effort. [...] In today's [version] rules superficial optimism, which has no base and is quite contrary to the circumstances suggested by the author and original director's plan."'®

So what had to have happened for the show to change so much? Three unpublished transcripts of the Artistic Board meetings reveal the cause and technique of such theatrical lobotomy.^° Although the most important decisions were never recorded on paper, of course. At any rate, after the play was shown to the Artistic Board on May 7, 1 980 it received unanimous praise from all members of the Board: leading actors and directors of the company. For example Vladimir Zeldin, one of the most prominent members of the company and not in the least a rebel said: "Vilkin produced an interesting, deep show, which will emotionally involve people. The life of the village is well done. This is moving. This show is just right for our theatre. I liked the acting. [...] So precisely shown are these people who cannot immediately comprehend that this is the war."^' The dissenting voice against the chorus of praise was that of a GlavPUR liaison named Sabelnikov. But even he at this early stage sounded fairly harmless: "This is our show, it covers our subjects. Russians do not want the war, but they can defend their motherland. Sabelnikov raised only a few objections, which had to do mostly with characters drinking too much vodka and with the fact that the news of the war was met without the standard Soviet theatre reaction of exaggerated shock and potential heroism. He did, however, object to a public performance a few days later and suggested that some changes be made and that the show be reviewed again.

The next run through and review came nine days later, on May 16. This time there were many more people invited to join the regular members of the Artistic Board. Mariana Stroeva, a well known theatre critic and academic was invited to give an outside opinion. From GlavPUR a few more officers arrived, including General Anikovich, the head of the Culture Department of GlavPUR. Anikovich was directly responsible for TsATSA at GlavPUR. To the relief of the Artistic Board, Mariana Stroeva joined the praise for the show. But Anikovich was not convinced. In the presence of Anikovich members of the Artistic Board tried to find the right words to divert any possible trouble away from the production. "Dr. STROEVA. I was deeply moved by this play. There is a feeling of real truth in how the simple people face the war. [...] This is a new work in our approach to the military theme - there are no explosions, no deaths. There is the theme of realization of what would happen tomorrow. [...] GENERAL ANIKOVICH. Soldiers always went to war, in different times. But will our audience understand what these people are going to fight for. STROEVA. Yes, this play shows our time, our people with whom we faced the war. [...] These are all Soviet people, they are our people, and they are going to defend the Soviet motherland - there is doubt about this. ZELDIN. This is a deep production. It is against war and for peace. [...] It moves me deeply.

32 This is not a straightforward play, but it is alive and realistic. UNGURYANU [a TsATSA director - S.0]. From this work I understood that our cause is the just one. We shall win, and this is shown not through empty slogans which would be an easy solution but through real life on stage. GENERAL ANIKOVICH. But how is this potential victory shown in the play? How can you see it? [...] BURDONSKIY [a TsATSA director - S.0]. I do not have this question here - what are these people are going to fight for? They are going to fight for their land, for their children, their mothers, their wives, their horses, for all of it. This echoes Tolstoy - there is depth to the movements of soul. Here is an eternal question of peace and war, one must not try to determine an actual period of time. [...] BELYAVSKIY. [a GiavPUR officer - S.O.] Still we have our doubts about the role of the people and the [Communist] party here. [...] I felt the lack of some essential element - the Red Star symbol, or the Kremlin, or the Red Banner. You comrades did not consider the educational effect of a play. You undertook to show the war through only 3 days. But how an ordinary person prepares himself for the war? [...] You lost measure in religious aspect. There are far too many cries: "Oh, Lord!". You must emphasize the ideological side of the play. [...] GENERAL ANIKOVICH. Such heated discussion of this production is a sure sign that we must make effort to keep this show. You must take our doubts into account and work them into the show. Perhaps this production will become our victory. You must reduce the amount of sad atmosphere, pacifist moods and religious feelings. It should not be allowed for public performance as it is today. I think that it will only have patriotic meaning if certain changes are made. [...] DECISION TAKEN: To continue work on the show and to present to the leadership of GlavPUR again on 25 or 26 of May."^^

On the 26th of May the Artistic Board convened again, for the last time. The process of lobotomy reached its final phase. This last meeting was attended by senior officers of GlavPUR, including General-Colonel Lizichev, head of GlavPUR. Actors yet again repeated their plea. But their military patrons had their own logic.

"SECOND GENERAL [unnamed - S.0]. I am against calling Russia as such all the time in the show, it should be the Soviet Russia. [...] GENERAL-COLONEL LIZICHEV. [...] We are military people. We gave our oath to this [Soviet] state. There were 20 million people who died for this state. You must take this into account. [...] It seems that your show is not about knights but about crusaders. In the novel the Church is hardly visible, but you put it to the center of the stage. You play prayer well, but when old women pray it is fine, but when the young ones do the same - it must be reduced. There is too much darkness both in terms of lighting and atmosphere. Everyone seems to be depressed, even a young girl, a member of Komsomol wears her head scarf as an old religious believer. There must be more light on stage. The idea of this play, acting, excitement - everything speaks for the show. But you must clean it up."^"

After some deliberation Lizichev chose to allow production on condition that changes be made: religious motives had to be taken out, more victorious optimism had to be brought in. Theatre could no longer resist, and the final result of these changes was later described in Silina's article quoted earlier.

The examples mentioned above show the diversity of ways in which dissidence could be expressed and methods by which it could be eliminated.

33 Avant-garde, Fringe & Republican theatres represented a diverse group in which dissident motives could be occasionally noticed.

In Moscow in the 1960s, an amateur student theatre company called Our Home became especially popular. It was based at one time at the Moscow University theatre. Its artistic director Mark Rozovskiy staged sketches and short scenes of a satirical and critical nature. A few decades later in the 1980s, another amateur theatre came to prominence: Theatre-Studio at Yugo-Zapad led by professional director Valeri Belyakovich. The theatre derived its name from its geographical location - on the South-West outskirts of Moscow. Due to its location and the initially low profile of a good proletarian neighborhood company, the theatre was able to obtain support from local authorities. Its ambitions and abilities soon proved to be much bigger than anybody thought. It was one of the first Moscow theatres to produce an lonesko play. Its productions of Hamlet and plays by Gogol earned the company the reputation of being experimental, as well as the attention and even admiration of normally snobbish Moscow theatre critics. For a few years long trips to the outskirts of Moscow to see a Belyakovich show even became fashionable.

A special place in the diverse world of the Moscow fringe theatre must be reserved for Roman Viktyuk, a theatre director who was never associated with any one theatre. Starting with his productions in the Zamoskvorech'e Club in the late 1 970s and early 1 980s, his manner and artistic agenda was always a scandalous topic. In his early productions of Petrushevskaya short plays, Viktyuk attempted to show some dark sides of real life 'as they were'. In a most naturalistic, even shocking manner scores of alcoholics, mentally retarded people and spiritually handicapped people were presented in Viktyuk's little-advertised productions. He soon established his reputation as an actor's director, as someone who could give an actor the most enjoyable professional experience and make him or her a star. Viktyuk's later production such as Columbine's Flat by Petrushevskaya, The Maids by Jean Genet, and Racine's Phaedra demonstrated his ability to produce in an ornamental style where text, movement and music converged to present the most decadent shows in Moscow. The sexual and more specifically homosexual element of his productions became very evident. His productions were incredibly erotic and suggestive but never in a straightforward, vulgar or primitive way. The purity of a complex and poisonous, yet irresistibly beautiful, style became Viktyuk's trademark on the Moscow stage.

Even more fashionable was a small intellectual group of elitist actors and directors, who came to prominence with the beginning of perestroika when they were given some theatre spaces and allowed to show their avant-garde work to a larger audience. One of the leading figures of this avant-garde movement was (and is) Anatoliy Vasiliev and his theatre humbly called The School of Dramatic art. This new generation of post-modernist directors included Vladimir Mirzoev, Boris Yukhananov, Klim, and others. They experimented with new theatrical reality, absurdist dramas both Russian and Western. Interesting aesthetic experiments of this theatre, however, neither appealed to a wide audience nor annoyed Soviet cultural authorities, who by that time were becoming more and more demoralized and panicky.

The search for new theatrical reality was also very active in the Chelovek Theatre. There, in a small semi-professional theatre of uncertain official status, a group of very talented professional young actors created their own reality. Young director Sergei Zhenovach and his actors - Sergei Taramaev, Sergei Kachanov, Vladimir Toptsov, Irina Rozanova - produced one of the most successful interpretations of Gogol prose in a play called Pannochka. Its reality was both imagined and yet naive. Witches and midnight mysteries were acted with almost childish naivete. This was a fantasy realism from the late 1 980s, which was a whole world away from the notions of 'socialist realism'.

A more prominent role in the game of Soviet theatre dissidence was played by two republican theatres: the Rustaveli Theatre from Georgia led by Robert Sturua, and the Vilnius Young Theatre productions of Eimuntas Nekroshius, a prominent Lithuanian director. Shakespearean

34 productions by Sturua were full of politically suggestive symbolism. His King Lear and Richard III were powerful political leaders whose relationship with others around them highlighted the world of intrigues, betrayals, and brutal cruelty. As a republican theatre the Rustaveli company was fairly distant from the Moscow cultural jurisdiction. While technically the USSR Ministry of Culture had some say in other republics, in reality many issues were left to the local republican authorities. In Georgia with its rich and powerful theatre traditions authorities appeared to be more lenient in theatre matters. Every time during a Rustaveli Theatre tour in Moscow the audience was packed. Theatregoers saw what cultural officials pretended not to see - that Sturua's productions were in fact as applicable to Soviet society as they were to English history.

Lithuania with its quiet cultural resistance to half a century of Soviet occupation was fruitful soil for controversial theatre. While there was plenty of pro-Soviet activity and internal censorship in Lithuania, it did not seem to affect the work of Eimuntas Nekroshius, at least not as far as the Moscow audience was concerned. Nekroshius presented on stage a slightly surreal, even futuristic world. Especially powerful were his productions of Chekhov. Minor characters, such as mute servants in Unde Vanya, for example, were suddenly acquiring a new, and threatening meaning. With robotic zeal they polished floors in the old house, and it seemed that if given the chance they would go on flattening things, stepping over inhabitants, destroying the house. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, it brought up ideas about the fanaticism and barbaric nature of the Revolution, when illiterate and drunk peasants and soldiers would burn the mansions of former landowners among whom there were many uncle Vayans.

In Leningrad two excellent directors never seemed to have crossed the line of artistic dissidence. Georgiy Tovstonogov at the BDT (Bolshoi Dramaticheskiy Teatr) and Lev Dodin at MDT (Maly Dramaticheskiy Teatr) deserve a dissertation each, but not in a report on dissidence in the Soviet theatre. Theirs was a high realistic art, and an example that even within the vague notion of socialist realism there could be exceptions of high class acting and directing.

REPERTOIRE: THE CHOICE OF PLAY VERSUS THEATRE INTERPRETATION

It always started with the choice of the play. All repertoire of the Soviet theatre was divided into four major categories: Russian classics, Soviet modern drama (including Russian and non-Russian), foreign classics, and foreign modern drama.

Arguably, it was not the choice of a play but its theatre interpretation that was at the root of dissidence in the Soviet theatre. Depending on a particular theatre director Shakespeare and Chekhov could be made incredibly controversial from a political standpoint. Yet contemporary plays which appeared to allow more freedom for potential dissidence could and often were produced in such a politically correct way that they rarely raised any controversy. Of course, when Yuri Lyubimov produced Mozhaev's play at Taganka Theatre he created one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of dissidence in the Soviet theatre. Similarly, Mark Zakharov's production of a Petrushevskaya play in Lenkom Theatre was considered fairly dissident and was not allowed for public production until years after it had been originally produced. Among foreign classics Shakespeare and Moliere were unchallenged repertoire leaders. Among Russian classics Chekhov, Gorki, and Ostrovsky had a dominant position. Foreign modern drama was very eclectic: from plays considered to be critical of Western capitalist society to light commercial drama.

As far as the repertoire choice was concerned there were no 'right' or 'wrong' choices per se. Technically, if a play was allowed by Glavlit it could be produced. In reality cultural authorities and party ideology supervisors looked carefully at a theatre repertoire. In their words it had to be 'balanced'. If a theatre were to produce four plays per year then two of them had to be by Soviet playwrights, one could be a Russian or Western classic and one could be a modern

35 foreign play. Among foreign plays, the repertoire choices were always the subject of intense negotiations. We saw this from examples earlier in this report. Directors and authorities would engage in tradeoffs. Authorities insisted that theatres produce a play dedicated to an important date - the anniversary of the Revolution or Lenin's jubilee, for example. Theatres were supplied every year with lists of plays recommended for production by the Ministry of Culture. A director would go for it, but in exchange he would propose another play for the same season or next season by Neil Simon, or Shakespeare, or Chekhov. Thus in the end the repertoire of theatre would turn out to be 'balanced' - not due to free decisions made by artistic directors, but as a result of compromise with cultural authorities. Still, a most harmless textbook play as, for example. Three Sisters or Tartuffe could provoke a paranoiac reaction from the authorities, while being a huge success with the audience. Or it could remain a harmless great drama from the past. Of all the categories the least controversial was, ironically, the foreign modern drama. Theatres producing it were trying to play 'foreign' life, which often resulted in decent box office returns but hardly ever provoked strong politically charged emotions from the audience or the authorities. Soviet modern drama was more complex since it often dealt with contemporary society. Here a lot depended on the director's interpretation of the play. We discussed some of these issues earlier in the report.

Some playwrights were more controversial then others. For example classics of absurdism - Beckett, lonesco, Mrozhek - were controversial in the sense that they were disallowed by Glavlit. Among modern Soviet playwrights the controversial ones included but were not limited to Petrushevskaya, Galin, Shatrov, Nina Pavlova, Volodin, and Vampilov. Their works were increasingly produced and by the mid-1980s you could see most of their published plays in the Soviet theatres. There was a list of 'safe' authors, officially recommended by the Ministry of Culture in its letters to theatres. Some playwrights made it in both camps: Arbuzov and Rozov for example.

Soviet cultural authorities considered every production from the perspective of how it commented (directly or indirectly) on Soviet or Western society, whether in a modern or historical context. Obviously, Soviet plays dealing with the modern Soviet society were more easily comprehended by the authorities. They tried to bring the content of a production in line with official ideology. Productions were welcome to criticize the individual mistakes or shortcomings of middle-rank Soviet managers in local situations, but they could not question the political principals or the system as a whole. Religious issues were not welcome unless they were anti-clerical. Erotic or sexual material was prohibited. Love stories were fine, whether the story of Romeo and Juliet or of a peasant and a socialist worker. Productions of classics that did not reveal any political commentary were viewed with suspicion. In general, there were not too many forbidden topics if they were treated and interpreted according to the official position on the matter.

AUDIENCE

Audience was often looking for a social and political commentary in a production - especially if it was not there. In many ways theatre was a place of escape from reality in order to reflect upon this reality. In theatre at its best the audience often read something between the lines, which united spectators with performers in acknowledgment of a common experience. If this common experience - hypocrisy, alcoholism, poverty, no freedom of speech, state as a prison, etc. - was officially denied by the state this made the shock of recognition even stronger. Many of the most successful productions were highly political even though they did not speak of politics directly. Such characters as Tartuffe, or Chekhovian characters, or Hamlet could always say something about modern Soviet society without actually speaking about it. But then again they could only deliver their lines. It depended on actor and director and someti- mes designer as to how such words of Hamlet would sound: "Denmark's a prison. [...] A goodly one, in which there are many convines, wards, and dungeons. Denmark being on o'th' worst"; or in dialogue with Guildenstern about playing a pipe and playing with people:

36 "Why, look you now, now unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play'd on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."

People living under or imposing the manipulative and repressive Soviet regime could not help but hear these words strike a familiar note.

A different though equally escapist role of theatre was to provide pure entertainment, which was eagerly consumed by a majority of the lesser educated and enlightened Soviet audience. Two Leningrad playwrights named Ratser and Konstantinov were produced all over the country. Their comedies were totally indifferent to anything that was going on in the society; instead they showed in a light form some easily digestible conflict or situations on a family level with a few sexually dubious jokes added for more effect. They were criticized both by theatre critics for their low artistic quality, and by authorities for their indifference to larger social issues. However, as a result, these authors were never in any trouble for being too critical, they were never forced to engage in any form of conformism, and they were loved by provincial theatre managers who knew that Ratser and Konstantinov would sell more tickets then Gelman or Shatrov. This also showed that a high-brow intellectual Moscow audience was a tiny minority of the Soviet audience, which often expected only entertainment from theatre.

PLACES FOR THEATRE DISCUSSIONS

Small kitchens in private homes were by far the most popular Moscow arena for theatre discussions. Most newspapers published irregular theatre reviews. There were two major periodicals dedicated exclusively to theatre: Theatre Life bi-weekly and Theatre monthly, with circulations of approximately 40,000 and 30,000 respectively. Between 1987 and 1991 four issues of Theatre Life per year were edited and produced by a team of young theatre critics who were collectively known as the Youth Edition. In these issues, which were very different by design and content from the parent edition, many controversial issues were discussed and new, previously prohibited, plays were published. For example previously unpublished in the USSR plays by Mrozek and Petrushevskaya were printed, and a discussion of the avant-garde and absurdist theatre was launched. Another popular part of the theatre life in Russia was connected with the Russian Theatre Society later named the Union of Theatre Workers. Many discussions, seminars, concerts, and social events were organized by the society, which had at its disposal large clubs with restaurants in Moscow, Leningrad and other large cities. Two large theatre libraries in Moscow and one in Leningrad occasionally served as places for formal theatre seminars, but more often for informal ones. Four theatre institutes in Moscow and one in Leningrad were certainly very active in the life of professional theatre. One of the Moscow institutes - GITIS, and the one in Leningrad - LGITMiK - had a department of History and Criticism which focused on discussions about modern theatre. Finally, the Institute of Art History in Moscow had a group of academics studying theatre who would occasionally initiate and hold discussions about modern theatre.

37 CONCLUSION: THE PERESTROIKA WAVE

Soon after Gorbachev began his reforms, firmly putting the Soviet Union on a track for self-destruction, censorship and political control over theatre deteriorated quickly. By 1988-89 a competition between Moscow theatres - free to produce once politically risky plays - began. Excitement was in the air. Theatres competed not only with each other but also with newspapers, which were trying to publish as much previously forbidden material as possible. Literary journals published once forbidden plays. The artistic quality of most of these productions often decreased as rapidly in direct proportion to the increased in quantity of once forbidden material and topics. Each of approximately 30 Moscow drama theatres of various rank and status performed stories about GULAG and Stalin, about the shortcomings of the Communist party, about prostitution, crime, the deteriorating economy, and much more. This was not, of course, real dissidence. The oppressive state apparat was on its death bed. And soon theatres would have to worry not about the Acceptance Commission, which ceased to exist, but about the lack of funding from the state. Theatres, like the rest of the society, obtained political freedom unimaginable just a few years before. But by the early 1990s this was a freedom of poverty. This was not just economic poverty, but also a spiritual one. Yes, Soviet theatre lost its rich sponsor - the Soviet state. This turned the material and financial side of things into a disaster. But equally dramatic for theatre was the loss of its oppressor - also the Soviet state, it was in constant debate with the state, in hidden dissidence, in ongoing struggle that many theatres found additional creative energy. Without this struggle and without any other meaningful tradition theatre was twice as poor spiritually. Theatre people could not fight the lack of money with the same comfortable and noble fervor as they used to fight with authorities during post-run through discussions trying to save the show. Nostalgia for this struggle, for the possibility of being dissident proved destructive. It is only today, with new financial sources again available to some theatres, that they have found new meaning for their existence. This meaning is less political, and perhaps more mundane. It can be compared to the role of commercial theatre in the West. Russian theatre is there to entertain, and occasionally to present artistic brilliance in acting, directing and the choice of a play. But it will be quite some time before a radical, left-wing, socialist theatre will again be able to catch on in Russia.

38 NOTES

1. Sergei Ostrovsky, a graduate of the History and Criticism Department, State Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow (GITIS) is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University (Massachusetts). He is based in England at 515 Liverpool Rd. London N7 8NS. Tel. & Fax. (0171) 609-4184. 2. Polozhenie o Sotsialisticheskom Gosudarstvennom Teatral'no-Zrelishchnom Predpriyatii. Moskva, 1 969; p. 1 3. RGALI, f. 2172; op. 3; d. 10. 4. Pravda, 28 January 1936. 5. Spravochnik rukovodyashchikh materialov Komiteta po delam iskusstv pri SNK SSR (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1941), p. 14-17. 6. Anatoliy Smelyanksiy. Oleg Eiremov: Teatral'ny portret. (Moscow: STD RSFSR, 1987), p.8 7. Mikhail Kozakov. Risunki na Peske. (Tel Aviv, 1993), p. 119. 8. Quoted in: Aksenova, G. Teatr na Taganke: 68 / drugie gody. Moscow: Ogonyok, 1991, p.5. 9. Ibid., p. 12-13. 10. Ibid., p. 28. 11. Ibid., p. 29. 1 2. Ibid., p. 44. 13. Teatr 2 (1 989), pp. 40-51. 14. Aleksander Gershkovich. Taganka: The Rebellious Soviet Theatre. (Boston: Chalidze Publications, 1 986). 15. 'Protokol Zasedaniya Khudozhestvennogo Soveta ot 14 maya 1977'. Manuscript. The Moscow Drama Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya, Moscow, 1977; p. 1. 1 6. Ibid., pp. 3-6. 17. 'Stenogramma Zasedaniya Khudozhestvennogo Soveta. 2 dekabrya 1977'. Manuscript. The Moscow Drama Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya, Moscow, 1977; p. 2. 18. Ibid., pp. 17-19. 19. I. Silina, 'The Earth', review of The Knights of Usvyaty by Evgeniy Nosov. Stage version by A.Sherel'. The Central Theatre of the Soviet Army, Moscow. Teatr, 1981, no. 2: 48-54. 20. Transcripts from TsATSA museum courtesy of curator Elena Medvedeva. 21. 'Protokol Zasedaniya Khudozhestvennogo Soveta TsATSA No. 9; 7 May 1980'. Manuscript. The Central Theatre of the Soviet Army, Moscow, 1980. 22. Ibid., p. 3. 23. 'Protokol Zasedaniya Khudozhestvennogo Soveta TsATSA No. 10; 16 May 1980'. Manuscript. The Central Theatre of the Soviet Army, Moscow, 1980. 24. 'Protokol Zasedaniya Khudozhestvennogo Soveta TsATSA No. 11; 26 May 1980'. Manuscript. The Central Theatre of the Soviet Army, Moscow, 1980.

39 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smelyanskiy, A., Poryadok slov. Znanie, Moscow, 1988. Efremov, 0., Vse neprosto. ART, Moscow, 1992. Dal'. 0., Dnevnik. Vagant, Moscow, 1991. Anninskiy, L., BUet v ray. Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1989. Teatr-studiya Sovremennik. Programs. 1957-1963. Rudnitskiy, K., Teatral'nye syuzhety. Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1990. Smekhov, V., Taganka. Zapiski zaklyuchennogo. Polikom, Moscow, 1990. Vysotskiy, V., Vsyo ne tak. Vakhazar, Moscow, 1991. Gershkovlch, A., Teatr na Taganke. Solaris, Moscow, 1993. Aksenova, G., Teatr na Taganke: 68 I drugie gody. Ogonyok, Moscow, 1991. Borshchagovskiy, A., 'Zapiski Balovnya Sud'by'. Teatr 10-12, 1988; Teatr 1-3, 1989.

* Wooden shoes worn by Russian peasants. ** Small dry round crackers. *** Mikhail Suslov, one of the most powerful members of Politburo; in charge of ideology and propaganda.

40 Former Yugoslavia THE DISSIDENT MUSE

CRITICAL THEATRE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1945-1989

Research by Dr. Aleksandra Jovióevié

1 I.

This report is an attempt to investigate mechanisms of banishment in the Yugoslav theatre between 1945 and 1989. It attempts to show not merely which productions have been censored but how they were censored - what was the role of theatre in relation to the official idea of culture as well as to audience expectations, how were the repertories created, how the theatre artists, performers and critics behaved, what was the attitude of political authorities within given political and social circumstances, and finally, what were the real consequences of political and aesthetic censorship in the Yugoslav theatre.

While theatre censorship in the rest of Eastern Europe had always been clearly defined and even regulated by law, in Yugoslavia it had never been institutionalised. However, it had a great influence in controlling and restricting the intellectual and artistic freedom of theatre artists.^ In addition, it should be emphasised that the Yugoslav situation was unique in other ways, too: shifts of power between conservative and liberal streams within the ruling communist party and frequent changes in the political climate, meant that what was tolerated in one period was proscribed in the next; the federal structure of the country and increased rivalry of the party elites and bureaucratic bodies in the six different republics, meant that what was prohibited in one republic, went completely uncensored in another (i.e. certain banned productions were transferred to other republics and even awarded prizes at national festivals). A certain degree of freedom was also partly tolerated in alternative forms of theatre as long as it did not have a larger impact and/or a following.

In an English issue of Scena (1 979), a Yugoslav theatre journal, it has been stated that in Yugoslavia:

"The repertoire is free from censorship on all levels: there is no body in the town, republic or federal organs that have the power to control the repertoire. The theatre staff, at the suggestion of the Programme Council, makes decisions on the repertoire policy. Theoretically speaking, a performance can be banned only by a regular court, but such cases have not been known in practice. Perfor- mances are, of course, regularly exposed to criticism, and judgments are passed by daily papers and periodicals. There were cases when party organs criticised individual performances, but no play has been recently banned after such criticism. In the post-war period, during the fifties and sixties, only two plays are known to have been banned in Belgrade, without any political consequences either for the artists concerned of for the theatre management. Dr. Vladimir Bakarió, a prominent political figure in Yugoslavia, has recently said that if there existed true Marxist criticism there would be no need to ban works of art, and has illustrated this citing examples where certain bans in the sphere of literature practically meant public dissociation from works with pronounced enemy character, although productions were performed in spite of this fact."^

According to recent unofficial statistics, however, more than seventy (70) theatre productions were banned and censored in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1990, out of which only two were banned by court sentence.^ Furthermore, there are almost no documents or traces regarding plays which were banned before the opening or in the midst of rehearsals, a process which was always executed silently and away from the public eye." Therefore, when we talk about banishment in the theatre we are usually referring to the relationship between politics and theatre, to the theatre as an object of politics, and to politics as an object of the theatre. In a seminal book written on the subject. History of the Political Theatre (1971), Siegfried Melchinger writes that theatre has been continuously censored throughout history. Regarding the Yugoslav case, however, Melchinger's statement that 'more indicative than a history of censorship is a history of state interference in limiting artistic freedom' could be more appropriate.

Any kind of prohibition represents an extreme act of freedom violation. Most such acts are public

2 and subject to criticism, if not at the moment when they occur, then certainly later when the political climate has changed. But interference, however, is less visible, a much more subtle and refined way of limiting creative freedom and thus, more dangerous and with consequences hard to calculate: there are no official records of banishment, no signed documents, no material traces, in short, nothing tangible. What is left are only broken pieces, fragments, hints, guesses, indirect proofs, and witnesses who are happier to keep silent, or 'who do not remember well' their seemingly unrelated allusions and accidental disclosures. Since there are no written or official documents on banishments, the attention of the historian should be turned to critically intoned speeches by political officials, full of generalisations and the usual party language and slogans, various signed and unsigned polemical reviews or articles, ideological criticism under the guise of negative aesthetic evaluation, and reports from the meetings of various artistic councils and self-management bodies within theatres themselves. All these led to forceful removal of a production from a repertory, usually disguised by a frequently used euphemism: to take out a play from a repertory. Even when direct proof of a closure of a certain production can be found, it only represents the last, decorative act, following a long train of events occuring amongst politicians, theatre management and/or self-managing bodies.® Therefore, the guilty parties were not only the political representatives who sometimes overreacted to protect the security of their position (power) but also their collaborators and informers within theatres, who enabled internal censorship before a production could reach the audience and thus public awareness.

Therefore, instead of following the high road of official theatre history, the inquiry led to the unmapped territory of hidden theatre history. This genre has not yet received a name in theatre history, but it might simply be called the history of censored theatre, for it treats theatre history in the same way cultural historians study cultures of previous periods. Where the regular theatre historian traces the filiation of formal theatre from theatre production to spectator, the historian of censored theatre studies the way theatre dissidents made sense of their theatre. He or she attempts to uncover their way of working and to show how they created and organised theatre. He or she does not try to make a hero or a victim out of a theatre dissident but to see how their work in the theatre called for a strategy.

Although there is no better way to do this than to wander through the archives, there is still a certain advantage in dealing with recent history, because many of its participants and witnesses are living and active, and archives only partly serve as a substitute for creating a history of censored theatre. Even more so, the archives dealing with censored theatre are exceptionally poor, while one can always put new questions to witnesses. However, one should not imagine that the historian has an easy time with his living informant. He or she runs into areas of opacity and silence here too, and he or she must interpret the witness's interpretation of what really happened. Mental undergrowth can be as impenetrable in relation to the living as in the library. We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the recent past, and to question it thoroughly again and again: for nothing is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that the Yugoslavs of a few decades ago thought and felt just as ex-Yugoslavs do today - especially keeping in mind the new world order and the current Yugoslav war.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle in the research was the feeling of nostalgia (a word made up from Greek nostos = return and algos = pain) for a country which does not exist any longer. The majority of ex-Yugoslavs are paying the price of false mythmaking regarding political freedom in Yugoslavia. Under the old world order, which Eric Hobsbawm defines as the shortest century (The Age of Extre- mes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1989, 1 994) the division between two extremes. East and West, was sharp and clear. People in Eastern European countries, unfortunately, were clearly aware of oppression and repression, while Yugoslavs were taught and thought of themselves as being between East and West and thus somewhat politically free. This false freedom was reflected in having the ability to travel, and to have more money and political choice than was possible in other

3 countries of the communist block. People in Yugoslavia were roughly divided into three groups: members of the communist party, the most privileged cast in the country to which about two million people belonged; the majority of apolitical people who, consciously or not, avoided politics in every instance and went about their business; and finally, the smallest group of people, who opposed communism, Tito and his regime and, of course, were persecuted for their political activities.

It is still hard for many people to accept the fact that due to unresolved political problems in ex-Yugoslavia, oppression in many instances, and the inability freely to express political opinion contributed to the present day situation and a terrible war beyond comprehension. The majority of Yugoslavs accepted this false situation and pretended that everything was all right. Even the theatre seemed 'tame and conformist, an ally of the state machine' and the majority was not aware of the notion of dissident theatre. However, such theatre existed, if not in a narrow sense, then certainly in a broader sense of the word, and was persecuted in many ways. In this sense, Yugoslavia could be considered a country with a very large or, at the same time, a very small number of dissidents, depending on the definition of the word dissident.

If, for example, anyone politically at variance with official ideology is considered a dissident, then Yugoslavia definitively had a large number of dissidents. For example, a surprisingly large number of so-called ordinary people have been sentenced, on average, to several years' imprisonment for committing 'verbal' political offenses, that is, for expressing critical opinions (either public or private) about the Yugoslav regime. Although the estimated number of political prisoners varies depending upon the source, their number was still amazingly large. According to Milovan Djilas and Mihajlo Mihajlov there were about 600 to 1.000 political prisoners (this estimate dates from the late seventies).® However, according to an interview of Vuko Goce-Guèetié, the Yugoslav federal prosecutor, in Belgrade's weekly magazine, NIN, in the late seventies there were about three hundred trials of people accused of this 'crime'.' As for graver, political 'cases' in intellectual and artistic circles, it is impossible to give an approximate estimate of their number. It is certainly large, since there were few distinguished persons in Yugoslav culture who were not in conflict with the regime, at one time or another, though these conflicts seldom resulted in actual arrest. Other, more subtle, but no less efficient methods of oppression were used: dismissal from work, campaigns of abuse in the press with no chance of defensive response, censorship of all forms of public activity, and social isolation through threats and blackmail of friends and acquaintances.® Furthermore, even the ruling bureaucratic communist class had never been completely 'monolithic' nor completely closed to ideas in conflict with orthodox communism and Titoism. From the time of the friction with Stalin and the break with the 'Soviet bloc' in 1948, 'liberal deviation', that is to say, reformist trends, emerged as a 'chronic illness' of the Yugoslav regime. Tito's only way of getting rid of communists who were loyal to the Soviet Inform-Bureau or who wanted more freedom was to carry out repeated Stalinistic purges with the help of the police and Internal State Security (secret police - UDBA). The majority of his political enemies were sent to the Yugoslav 'Gulag', an island in the north Adriatic, called Goli otok (Naked Island).

Thus, one can assume that dissidents in Yugoslavia have been both numerous and influential, more so than is usually thought, but the narrowness of the definition used by Western politicians, press and media to describe people engaged in a specific type of political activity influenced our view of the issue.® According to this opinion, there were few 'authentic' dissidents in Yugoslavia which lacked a KOR or Charter '77. Still, in 1986 the Yugoslav Committee for the implementation of the Helsinki Act has been founded in Belgrade. Among the founding members were Tanja Petovar, Lazar Stojanoviö and Sonja Liht. Also, Yugoslavia didn't have a rich record of 'supporting activities' which the West deemed a necessary component of 'serious' dissident activity. Samizdats, 'universities' and 'theatres' in private apartments, committees for helping unjustly dismissed workers, groups that aided political prisoners and their families, systematic co-operation with the democratic press in the

4 West - all of these were scarcely practiced, with a few exceptions: in 1 984, Stane Dolanc, the then- Minister of Internal Affairs, organized a police action to prevent Milovan Djilas from addressing the 'Belgrade Free University'; The Duèan Bogavac fund for persecuted journalists was established in 1984 (although, according to some other sources, the year was 1986). Therefore, by this narrow definition there were very few 'pure' dissidents in Yugoslavia. Yet dissidence in a broader sense (various types of resistance and criticism) was widespread. This 'paradox' is difficult and perhaps even impossible to explain persuasively since it arises out of unique Yugoslav conditions.'® This report attempts to explore unfamiliar views of the Yugoslav postwar theatre. It proceeds by following up the surprises provided by an unlikely assortment of cases: from early resistance to experimentation and avant-garde to inherent aesthetic conservatism which resulted in a certain open confrontation between conservatism and modernism in the theatre; from executions and persecutions of actors following immediately after the Second World War because they continued to perform during Nazi occupation, to persecution of theatre artists for their aesthetic and political opposition, which strongly encouraged the feelings of self-censorship and certain kinds of 'inner emigration'; from Tito's somewhat disinterested attitude toward theatre to obsession of people within and around theatre with Tito's opinion of the theatre; from a certain primitivism and ignorance of party members who dealt with theatre to the extensive importance given to the theatre in the society; from official restriction of nationalism to tolerance of extreme chauvinism in the theatre; from an almost ritual bonding between dissident theatre makers and their audience to populist attacks on the theatre and in the theatre (the so-called theatrocracy); from aesthetic dissidence and cultural opposition to political struggle. The mode of exegesis may vary, but in each case one reads for meaning - the meaning inscribed by contemporaries in whatever survives of their vision of the theatre. I have therefore tried to find my way through the so-called theatre of dissidence in Yugoslavia, and I have appended cases to my interpretations so that future readers/researchers can interpret these cases and agree or disagree with me. I do not expect to have the last word and do not pretend to completeness. This report does not provide an inventory of cases and attitudes in all kinds of theatre and republics of ex-Yugoslavia. Nor does it offer typical case studies, because there is no such thing as a typical case. Instead of chasing after them, I have pursued what seemed to be the richest run of documents and witnesses, following leads wherever they went and quickening my pace as soon as I stumbled on a surprise. Straying from the beaten path may not be much of a methodology, but it could represent a starting point for a future study of dissident theatre in Yugoslavia.

II.

Political concerns, the main ingredient of Yugoslav censorship, resulted in prohibitions of a number of classic plays immediately after the Second World War, The first example of a production that was banned in the post-bellum Yugoslavia after a negative review, was an opera by Yugoslav composer, Petar Konjovió, Knez od Zete (Prince of Zeta) which opened on December 29, 1946." The review, 'A Weak and Reactionary Production in Belgrade's Theatre' CJedna slaba i reakcionarna predstava u beogradskom pozoristu'), published in the newspaper Borba on December 31, 1946, was signed 'Anonymous' but it was actually written by Milovan Djilas, who was then still a high ranking party official, a number one ideologist and Tito's right hand man. The production was attacked as being ideologically inappropriate, that is 'a clear case of disgusting abuse of art for the most reactionary political purposes. 'Its creators were attacked for disfiguration and changing the 1929 original to emphasise 'mysticism of Orthodox religion', 'obscuring the people's past' and to show 'diminished and divided Serbs' after the defeat by the Turks in the battle of Kosovo (1389). Djilas criticised even the set design which also reflected the obscure ideas of the writer and director of the production. After the review, steps were taken to prevent the National Theatre from becoming 'a grand-stand of cheap reactionary propaganda' and the production was concluded after five performances, on March 3, 1947. The Opera manager. Oskar Danon, who also conducted the opera, was punished by the party, while its director, the son of the composer, Jovan Konjovió was ordered to move to the

5 provincial National Theatre in Leskovac (a town in South Serbia). This case paved the way for many subsequent similar 'scenarios' of interdiction in which the main role was given to critics and people within the theatre.

On July 13,1 948, a few, at the time, most prominent theatre and literature critics and writers (Milan Bogdanovid, Velibor Gligorié, Skender Kulenovió, and Eli Finci) met with high ranking members of the Ruling Board of the Agit-Prop of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party (Stefan Mitrovié, Jovan Popovió, Radovan Zogovió, Veljko Vlahovió) to discuss three productions staged by one of the most promising Yugoslav directors, Bojan Stupica, in the newly opened Yugoslav Drama Theatre.'^ Such meetings were quite frequent at the time and their transcripts are kept in the Archive of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party (CK SKJ), but this was the first to be published in a weekly newspaper.'^

This meeting serves as an example of the frequent attempts to implement ideological orthodoxy and the dull, uniform mediocrity of approved realism (or rather socio-realism) in the theatre, even when classics were at stake. Stupica was accused of showing a certain lack of optimism in all three productions, of which the first was a classsic tragedy by Slovenian Ivan Cankar (1 876-1 91 8), King of Betajnova [Kralj Betajnove, 1902), the second a play by Chekhov, Uncle Vanya and the third a comedy, Goldoni's Le Baruffe Chiozzotte; and of an eclectic, somewhat experimental style which went against ordered realism. Stupica was described as a man who started his career as 'a constructivist and experimenter', without limit and style, who tried to free himself but ended up in a certain eclectism, 'anti-realism' and 'nihilism', insisting on psychological rather than social aspects of the plays.

Instead of emphasising the veristic and sarcastic character of Cankar's play, Stupica, the critics stressed, insisted on portraying the gloomy world of crime filled with 'Ibsenite' atmosphere and 'Strindbergian-symbolic' elements reflected in all aspects of the production, from mise-en-scene to the way of acting.

Regarding Uncle Vanya, Stupica was accused of emphasising the psychological level of the play and losing sight of the social level. The majority of those involved in the discussion pointed out a certain optimism inherent in Chekhov's work which, in their opinion, had been erased by Stupica who brought into the production a feeling of darkness, pessimism and sombre feelings, especially in the roles of Vojnicki and Dr. Astrov, which were subjectively interpreted by the actors.

Under the guise of friendly discussion and light criticism, the real target of the meeting was 'the future' of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and theatre in general. The theatre repertory was criticised as not being political enough and a suggestion was made that an attempt be made to direct modern drama and classical texts which directly corresponded to the present-day situation and from which spectators could learn and become spiritually enriched. The repertory of Yugoslav Drama Theatre, however, according to participants in the discussion, was extremely formalistic, because the theatre included in its repertory plays which served only to showcase actors and directors (such were Le Baruffe Chiozzotte and Sheridan's School for Scandals, which at the time was in a period of rehearsals). In addition, one of the main subjects of the discussion was the role of theatre criticism in the ideological struggle for new realism in the Yugoslav theatre. In certain theatres, it was pointed out, a tendency toward decadence and modernism in directing and also in viewing the theatre arts, prevailed. These were considered remnants of the past, as well as a reflection of a 'decadent' stream of foreign modernist theatre practice which should not have had any connection whatsoever to Yugoslav theatre realism.

The meeting, which was presented as being informal, produced a decision to reinforce a didactic role for theatre along with its criticism, whose main function was to disclose ideological problems. This

6 meeting and a subsequent article, however, probably would be forgotten in the deep dust of the archives if it were not for similar discussions, staged now and then to revise and discuss so-called suspicious and ideologically inappropriate productions, mostly directed at classical or foreign plays, which resulted in their removal from repertories, including Labiche's An Italian Straw Hat in 1951 and Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1 955, as well as the rock-operas Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar in the early seventies.'"

III.

The first production performed in a newly established Youth Theatre (Omiadinsko pozoriSte) in Belgrade was Gogol's The Marriage, in February 1946. This production immediately set the company's tone and genre orientation toward comedy, farce and vaudeville. The company was created under the leadership of Dobrica Cosid, a president of the Agit-Prop Committee, and was made up of a group of semi-professional young actors and directors, who immediately after the war (1944) joined the so-called Academic Theatre (Akademsko pozoriSte). Since many of these young people entered Belgrade University, the theatre soon re-established its previous name, Academic Theatre, and was joined by a number of students from various schools. The amateur and rather exclusive nature of the theatre enabled them to work in conditions akin to a theatre laboratory, where they experimented with Stanislavski's method and discussed various theatre issues. Their rehearsals were attended by established directors and critics who helped them with 'suggestions'. In a way, the Academic Theatre could be considered the first alternative theatre in Yugoslavia, since its rehearsals and performances were held in various schools, coffee shops and the so-called Russia House (later Soviet Cultural Center), and also because its survival was based on box-office success.

In order to participate in the Yugoslav Festival of Youth Theatres, a decision was made to stage A Suspicious Person (Sumnjivo lice, 1887) by the most popular Yugoslav comedy author Branislav NuSié (1 864-1 938). The production, directed by Soja Jovanovió, had won first prize at the Festival, on November 2, 1948.'® In spite of positive reviews and audience reception, one negative review initiated the castigation of the production. Entitled Desecrated NuSió (OskrnavljeniNuéió), the review attacked the production for being too much of a stylisation: the caricatures of incompetent bureaucrats were based on Walt Disney characters and Nuèió's verbal humour was translated into slapstick; the overall production resembled a grotesque children's play. One bad review was enough to destroy the whole company: a day after it was published, the troupe was informed by Dobrica Óosió that he had received an order to 'chase them away' and that nothing could be done.

One should keep in mind that 1948 was a year in which Yugoslav communists came into conflict with Stalin's Soviet Union, resolving it by becoming a more independent state. In this 'strengthening the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state', however, there was no place for 'strengthening of the sovereignty of individuals' and the notion of 'suspicious person' became particularly strong. In the first few years, anti-Stalinism in fact meant Stalinism in internal affairs: a previously mentioned concentration camp (Goli otok) was used for the communists who remained or were accused of remaining loyal to the Soviet Union; as well as a general strengthening of the army, police and political propaganda. In this 'witch hunt' the theme of the abuse of power at any cost and the accusation of an innocent person of being A Suspicious Person became actual, although that was not a primary goal of the company, which seemed merely to be politically naive. But nothing could prevent the closing down of the company and their members from being scattered to various theatres and even Radio.'®

However, as soon as the political climate changed toward moderate freedom, the dispersed members of the company were reunited for the third time, in the Belgrade Drama Theatre (Beogradsko dramsko pozoriSte, founded in 1948). This theatre became, in a way, a space reserved for a new generation

7 of actors and directors who shared an orientation toward restoration of modern foreign repertory. For them modern also meant Labiche's An Italian Straw Hat (1851) and Annouilh's The Thieves' Carnival (1938), staged in 1951 and 1952, respectively. An Italian Straw Hat managed to survive in spite of some bad reviews and remarks regarding its coiourfulness and playfulness (a critic asked, "Do we really need such a production?" and another asked, "How is it possible that the audience is immensely enjoying the production?") at least for one season, after which it disappeared, imperceptibly, from the repertory, in spite of its great popularity.

However, The Thieves' Carnival had a quite different destiny, since it was removed from the repertory only after its third performance. Another popular entertainment show was too much for some of the critics, who asked themselves about the real reason behind choosing such a play for the fifth anniversary of the Belgrade Drama Theatre? If such a play went according to the taste of Paris boulevard theatre audience, it certainly did not correspond to the taste and needs of the people of contemporary Yugoslavia. This lighthearted and insignificant piece was said to inspire a false notion that small thieves should be glorified. And it certainly proved Soja Jovanovió's tendency toward grotesque and fantastic, which she had already shown in sacrificing A Suspicious Person and An Italian Straw Hat to her personal style.^®

The critics were divided in their opinions, both for and against modernism and realism in the theatre, and a huge debate over polemics started. On one side there was Eli Finci, who defended the audience's right to laughter, while on the other were those who thought that something ideologically was wrong in staging a minor piece by a well-known writer (but right-wing oriented). The controversy was stirred up by Mitra Mitrovió-Djilas, the minister of education, science and culture and Djilas's wife, who publicly banned the production from the repertory and wrote an article in a magazine, describing it in a drab manner.'® But in this article she did not write what she stated many years after in a diary written for Borba in 1989; that after the opening of the production she had received a phone-call from MoSa Pijade, president of the Parliament and high ranking official in the Communist's Central Committee. This call took her by surprise because they previously had not had any contact. "What is this theatre of yours doing", he asked, "are we all thieves?" After his call, according to Mitra Mitrovic, other calls followed and she started to fear for the theatre's destiny. She invited the manager, Predrag Dinulovió and also Soja Jovanovié and suggested that they exclude the play from the repertory. They immediately agreed, being aware of her high-ranking position. But the polemics went on and later she wrote that she had felt bad to have been part of an oppressive mechanism in a time when certain liberties were felt everywhere, especially in literature (new books), press (new magazines, such as NIN) and theatre (modern repertory). However, this banning was a result of an ideological struggle within the party itself, where a more conservative, dogmatic stream had won. Party discipline prevailed but Mitra Mitrovid felt defeated as a person.Neither Predrag Dinulovió, nor Soja Jovanovié lost their positions but they certainly needed some time to recuperate from the blow. (Perhaps the terror of theatre people had its origins in the postwar executions and trials of several actors who collaborated with Nazis, that is, who continued to perform under the occupation, so that their bad fortune lingered in the collective memory of theatre people). The question remains what kind of direction the theatre would have taken had it not been for this early censorship. It is certain that any theatre artist, whose art is by its very nature extroverted and the life of which depends on the relationship with the audience, must always undergo certain changes if he or she wants to continue to exist as an artist. People in the Belgrade Drama Theatre became more careful in selecting and staging particular plays and for a while, everything seemed serene until somebody had the idea to stage Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1954,^'

8 IV.

Nobody really remembers who first had the idea to translate and stage Beckett's new play.^^ In addition, nobody agrees on the exact date of rehearsals, but it was probably sometime in early 1 954. Vasilije Popovió, a director who already worked in the Belgrade Drama Theatre, made a proposal to start the rehearsals. Since nobody had a clear idea what this play was really about (it was defined as a 'modern tragedia dell arte'), theatre management allowed rehearsals, saying: "Just go on with the rehearsals and we'll see what happens.The play was not officially placed in the repertory (which according to Predrag Dinulovió was never planned a year ahead) but the actors were allowed to rehearse in their free time in the afternoons and sometimes in the evenings after the shows. Already during the rehearsals, which represented a long and painful process of understanding and interpreting the play, and which 'the whole intellectual Belgrade' followed with great interest and excitement, a certain aura of resistance was felt in the air. Some intellectuals were invited to attend rehearsals and contribute their opinions. When the production (executed in a manner of farce) reached dress rehearsal, among those who attended was a Yugoslav writer, Miroslav Krieza (1893-1981, a 'towering' figure of Yugoslav culture), whose standpoint in favour of aesthetic pluralism against social realism was clearly proclaimed and whose play Vuöjak (1 923) was premiered at the Belgrade Drama Theatre in 1953.

And what was his reaction? In a meeting with actors and managers of the theatre, Krieza spoke of alienation, of reducing a man to a rag, of characters in the play who represented psychologically destroyed personalities and senility, a social disease in capitalist societies. But he also added that the play did not represent anything new in the theatre, indeed that it was a déja vu. According to actors, KrIeJa said that the production would not survive past the opening.According to Dinulovió, Krieza said nothing except that he did not have an opinion on the play, "It's your problem, not mine."^® But that was enough for Dinulovié, already in a precarious state, who interpreted this as a 'directive from above'. Later he would not admit it, saying that a conservative stream within the theatre, as well as a fear that the theatre might be closed down and people expelled, prevailed. Many years later, however, he spoke of self-censorship as a primary reason. "To him (Krieza) it (the play) seemed as dark as it seemed to me at the moment. And I think that darkness sounded an alarm, a red light which we could not avoid. But still one should not blame Krieza for a decisive role in all of this."^' The least Dinulovió did was to enable a closed dress rehearsal for the rest of the company but it was clearly prohibited for anyone outside the company to attend.^®

Though the fifties marked a period of constant opening up and free flow of ideas and art from the West to Yugoslavia, this process was not always smooth. Now and then, a conservative reaction, a case of paranoia, a misunderstanding stirred up controversy. It is not clear if the events regarding Waiting for Godot ended the 'golden period' of the Belgrade Drama Theatre. The consequences were not apparent in the beginning, but a few years later it seemed that the theatre could not live up to its reputation and many of its most prominent actors left the theatre.^®

V.

It has been noted that every time a play or a production was banned, a particular theatre needed a long time to recuperate - but some never did. The case of Godot is one of the rare cases in which the actors, who were directly involved in the controversy, did not feel 'disappointed and demotivated'. On the contrary, their enthusiasm and belief that they were working on something important and unusual, which was reinforced with prohibition (a feeling that they were doing something contrary to officialdom), encouraged them to continue their work and they even staged a private opening in an alternative space, that is, at a painter's atelier only a few months afterwards.Perhaps this was the first and last case of a 'dissident' theatre in the narrow sense

9 of the word but it was an important episode that influenced Yugoslav theatre artists to think about theatre in different terms, to search for alternative modes of expression and not to give away their precious creation. Almost two years later on December 17, 1956 'the first Godot in a socialist country' had its premiere in a newly opened theatre Atelier 21 2 (whose name alluded to the painter's atelier).

The formation of the theatre had all the characteristics of alternative theatre: a group of people of similar sensibility decided to create a new and experimental space which was found in a hall of Borba's headquarters; money was acquired from NIN although the largest sum was received from the City Hail, thus enabling the play to open. Therefore, no matter how avant-garde and aesthetically new the theatre was, it was still state-controlled. It was left on its own to develop its profile as long as it was producing politically non-problematic plays. But it also paid its dues to censorship in several instances, especially because it was an extremely popular theatre which always played to a full house.During the course of its history, several of its productions were censored and others were forcefully removed from the repertory.Nevertheless, Atelier 212 managed to keep its aesthetic dissidence as long as it was not political. By its very nature the theatre itself is a collective effort, in which various individuals are brought in to collaborate together, and are thus forced to share the responsibilities as well. In the case of Atelier 212, however, thanks to the efforts of one individual, Mira Trailovié, and her ability to juggle phone calls from politicians and to circumvent the censorship, the company managed to keep its reputation.^"

No matter how harmless it was, in the sense that nobody was arrested, persecuted or fired, the legacy of the above mentioned cases is much stronger than it seems: who knows how many ideas, initiatives, and experiments were prevented. Humiliations, 'throat spasms' for not being able to defend oneself, apathy and the inability to be more engaged, proliferated. Expressions such as 'This is not the proper time for it' were often used to justify conformism, cowardice and self-censorship. The Yugoslav theatre was certainly doomed by it. The majority of theatre artists wasted their energy in avoiding obstacles, adjusting to new circumstances and trying to survive in the arts at any cost, an attitude which can be traced in new generations of Yugoslav theatre makers. Only a few managed to maintain their integrity as independent artists, paying a high price.

VI.

If the late forties and early fifties in Yugoslavia had been characterised by the foundation of new state sponsored theatres,®® the late fifties were marked by the foundation of the first modern and experimental companies, such as Zagrebaöko dramsko kazaliète (later known as Dramsko kazaliëte 'Gavella', founded by the director Branko Gavella and a group of 'dissidents' who left the Croatian National Theatre), Oder 57 in Ljubljana and, in the sixties, Zagreb's Teatar ITD. The latter two theatres had problems regarding censorship, but the case of Oder 57 is particularly interesting for this study because it was openly political, under constant pressure from Slovenian authorities from its inception and whose annihilation in 1964 was a direct consequence of a court order which banned its last production Hothouse {Topla greda) by Marjan Rozanc. Although it seemed that the Communist party in Serbia took measures which not only prohibited certain productions of which it disapproved but also directly manipulated theatrical productions and the choice of repertories as part of its none too sophisticated propaganda, censorship was equally repressive and long lasting in Slovenia.

Oder 57's first productions were lonesco's Lesson and Bald Soprano, but it only fully flourished when it began to present plays by contemporary Slovenian playwrights affiliated with the company, such as The Affair and Dialogues by Primoz Kozak, Children of the River (Otroka reke) by Dane Zajc, Antigone and Games Hgrice) by Dominik Smole and several plays by Peter Boziö {Vojaka Josta ni,

10 KriziëCe, Zasilni izhod, Kaznenci) and Marjan Rozanc (Stavba and Topla greda), which all dealt with contemporary issues, sometimes in a realistic manner but mostly in a grotesque and absurdist style.Their plays represented not only the poetic and political culmination of Oder 57 but also the peak of modern Slovenian drama. In the beginning Oder 57 was also affiliated to a journal, Revija 57, which was soon banned and some of its editors arrested, so it then became related to the journal Perspektive which reflected a sharp, exclusive but left-wing opposition to the authorities. The aim of both groups, who were generationally very close and shared the same sensibility toward new theatre aesthetics and socio-political ideas, were democratic changes in the society. The company and the journal did not hide their radical intentions to become a sort of mirror for the society, questioning its values and proscribed norms, and discussing taboo-themes regarding revolution and actual party ideology.^'

In its second, more classical period, between 1960 and 1964, Oder 57 considered aesthetic revolution a constant political struggle for change in art, philosophy and society. However, that was impossible from the point of view of authorities who recognised in them a threat to their power. The company lived under constant strain and even when certain agreement with the authorities was reached, the tension still remained: nobody knew what would happen next. Oder 57 was perhaps too uncompromising and aggressive for some of its members, who left it after a while, so that it became even more compact and exclusive. Although Oder 57's main goal was autonomy of art, the right to self-determination, pluralism and political emancipation of individuals and groups, their attitude toward those with different sensibilities who wanted to join them was quite rigid, which generated more enemies for them during the course of the group's existence.^® However, when other, younger people wanted to join them, the company was more open.^®

The moderately free political climate in Slovenia, under the auspices of Boris Kreigher, Minister of Culture in the late fifties, enabled the emergence of several such groups (Eksperimentalno gledalièöe Balbine BaranoviC and Ad Hoc Theatre of Draga Ahaöiö) but in the early sixties the political atmosphere in Slovenia changed to a new communist conservatism. Oder 57 and Perspektive were so prominent in their attacks and so blatant in their productions that the talk in Slovenia was that they were paid opposition groups designed to make the authorities appear liberal. However, the opposition activities of Oder 57 had upset the regime. Threats abounded and culminated in the closure of Perspektive in April, 1 964.*° It was obvious that the prohibition of Oder 57 was only a matter of time. In spite of this, nobody suspected that it would be executed according to a spectacular and populist scenario and in full public view. Several days before the /-iothouse opening a group of nine intellectuals, affiliated with Perspektive, including Marjan Rozanc, signed a statement in which they refused to compromise their political viewpoint and to participate publicly in the culture because any such act would represent a tacit agreement with the official policy. The statement and previous arrests gained a large publicity and for a while it seemed that the Slovenian government would be faced with far more intense oppositional reactions than they had anticipated, and the editors of several journals were dismissed.

Meanwhile, Hothouse reached dress rehearsals in spite of the tension and pressures. The theme of the play, written in a form of 'dramatic feuilleton', was the negative impact of collectivisation of agriculture, v hich was always a hot issue especially in Slovenia, where it was implemented in a Stalinist way in order to prove that the country had not abandoned the cause of socialism. This was, in a way, dramatisation of Joze Puönik's incriminated article On Dilemmas of Our Agriculture {0 dUemah naSeg kmetijstva] published earlier in Perspektive, adapted in a form of very intensive and straightforward dialogue. The characters were more generic than individualised types, who reflected various strongly opposed ideological and political stsndpoints."' The first part is a confrontation between the director of an agricultural cooperative called Stari, a hard-core revolutionary, war veteran, and communist, and his two spineless secretaries with an engineer, Lajovic, a representative of the more pragmatic, 'technocratic' generation; while the second part represents a final clash

11 between managers and the collective of workers. The end was envisioned by the author in Brechtian terms; the actors were supposed to step down to the auditorium, mingle with the spectators and start up a discussion.

However, the audience participation happened in a quite different way: on May 31, 1964 a group of peasants were brought in by a nearby agriculture co-op for the opening. An already restless audience exploded into shouting after only twenty minutes."^ The protest ended in unbearable noise: cries, whistles, stamping and yelling. The peasants disturbed and overpowered that part of the audience which wanted to watch the conclusion of the play. The actors tried to continue but it proved impossible and the performance ended prematurely although some people did remain for a while to discuss the incident before they left the theatre."'

The incident had a long and complicated incubation and brief and painful aftermath."" Everyone connected with the production had their apartments searched and their copies of the play confiscated. Some were interrogated and threatened with prison. On July 3, 1964 a county court officially forbade the play, stating that it spread false and upsetting news, represented falsely and with ill-intent contemporary social and political conditions, and attacked constitutional principles."®

This verdict had also put an end to various polemics and discussions in the press and media and an attempt by Oder 57 to re-stage the production in the university campus."® This sentence remained in force until the break-up of Yugoslavia, in spite of Rozanc's plea for reconsideration and abolition in 1 984. Despite very good reasons for doubting the objectivity of the 1 964 judiciary, the submission of such a request was obviously a mistake, since the court stated that the sentence did not anticipate a possibility of reopening the case just because the political situation had changed, especially because no new proofs or facts were submitted."'

Oder 57's conception of the aesthetic and political struggle against society tended to be narcissistic, uncompromising, vindictive and guerilla-like but also romantic. Artistic and intellectual freedom, as such, was taken to be not only necessary, but also the only condition for a free, prosperous and civilised life. However, from a distance their struggle may seem irrational, ludicrous and downright insane, and their courage and persistence insufficient. It also seems that it occurred too early (Taras Kermauner thinks that the late 1 960's seemed to be a more appropriate time) to achieve long lasting and significant social changes. Contrary to the general opinion that the destruction of Oder 57 had a profoundly damaging effect on Slovenian theatre and drama (there are those who think that Oder 57 went out of existence because it exhausted its ideas), everyone involved with Oder 57 continued to work and struggle in different modes. Some, like Rozanc and Kermauner joined another journal, Problemi) Smole and Kozak continued to write plays, with more or less the same enthusiasm and success."® Kermauner thinks that the 'liquidation' of Oder 57 and Perspektive also represented a 'liquidation' of humanism which was restored only two decades later in a form of a new, enlightened, legal civil society. After the destruction of Oder 57 the whole generation experienced a feeling of betrayal, defeat, guilt, moral uneasiness, self-criticism and even self-destruction - moral uneasiness because of their defeat in the confrontation with Stalinism, and helplessness because they came up against the absolute power of despotism. The open confrontation symbolised by Antigone turned into half-legal survival tactics and circumventing censorship (Kermauner, 1990, 243). But, the most important legacy of Oder 57 was the creation of new experimental groups which flourished in Slovenia during the late sixties and seventies (Pupilija Ferkeverk Theatre, Pekarna, GLEJ Experimental Theatre) and especially the writing and directing of its younger generation, Gregor StrniSa, Rudi Seligo and Mile Korun. Their work has been defined as ludism (ludizam), a sentimental, lyrical, less radical, more cynical version of the 'vigorous style' (Kermauner) of Oder 57 which also enabled them to work within official theatre. DuSan Jovanovió, who wrote plays in a more radical ludist manner, perhaps was the only one who succeeded in continuing a more cruel, iconoclastic, violent, 'bloody pathos' (Kermauner) of self-punishment and self-destruction of language and communication and was

12 thus forced to work in alternative realms (he was co-founder of Pupilija Ferkeverk in 1 966 and GLEJ in 1970)."®

VII.

By turning peasants against artists and intellectuals in Slovenia, the communist authorities played on an old communist idea that workers and peasants should never trust intellectuals, who are their eternal potential enemies. This 'scenario' was repeated many times in Yugoslavia, even in Serbia three years ago (in 1992) when during the protest by Belgrade's students, police succeeded in putting a damper on communications between students and workers. This assumption was also reinforced by Tito who in many of his speeches insisted on the differences between 'socially engaged' intellectuals and those who were more individualistic, accusing the latter of being outside 'our socialist reality' and in most cases, of being carriers of negative influences from outside. Such abuse remained one of the most powerful and effective weapons of the Yugoslav communists.

In his essay, A Police Inspector Sorts His Files, Robert Darnton writes about an inspector of book trade during the Ancient Régime in France, who also inspected the men who wrote the books. In fact, he investigated so many of them that his files (kept at the Bibliotheque National in Paris) constitute a virtual census of literary population in Paris, from the most famous philosophers to the most obscure hacks. At times he also exercised literary judgement. The files also reveal the way a fairly enlightened official of the Old Regime attempted to make sense of a new phenomenon - a matter of imposing a framework on the world as it appeared in the context of a peculiar police beat.®°

The inspector was dangerous because he knew where to search for politically subversive works, while Yugoslav 'undercover' policemen were never sure where to look - everything and everybody who expressed a tendency toward an independent way of thinking seemed to be politically subversive and thus suspicious. In order to ensure a greater and more systematical control, each theatre (except those considered alternative) had to have a so-called Artistic Council which was usually made up partly of politicians and state approved artists and partly of people inside the theatre. Most theatre artists lived in a constant state of paranoia of being followed and watched by others. The notion of 'otherness' carried in itself a larger threat - one never knew who was carefully watching him or her. This collective gaze/control was unified in the gaze of an ultimate spectator; Tito.

As in the Medieval theatre, where mystery cycles and miracles were staged for God as the ultimate spectator, and as in Renaissance Italy where theatres were designed according to an ideal perspective created for a prince who was placed in the central position of the auditorium, Tito represented an imagined spectator, who was able to see everything in the theatre, even when he was not present. Although Tito's relationship to the theatre was never strong, and his visits were quite sporadic, everything was nonetheless created according to his gaze.®' It seemed that everyone in the theatre and around the theatre behaved as if he were constantly watching them. An actress stated that once when Tito attended their performance, despite everyone's stage-fright, she knew that everything would be alright because he was watching her. Another told a story about how Tito had told her, "Unfortunately I do not go to the theatre often, but I deal with it in other ways." And they all feared his remarks about a production, as if he were the critic who had a distinguished value judgment.®^ The grotesque idolatry of Tito, who in the sixties received honorary doctorates from all Yugoslav universities, and who in 1974 was declared the lifelong president of Yugoslavia, continued until the late eighties. For example, even having been dead for nine years, he remained the official patron of the Festival of Yugoslav Drama and Theatre - Sterijino pozorje until 1989.

13 Such an idiotic acceptance of Tito's role as sole arbiter in all matters of intellectual and artistic life, placed the theatre artist in a difficult position. In the light of such acceptance, Tito had the last say as to who was or was not morally-politically suitable and which kind of artistic freedom should be allowed and which should not. In his speeches, he never mentioned personalities or events directly, but everyone in the country knew what he was talking about. On October 25, 1 969, Tito delivered a speech in front of representatives of agricultural co-ops and political bodies in Zrenjanin (Banat, north Serbia) attacking a production which had opened twenty days before, When the Pumpkins Bloomed by Dragoslav Mihailovid. He spoke of many problems within the society, and a new one coming from those 'theatrical little pumpkins'; he invited the communists themselves to incapacitate the author. He did not call for his arrest; on the contrary, he asked the public, the people from below, to prevent 'them' (foreign elements) from continuing their work.

VIII. THE CASE OF ROTTEN PUMPKINS

We need to stop here and explain the genesis of the cause celebre of Yugoslav theatre censorship. In 1 967, an unknown writer of short stories and editor of a nutritionist magazine (Ishrana i prehrana) published the novel When Pumpkins Bloomed (by Letopis Matice srpske) which immediately received positive reviews as an original, realistic novel which through concise and crude language managed to depict in a vivid manner, fortunes of small, ordinary people from suburbs, destroyed by political changes. Politics served here only as the framework of the novel. As stated earlier, Tito's break with Stalin represented a most important legacy of the Yugoslav state and nobody dared to question it. Mihailovié, however, was the first to describe this particular period (early fifties) in the form of a life story of a disillusioned Yugoslav immigrant who returns from Sweden, told in retrospective. After his brother and father are arrested and sent away to Goli otok and jail,®^ the life of the innocent protagonist Ljuba Sretenovió, a.k.a Champion, and his family is quickly destroyed (his sister is raped and commits suicide, his parents die, he is sent away to the army for three years and leaves the country).

Soon afterwards, Dragoslav Mihailovió started to work on a dramatisation, which had been considered for production but abandoned by the National Theatre and Atelier 212. Finally, it reached the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and was offered to the young and promising director, Boro DraSkovió. During the long period of rehearsals it seemed that nobody had problems with the text but accounts of the protagonists vary." Nevertheless, the play was prepared with an outstanding collective passion and fervour. This and the enormous success of the opening, which resembled a triumph (the director was carried along on the stage on the hands of the actors, as if he were a boxing champion) are perhaps the main reasons why a great sense of defeat and loss was experienced by everyone involved after the production was forcefully removed from the repertory after its fifth performance. For example, its director Boro DraSkovió never returned to work in the theatre.

This case is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, along with very positive reviews, a number of attacks were published in the same newspapers; some of the critics who initially expressed enthusiasm went on to write negative reviews two days later.®® Second, it showed that the same novel managed to escape censorship either because the police had not read it, or because the words from the novel when spoken on the stage gained a different power. It should be noted that the novel was never officially banned even after the production had been excluded. On the contrary, it was sold out immediately. Later on, many subsequent editions were published. Accounts vary as to how it all started: was it because a certain politician (many think it was Kiro Gligorov, the current president of Macedonia), left the theatre during the break at the opening, making sure that everybody noticed his departure; was it because of the appearance of various attacks in the newspapers; or was it because the City Committee of the Communist Party immediately reacted, inviting Bojan

14 Stupica and communists from the theatre for a 'friendly conversation', on October 7, a day after the opening?^' Nevertheless, by the second showing on October 7, it was already obvious that 'something was going on' and the play was performed under the cloud of a 'certain inner pressure'.

The orchestrated campaign by the press and pressures from the Party Committee, forced Bojan Stupica to organise several meetings within the theatre: a meeting of theatre communists was held on October 1 5 and on October 1 7, another meeting was held with the Artistic Council and members of the artistic ensemble. Stupica warned the actors that they had two choices: either to remove the production from the repertory, or to make some changes in the production (however, he warned them that the production was already destroyed: "I think they have already crushed us.") A unanimous decision by everyone who participated in the meeting was to make changes in the production in order to save it and a rehearsal was scheduled for October 1 8, since the production was again in the repertory on 22 and 25 October.®®

Stupica was right: according to P. Krstió,®® who wrote an article entitled Deep Decay (Truteé u dubini), while the most drastic scenes were 'retouched' something was still wrong, that is, it was clear that not only the peel was rotten but also the deepest layers of the fruit. The problem was not in a few isolated scenes, he continued, but represented a false way of looking at the historical and human situation. P. Krstió did not need to bother; Tito was already alarmed and delivered his famous speech on the same day. The Artistic Council of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre issued through Tanjug (Yugoslav press agency) its decision to remove the production from the repertory on October 25, 1969.®°

In retrospect, perhaps the case of Oder 57 was more dramatic and had a larger impact on a whole generation of theatre artists in Slovenia, but the case of Pumpkins remained stamped in the collective memory of Yugoslav intellectuals and theatre people, especially because the suppression was aimed toward relatively politically innocent actors and the director. Not only DraSkovió refused to continue working in theatre, but most of the actors felt discouraged and destroyed and there are many who think that this contributed to the downfall of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, which after this incident followed a secure path of mostly foreign or politically benign plays. Especially drastic was the case of Dragoslav Mihailovié, who was not arrested but was denied basic existential rights (blacklisted - for years he could not get a job or find an apartment) as well as his rights as a social being (his friends and family avoided him).®' It should also be mentioned that a number of polemical articles continued to be puDlished even a year after the removal of the production, calling on anyone and everyone to take responsibility, but that was like beating a dead horse. These articles are also indicative of the great strain that was put on the actors, who for many months afterwards underwent 'public trials' in the press, expressed their sense of guilt for having been 'blind' and 'looking after their own business', which, they concluded, was apparently the wrong thing to do. DraSkovió and Mihailovió refused to give any statements, even when they were almost forced to deny publicly their work, or accuse each other, for which they were castigated even more.®^ Rare voices were heard that the exclusion of Pumpkins represented a clear case of a threat to artistic freedom but they were always suffocated by the voices of 'ordinary people The late sixties and early seventies were particularly turbulent times for Yugoslav policy, which was marked by a struggle between liberalism and conservatism, emerging nationalism and centralisation of power, and this was also the time when a number of journals, books, newspapers, articles, films and productions were banned and intellectuals arrested because they represented a new threat to the society. Thus, Kermauner's assumption that Oder 57 would perhaps have had a better destiny if it had appeared in the late sixties is not justified. More appropriate times for Yugoslavia did not develop before the mid-eighties, when informal censorship was slightly relaxed (that was also a time when a new production of When Pumpkins Bloomed was staged at the National Theatre in Belgrade without any problems). For years, many issues in Yugoslav policy remained taboo, especially the break with Stalin for which many people paid dearly. During the late seventies, nonetheless, there were a few timid attempts

15 in literature to talk about the traumatic case of 'Goli otok' and it seemed possible again to stage a production based on the theme.

When in 1979 DuSan Jovanoviö won a prize for his new play, Karamazovs, in Ljubljana, the artistic director of the National Theatre in Belgrade decided to put it in the repertory of his theatre. He managed to avoid the usual long procedure in repertory politics, based on the approvals of the Drama Council and Assembly, the Program Council, and the Assembly of Self-Management Association for Culture. This was sometimes possible if a certain play fulfilled, beforehand, a general program orientation of the theatre (in this case it had won an award in Zagreb). The preparations for the production were quick and efficacious because it was calculated that this production might have a good chance at the forthcoming Sterijino pozorje festival and a young director, Nikola Jeftió was invited to direct it. One should not forget that this was the time when Tito was experiencing a long agony at the Clinical Centre in Ljubljana and that statements regarding his condition were issued by the Council of Physicians and published daily in the newspapers. This created a foreboding atmosphere: what will happen with Yugoslavia after he dies? The 'verbal offence' article no. 133 was reinforced again for those who took it 'too lightly or with certain humour'. Self-censorship increased again which probably explains why someone from the theatre got the idea to alert the City Committee of the Communist Party (GK SKS). The play, according to them, besides falsifying history, presented the character, Svetozar Mitié, who after declaring his loyalty to Soviet Inform-bureau is sent to jail, as a tragic hero. But the second part seemed even more problematic because the tragic destiny was extended to Mitió's three sons, who grew up disillusioned and disoriented. Nikola Jeftió decided to place the audience on the stage in order to create a feeling of emotional closeness, using technology to its advantage as well. He envisioned for the last moment of the production that an iron curtain would be brought down so that everyone remaining behind it would get the message.®" In spite of warnings, the opening was announced for March 11, 1980 and tickets were sold well in advance. Two days before, a control dress rehearsal was scheduled for the Program Council. For some reason, the rumour in town was that this would be the last showing of the production and four hundred people filled the stage of the National Theatre. Both actors and spectators were aware that this was the last time they presented the show publicly and that created an emotional impact and a sense of strong bonding among them. The dress rehearsal was followed by a meeting between the actors and the Program Council, in which of course, a decision was made to ban the production, in spite of the fact that different opinions were expressed (which always served to provide an illusion of democracy). The irregularity of placing the play on the repertory against the usual procedure was, of course, used as a main argument. This time a more or less hidden sacrifice was at stake as compared to the open sacrifice in the case of Pumpkins, although the same macabre scenario was repeated.

Only a few months afterwards Karamazovs opened at Slovensko ljudsko gledaliSCe in Celje (Slovenia) on December 12, 1980; then in Sarajevo on February 12, 1981 (Kamerni teatar 55); in Zagreb on December 8, 1981 (KPGT) and, four days later, the Zagreb production was presented on the stage of the Students' Cultural Centre in Belgrade without too many problems and to very positive reviews.®® This particularly hurt the actors of the National Theatre. According to Nikola Jeftió the reason why the KPGT production, adapted and directed by Ljubièa Ristié, was allowed was because its second part was completely changed (for example, out of seventeen characters in the original, only five remained and some scenes were shown on video). However, Jeftió recalls vaguely that while working on the play at the National Theatre, he had received a letter from Duèan Jovanovié who explicitly asked that no changes be made.®® Attempts were made to re-stage the production from the National Theatre in a different space in order to compare the two productions but that was impossible for several reasons: one of the main actresses, Neda Spasojevió had died in the meantime, other actors were engaged in other productions and, most importantly, because Nikola Jeftió had a feeling that due to the fragile nature of the theatre it was impossible to re-create a production once destroyed, especially since many circumstances had changed, including the audience interest.

16 Nevertheless, he thinks, the fact that his production managed to have at least one performance keeps it alive in the memory of its audience.

IX.

No matter what Nikola Jeftió and his actors think, one of the reasons why LjubiSa Ristió managed to bypass the censorship in the case of Jovanovié's Karamazovs, was because the play was produced by an alternative theatre, KPGT.66a The history of the alternative theatre in Yugoslavia deserves another, more meticulous examination, since the limited space of this report enables only an examination of the relationship to mainstream theatre. The national and repertory theatres, with their permanent ensembles and large administrative and technical staff, had to depend on state subsidies which covered almost ninety per cent of their budget and were thus susceptible to official manipulation. On the other hand, it seems that the Yugoslav alternative theatre had a life of its own, with few open attempts to extend censorship to it.®'

The alternative companies were composed of freelance artists and disappointed members of institutionalised theatres (i.e. the downfall of the Belgrade Drama Theatre resulted in a formation of Beogradska dramska druzina A; the explosion of Oder 57 created Pupilija Ferkeverk, GLEJ and Pekarna). They mainly relied on the audience which was composed of students and intellectuals who encouraged them to present innovative, experimental and sometimes, high-quality works. Besides this, thanks to BITEF Festival, where by 1977 about 180 productions from all over the world had been presented, many artists were inspired to create their own work. The alternative companies grew in number, especially during the seventies and eighties in spite of problems regarding performing space, the lack of a solid technical base and financial problems (that is also how their lifespan was established, because in most cases they relied on box-office success for their survival). The alternative companies were also meritorious for creating a particular Yugoslav cultural space, through their extensive tours, bringing artists from different republics to work together on mutual projects, thus crossing both linguistic and bureaucratic boundaries among the federal republics.®®

The lack of official attention enabled these groups to develop many new domestic plays and extend theatrical boundaries. This was a time when Yugoslav theatre searched for 'tertium datur' between avant-garde, experimentation and conservatism.®® In the seventies and eighties there were about thirty alternative companies (although their number is hard to establish because little has been preserved in terms of documentation and archive material).'® Some became internationally acclaimed, like Kugia GlumiSte in Zagreb, Otvorena scena 'Obala' in Sarajevo, 'Nova oseóajnost' in Belgrade, theatre Pralipe in Skopje and GledaliSöe Sester Scipiona Nasice in Ljubljana,'' and especially KPGT, which had successful tours in the United States and Australia in the early eighties.'^ The great popularity of KPGT and its reputation as the leading alternative theatre company was to a large extent due to the successful collaboration between Ljubièa Ristié as director and DuSan Jovanovié as writer. But it was also thanks to its actors, who were all from different cultural capitals around the country and who were already popular in regional theatres. Believing in a larger political work, these actors decided to invest their talents in KPGT. From the beginning, political and theatrical considerations were closely linked to the troupe's philosophy. In his several interviews during the period, Ristió defined KPGT as a 'socialist theatre that refused to accept the world as it is, even a socialist world'.

KPGT placed itself in a critical position. Instead of posing one ideology as an alternative to the accepted dogma, it insisted on integrating politics into everyday life, asking the audience to consider ideas and the connections between economic, social and cultural issues. All these made KPGT subject to certain censorship pressures and threats which were never too open but always existed, and were especially true when they staged Misa in A-minor at the Slovensko mladinsko gledalièèe

17 (again an institutionalised theatre) in 1981. The production, which was almost banned, was based on a book by Danilo Kiè {A Tomb for Boris DavidoviC) which already stirred up a large controversy when it was published in 1978. This time pro-Soviets and Soviet officials protested against the presentation of Stalinist purges. The production, which had a fragmentary structure of brief scenes in various genres, composed of texts by Lenin, Trotsky, Clara Zetkin, Mayakovski, Thomas Mann (a real postmodern montage), instigated polemics and huge controversy at Sterijino pozorje, but was later declared the best production at the 15th BITEF in October 1981.'"

X.

It seems that in this exhaustive report on the dissident theatre of Yugoslavia that certain republics have been forgotten. Intentionally or not, the cases of proscription in other republics have been left out, either because they were less politically explosive, aesthetically important, or executed according to the already presented scenarios based on internal theatre censorship and self-censorship.'®

In Croatia, however, the theatre went through several phases of ideological censorship in a quite similar way to Belgrade. Although no particular productions were banned, except Man is Good (Covjek je dobar) by Josip Kulundzió in the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) in 1 953, in the years after the war, writers, directors and actors were always controlled and made sure not to make ideological mistakes. They were obliged to produce plays according to socialist-realism and the ideological interpretation of Stanislavski. This control resulted in very strong feelings of self-censorship which manipulated everyone involved in theatre, from writers to actors. Some writers, like Marijan Matkovió and Antun Soljan (see footnote no. 36), found a way to express themselves in a vague manner through farce, historical or metaphoric plays but were soon 'discovered' and censored.

The Croatian situation is best reflected in the fate of a production which went through several instances of censorship which it managed to survive after many changes. After the play Scents, Gold and Incense (Mirisi, zlato i tamjan) premiered at the Theatre ITD in Zagreb on January 14, 1974, its author, Slobodan Novak (the play was an adaptation by the director Bozidar Violió of the novel by the same title), was forced to re-write a scene in which revolutionaries are compared to hoodlums. After that, each performance was attended by members of the Party Committee, who each gave their opinions until finally the play was given a green light and continued to live for more than fourteen years (until 1988 the play was still in the theatre's repertory).

Nevertheless, the cause celebre of Croatian dissidence is certainly Ivo Breëan (b. 1 936), whose every play faced different problems with theatre censorship in and out of Croatia.'® As in many previously mentioned cases, his plays were never officially proscribed but always attacked and forcefully removed from the repertories or prevented from being brought to a premiere. The first such case was The Stage Play of 'Hamlet' in the Village of Lower Jerkwater (Predstava 'Hamleta' u selu MrduSa Donja), a tragic farce which premiered in 1971 and received Sterija and Gavella awards." But in 1973 the production was attacked on Zagreb's TV for being ideologically 'unsuitable', which instigated a number of unsigned polemical articles in the Croatian press and soon afterwards was taken out of the repertories of many theatres, except in Theatre ITD and Kamerni teatar in Sarajevo, where it remained in their repertories for ten years, achieving 300 showings.'® At the same time, in 1 973, the film director, Krsto Papió turned it into a film which has also won a number of national and international awards.

18 The second case was related to BreSan's play The Devi! at the School of Philosophy {Nedastivi na filozofskom fakultetu) which was supposed to be produced at the ITD at the same time that the TV attack on Hamlet occurred. People within the theatre decided that it would be better not to produce it and the rehearsals were stopped, although the production was almost ready. In 1 975 the play was published in the Croatian theatre journal, Prolog, and set off another round of polemics preventing further productions of the play in Croatia. The play was produced for the first time in 1981 in Ljubljana, in 1985 in Belgrade and in several cities throughout Yugoslavia. Finally, it reached Zagreb and was premiered in 1989. His third play. The Death of President of Tenant's Association (Snnrt predsjednika kuónog savjeta) was supposed to have its first opening at the Belgrade Drama Theatre in 1979, but its manager at the time, Miodrag llió, feared it might be politically controversial and decided to 'freeze' the production until better times, which never arrived. This decision almost influenced the people in the Gavella theatre, who were also rehearsing the production but who, in the end, decided to go on, without consequences.

The fourth BreSan play which was banned was The Apparition of Jesus Christ at Military Post 2507 (Vidjenje /susa Hrista u kasarni VP 2507), which represented the third part of a so-called trilogy (along with Hamlet and Devil). This play was written in 1973 and its first performance was only in 1988, at Belgrade's Theatre Boëko Buha.'®

In all of his plays BreSan evokes, through a form of tragic farce, all those traumatic situations, including the most sensitive ones, that Yugoslav society underwent in the years following the Second World War (local party establishment, pogroms in academia, stupidity of military, etc.). He set them in god-forsaken places and communities, playing between the banality of everyday reality and fantasy. BreSan's plays have attracted various interpretations, especially their tragic and pessimistic endings.

Beside BreSan, another Yugoslav playwright, Aleksandar Popovió, could also be described as a dissi- dent. He, however, does not consider himself a dissident, simply because he was never arrested or officially banned. Nevertheless, seven out of the forty plays which Popovió offered to theatres have been banned under different circumstances and in different phases.®® Popovió is very honest when he speaks about himself as a writer who became aware of self-censorship early on and acted accordingly. He was always very careful not to say what he does not think, but to say the truth within the bounds of what was allowed.®' All his life, Popovió has been a playwright and a peculiar kind of populistic communist. As a young man, he spent three years on Goli otok and since then has been followed, investigated, often taken to the police for the so-called 'informative investigation' (in which he has wasted one year of his life) where police tried to warn, corrupt and frighten him, so that he has spent most of his life in a precarious state. Several times he went through what he calls a 'civic death', being without a passport, a place to live, blacklisted, outlawed, excluded from repertories, and avoided by friends. But he never considered leaving the country because he wanted, as he mentioned, to share the common fate of his people. At the same time, however, Aleksandar Popovió was (and in a way still is) the most produced playwright in Yugoslavia and has received many prizes for his work. Both BreSan and Popovió are in similar positions as Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Muller in East Germany, being the most celebrated but at the same time the most controlled theatre artists.

Aleksandar Popovió never stopped working even during the times he was blacklisted. In one of these periods, in the early seventies, he founded, with a group of several young people, an Informal Theatre Group AP and started to perform his two plays. Secret Connection (Tajna veza) and Pink Night (Ruziöasta nod), without any financial support and in various spaces throughout Belgrade (thirty different student and cultural centres) where they were always chased out after awhile.®^ This is interesting because there are no official records of their work, except an invitation extended by

19 Italian director Paolo Magielli to participate in an alternative theatre festival in Parma in 1974. Popovié's plays, written in a poetic form (sometimes in verse) deal with small destinies of small people from the suburbs and margins of life, always mixing everyday humour with the grotesque, farce and poetry. As a communist and anti-Titoist, however, he could not avoid being politically critical and this is particularly true for his seven banned plays, in which various political metaphors are interpolated. A year before Atelier 21 2 went on its successful tour to the United States with the productions Who's Afraid of Virginia Wooif with Popovié's The Development of Bora the Tailor, his play, Caps Down, a farce about the interior mechanism of a man who turns into a dictator, was removed from the repertory of Atelier 212 after its third performance, presumably because its main couple resembled in many ways Tito and his wife, Jovanka. Most of the time, the actors stood on the apron shouting slogans and direct political allusions to the audience. A small scandal occurred at the opening because the actress (Maja Cuökovió) wore the same hair style as Jovanka!®^ The production was smoothly removed after a phone-call from a politician, without too many difficulties or public reaction.

A year later, in 1 969, Ljubomir Dra§ki6, the same director who directed Caps Down, was rehearsing Popovió's second play Second Door Left. The outside members of the Program Council showed a great interest in the play and attended a rehearsal, after which they met with the inside members of the same body. The outside members considered the play heretical, that is, an opposition to the official reinterpretation of the students' revolt in 68', and asked the inside members to vote against it. In spite of some efforts by a few in the theatre, the Council banned the production, with the majority of votes in favour of proscription. It should be noted that the same production had been staged in Zagreb at the Students' Cultural Centre without problems, which only occurred during the Sterijino pozorje in 1 969, when the play was shown at the late night alternative program of the Festival.®"

XI.

After Tito died, in the early eighties, it seemed that the political theatre flourished in Yugoslavia and that censorship eased. This was quite a false notion. Two things contributed to the argument that the censorship was way too strong. First was the creation of the so-called White Book {Bijela knjiga), which was subtitled 'On certain ideological and political tendencies in artistic creation, literary, theatre and film criticism, as well as on public statements of a certain number of cultural workers in which politically unacceptable messages are contained' which was made public in May of 1984. This book, created by president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia (CK SKH) Stipe Suvar and his collaborators, serves as one of the most shameful documents on Yugoslav censorship and, at the same time, as another proof of how artistic freedom was constantly controlled, manipulated and castigated. For example, a whole range of literary and theatre works dealing with 1948 and Goli otok have been extensively discussed and analysed. A large part of the book was reserved for a scandal that occurred in the theatrical season of 1982/1983.

As soon as Tito died, nationalism, which was always repressed and persecuted, started to re-emerge and expand in all republics. In 1981 writer Jovan Radulovió, a native of Knin, wrote a play Golubnj'aöa in which he depicted the bloody consequences of national intolerance and hate in a small village, in a very graphic and genuine manner. After several attempts to place it in the repertory of a children's theatre BoSko Buha (the main protagonists are two boys, Lukica and Miéuka), where it was disapproved by its Program Council. Dejan Mijaö, one of the best known and most successful theatre directors, decided to take it to the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad and stage it there. When the production opened on October 27, 1982, the majority of critics welcomed it with favourable reviews, saying that there were no more taboo-themes in the Yugoslav theatre and that Radulovió succeeded in writing a very convincing play on Serbs in Croatia (Dalmatian hills) who never

20 forgot their dead, and who were thrown into pits by Ustashas. After several performances, however, the first negative reviews appeared, which called the production 'a real chauvinistic diversion', 'an ordinary political lie' and a recommendation was made that it be removed from the repertory as anti- Croatian nationalistic deed. This incited an orchestrated campaign by Vojvodina's communists who wrote many pamphlets and speeches against the production and the theatre that put it in its repertory. Under enormous public pressure, the theatre management of SNP removed the production, which moved to Belgrade with the same cast, where it was staged again in the Student's Cultural Centre, but the polemics went on in the press for several months, and started again when the play was invited to Sterijino pozorje. Even the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party had this play on its agenda, while intellectuals, artists and critics from all over Yugoslavia, including Slovenian critics (Kermauner) defended it openly as a good play and as a sheer matter of artistic freedom, and did not see any nationalistic conspiracy in it. The more the production was attacked, the stronger it became, being performed regularly in Belgrade, Ljubljana and other cities in Yugoslavia. In spite of what happened later (considering Radulovió's career in newly created Krajina) the Yugoslav artists and intellectuals won their first and last battle against political censorship in the theatre. They showed that there could be democracy even in Yugoslavia. If there had been more opportunities to discuss, examine and resolve political problems on the stage, Yugoslavia might have become a free society. If every individual was able to express his opinion freely, or an artist to create without fear of repression, then every political problem could have been resolved. This is also true for nationalism. A truly free society at the same time allows and undermines such sentiments and ways of thought. Recent history teaches us that Yugoslavia went from one sort of dictatorship to many smaller but worse ones, more violent and oppressive. NOTES

1. However, censorship in film was institutionalised immediately after the war, in 1945 by the Decree for Censoring Cinema Movies (Sluzbeni list, 57/45 and 1 6/46). Censoring of all domestic and foreign films had been introduced and the censoring body was the Federal Ministry for Education and Culture in Belgrade. This regulation remained in power, with a few minor changes, until 1965, after which some republics had their own Republic Commissions for Examination of Movies, while others extended these duties to councils and self-management bodies of film companies involved in film production and distribution.

2. Jovan Cirilov. 'A Key for Better Understanding: 35 Years of Yugoslav Postwar Theatre'; translated by Borka Tomljenovié. Scena, English Issue 2, 1979, p. 3-18.

3. Igor MrduljaS. 'Kako uspavati kazaliSte ili kako se vlast ne da vu6i za nos. Scena XXVI 2-3, 1990, p. 202-207. It is important to mention that, out of the 70-some banishments, 45 occured in Serbia, that is in Belgrade; moreover, they occured in the period known as the 'liberal' one - between 1969 and 1 973.

4. The application of Richard Schechner's model of the whole performance sequence, which is composed of training, workshops, rehearsals, warm-up, performance, cool-down, and aftermath, could be useful in analysing the theatre of dissidence. See: Richard Schechner. 'Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought, Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia'. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, p. 3-35. Theatre historians usually investigate performances but ignore rehearsals, warm-up, cool-down and aftermath. Just as phases of the public performance itself make a system, so the whole 'performance sequence' makes a larger, more inclusive system. In different periods and republics, in Yugoslavia, one or the other part of the sequence was emphasised and banned.

5. The notion of socialist self-management introduced in Yugoslavia in 1974, after the decision made at the Tenth Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and new Constitution of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) also in 1974 and reinforced by the 1976 Law of Associated Labor, needs a special explanation and thorough examination, since it was specific for Yugoslavia and created major changes in Yugoslav society. It had also altered the position of culture in the society and especially the social status of the theatre, since it introduced a certain populism and more subtle way of controlling the artistic freedom in theatres by its internal bodies - the so-called artistic councils. Under the disguise of democracy and independent decision making of all people professionally involved in the theatre, it was expected from the people in the theatre to show a full social and political responsibility in creating a repertory and producing plays that had been a priori ideologically appropriate. See: DuSan Popovió. 'The Theatre in the Socialist Self-Management Society' (From the 1978 Sterija festival speaker's platform); translated into English by V. Grbin. Scena, English Issue 2, 1979, p. 18-23. "It should be recalled that even during the first years of socialist Yugoslavia the tendencies were contained of the state machinery and political organisations to become directly involved in the repertoire and general theatre policies, despite the fact that such and similar views undoubtedly did exist at the time. The Communist Party, reps, the League of Communists, upheld the view that the theatre should be independent and that repertory policies should be the province of those who are active in the dramatic arts and in other fields of culture and public life. (...) Theatrical managements had a considerable autonomy, as well as the arts councils and the subsequent social councils: self-management was developing. As a result of all this, we now

22 have a theatre that is different from both the West and East, and that has attained enviable artistic excellence in those settings where a concentration of artistic talent has been achieved. With the creation of self-managing communities of interest for culture as well as with various other direct links, a free exchange of labour is effected between associated labour and the theatre." (DuSan Popovió, 1979, p. 18-19).

6. Aleksa Djilas. 'Dissent and Human Rights in Post-Tito Yugoslavia'; review of the Study Center for Yugoslav Affairs. London 1983, II, 5, p. 497-512. Nobody knows the exact total number of political prisoners in the former Yugoslavia with, perhaps, the exception of Amnesty International. However, according to Rajko Danilovió (Upotreba neprijateija: politiöka sudjenja 1945-91 u Jugoslaviji, 1993) after the first wave of repression between 1945 and 1951 (i.e., 16.713 people were legally sentenced and punished for their loyalty to IB between 1948 and 1963), the number of political sentences decreased from 2.300 in 1952 to a 'mere' 450 in 1958. Since the introduction of a more liberal Criminal Law in 1959, the number went well under 200 in 1960. The number of political sentences increased in the period between 1971 and 1976, then decreased again (no exact number has been given), but when Tito died in 1980, every year there were about 500 cases of court sentencing extended to political opponents. Danilovic claims that 1980 was a particularly oppressive year since the number of political prisoners increased for 83% compared to the previous year (1979) - exactly 523 people were accused of political delinquency. Only in the autonomn province of Kosovo 658 people were arrested and sentenced between 1981 and 1983, while approximately 2.000 people were punished by local magistrates (sentences of up to 60 days). In the period between 1981 and 1986, 6.500 Albanians were arrested and prosecuted, while in 1 986, out of 1.400 political prisoners, the majority consisted of Albanians.

7. Interview with Vuko Goce-Guöetió, NIN, June 29, 1980, who also stated that 'nine-tenths of political crimes' were committed verbally. The 'verbal' offense was also unique for Yugoslav case, as a crime in the large scale of legal measures used against anyone who tried to express his disagreement with the regime. The notorious article 133, section 1, of the Criminal Law of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), Sluzbeni list SFRJ, no. 44/76, states that: "Whosoever by means of writing, leaflet, drawing, spoken word or in some other way calls for or incites the abolition of the rule of the working class and working people, unconstitutional changes of the socialist self-management system, breakdown of brotherhood and unity and equality of nations and nationalities, abolition of self-management organs or their executive bodies, resistance against the decisions of the appropriate organs of government and self-management that are important for the protection and development of socialist self-management relations, security or defence of the country, or with ill intention and falsely represents social and political circumstances in the country, will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of one to then years."

8. Interview for this report with Dragoslav Mihailovió, the author of the play When the Pumpkins Bloomeo \Kad su cvetale tikve) which was excluded from the repertory of Yugoslav Drama Theatre (Jugoslovensko dramsko pozoriste).

9. In the West, the word dissident is used to describe a person who 'systematically, openly and over a long period of time, without belonging to any particular ideology or political movement struggle as a matter of principle for implementation and respect of human rights in their country'. (Aleksa Djilas, 1983, p. 498).

10. According to Aleksa Djilas, the following factors hindered Yugoslav dissidence from conforming to the Western definition:

23 1). The absence of a strong denriocratic tradition, that is the weakness of democratic institutions in the period before the communist revolution; 2). The lack of public awareness of the significance and importance of human rights and how all rights and liberties in a society are inter-related and depend on each other; 3). The failure to realize that a minor infringement such as the refusal to issue a passport or the persecution of politically dissatisfied intellectuals, is merely a matter of degree in the system that oppresses everybody; 4). The relative persuasiveness of the Marxist Leninist myth that freedom of speech is a false 'bourgeois' freedom; 5). The conflicts between the various nationalities and the resulting inability of the political opposition from different nations to work together; 6). The severe persecution of those who demand fundamental liberties, compared with the restraint of any other mode of polemical criticism; 7). The depth of the social changes that the Yugoslav communist revolution brought about, which created the illusion that the communist order was so thoroughly integrated into society that it could only be moderated and improved, but no longer fundamentally altered; 8). The fact that the struggle for 'human rights' is invariably interpreted by the regime as nothing but a cover for attempts to transform the existing 'workers' order into a 'bourgeois' democracy which exploits the working class. (Aleksa Djilas, 1983, p. 499)

11. However, before it, two productions were banned in Novi Sad (Vojvodina, a northern province of Yugoslavia) in 1 945/1 946: G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion, upon the request of a high ranking party officer, who noticed that the only real proletarian in the play, Alfred Doulittle, was pictured as a drunkard; and Armored Train 14-69 by Vsevolod ivanov, because a character of a reactionary was too vividly presented.

12. Bojan Stupica (1910-1970) Slovenian director, set designer and actor. Along with Eli Finci he was the founder of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in 1948. They were authorized to invite, at their own choice, actors from all over Yugoslavia, who were assembled by government decree. In 1958 Stupica became the manager of Yugoslav Drama Theatre until his death. He was one of the directors whose somewhat eclectic style and presence marked the whole period in the Yugoslav theatre. Through directing plays of Chekhov, Goldoni, Brecht and Yugoslav classic and contemporary writers (Drzió, Cankar, Krieza), Stupica made an impact on a whole generation of Yugoslav theatre-makers.

13. 'Diskusija povodom tri predstave Jugoslovenskog dramskog pozoriSta'. Knjizevne novine, 13. jul 1948, p. 37-41.

14. For further study of these discussions see the Archive of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party (CK SKJ VIII, l-VI). For example, in a 'Consultation with Jury Members for Awarding Our Actors', held on February 2, 1 948, in addition to the criticism extended to several theatre and opera productions in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade (i.e. Le Tartuffe and Aida), a general agreement was to award actors, having in mind 'certain policy of support to those actors for whom we think that will come closest to our way of thinking. The awards contain their own politics and are determined for a full year. That means that their criteria will be different in 1948 than in 1952. (Archive of CK SKJ, VIII, 11/4 - g - 5, 2. II 1948). See also: Radovan Zogovió. 'Na popriStu'. Belgrade, Kultura, 1947, and following articles: Marko Fotez. 'Za propagandu pozoriSta'. Knjizevne novine, 18-IX-1951, IV, p. 36. Hugo Klajn. 'Kako unaprediti pozoriSni zivot u Beogradu'. Knjizevne novine, 9-1-1951, IV, p. 2. '0 nekim pitanjima naèeg dramskog repertoara'. Knjizevne novine, 27-X-1951, IV, p. 42. '0 pozoriSnim kritikama Milana Bogdanoviéa objavljenim u 'Borbi'. Borba, 31-1-1953, XVIII, p. 30: signed by Velibor Gligorió, Milan Dedinac, Marko Ristió, Predrag Dinulovió, Eli Finci, Cedomir

24 Minderovié, Jozo LaurenCió, Duëan Kostió, Erih Koè, with statement of editorial board of 'Borba'.

Jovan Putnik. 'Realizam u pozoriStu'. Strazilovo, 1953, 14, p. 1. Sta znaöi diskusija o predstavi 'Djida' u Srpskom narodnom pozoriètu u Novom Sadu. Dnevnik, 15-XII-1953, XII, 2830.

15. Soja Jovanovió (b. 1922), director, educated at the Belgrade's Theatre Academy, established herself as a director of foreign and Yugoslav classic comedies, vaudevilles and musicals; and also as a director of films based on NuSió plays.

16. However, the production of A Suspicious Person had been re-staged again in 1955 with more or less the same cast and in the same manner, but this time without any problems.

17. Vukica Borovac. 'Slamni ëeSir'. Narodni student, 26-X-1951, VI, p. 22. Radmila BunuSevac, Ezen Labis. 'Slamni §e§ir'. PoHtiio, 18-X-1951, XLVIII, 13999; Eli Finci, Ezen LabiS. 'Slamni èeèir'. Knjizevnost, 1951, VI, VIII, 11-12, 503-506; Milenko Misailovié. 'Labièev 'Slamni SeSir' na sceni Beogradskog dramskog pozorisèta'. NiN, 23-XII-1951, I, p. 51; Lazar Trifunovié. 'Joè jednom o 'Slamnom èeSiru'. Narodni student, 2-IX-1951, VI, p. 23.

18. Hugo Klajn. 'Anujev 'Bal lopova' u reziji Soje Jovanovió'. Knjizevne novine, 29-111-1952, V, p. 50.

19. Josip Barkovid. 'Oöigledan dokaz Bore Drenovca'. Krugovi, 1952, i, 6, p. 494-496; Radmila BunuSevac. 'Bal lopova'. PoUtika, 26-111-1952, XLIX 14135; Eli Finci. 'Pravo smeha i pravo na smeh'. Svedoóanstva, 1952, I, 7, p. 12; Bora Drenovac. 'Umesto dalje diskusije'. Knjizevne novine, 2-VIII-1952, V, p. 62; 'U susret neizbeznoj borbi'. Knjizevne novine, 31-VIII-1 952, V, p. 64; Eli Finci. 'Jos jednom o pravu smeha'. Svedoóanstva, 1952, 1, 9, p. 4; 'Logika zvana tramvaj'. Svedoóanstva, I, 12, p. 2; Mitra Mitrovió. 'Povodom diskusije o skidanju 'Bala lopova' sa repertoara'. Knjizevne novine, 14-1X-1952, V, p. 65.

20. Mitra Mitrovió. 'Nisam mogla da se odreknem demokratije'. Nedeljna Borba, 24-25 jun 1989, p. 15.

21. The repertory of Belgrade Drama Theatre was mostly made up of contemporary American plays by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams but since they were considered to be, to a certain extent, a socially engaged and oblique critique of American society and the downfall of capitalism, they were approved. Some consider this period of the Belgrade Drama Theatre as its 'golden period', because an illusion was created that the theatre had certain creative freedom and autonomy in formation of repertory from what was considered official culture. Nevertheless, everyone, including artistic bodies and critics were all the time 'on guard', just in case of a deviation. It is true, however, that at the time, this was the only theatre in Belgrade in which these kinds of plays were presented in a manner which could not be considered straight realism nor naturalism, but rather theatre modernism. This was also reflected in the way of acting, since the company resembled Stanislavski's theatre in which there was no star-system but a collective effort in creating a production. For the full account of the repertory of the Belgrade Drama Theatre's, See: Dr. Petar Volk. 'Pozorièni 2ivot u Srbiji, 1944-1986'. Belgrade, 1990, p. 648-671.

22. It is not definite whether it was Dusan Matió, a famous Yugoslav writer and member of pre-war surrealist circle, who saw Roger Blin's original production in Geneva, or Soja Jovanovió, or Borislav Mihajiovió Mihiz, dramaturg and critic, or some other intellectual familiar with French culture and arts. For the full account how it all started and ended, See: Feliks Paèió. Kal<.o smo

25 öekah' Godoa kad su cvetale tikve. Belgrade, Bepar Press, 1992.

23. Interview with Feliks Paèió, May 20, 1995.

24. Why not on a regular repertory? Even though the society as a whole started to open up toward the rest of the world and especially the West, Beckett was still completely unknown as an author and his play represented 'pessimistic' view of the world, a ritual which celebrated nothingness, an absurdist philosophy which was opposed to the proscribed optimism. 'A question was, was it necessary to introduce this philosophy, in that moment, into our society?' (Predrag Dinulovió, Feliks PaSió, 1992, p. 12).

25. Krieza also described Beckett as Joyce's personal secretary and it seemed that he disliked the play itself rather than the production. (Feliks Pa§i6, 1992, p. 17).

26. Ibid.

21. Feliks PaSió, 1992, p. 46.

28. There are a number of anecdotes on how people tried to get in and who was actually there.

29. Fifteen actors left after an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a repertory of contemporary domestic plays and especially after the decision to fuse the Belgrade Drama Theatre and Belgrade's Comedy. The actors founded a company which was first called Activ and later changed into Beogradska dramska druzina A (Belgrade Drama Company A), which during the early sixties (1961-1964) presented new domestic plays in alternative spaces, mostly to students' and worker's audiences and ceased to exist due to financial problems.

30. A special chapter could be devoted to the story of how the actors led by the director, Vasilije Popovió, encouraged by their friends, decided to re-stage the production in the atelier of Miöa Popovió, one of the best known Yugoslav painters. His atelier was chosen as the largest (14,70 m by 7 m), and a division between 'stage' and 'auditorium' had been established by a drawn line, costumes were brought in from the theatre, a large broom turned upside down was used to represent a tree as the only set, a lamp was placed above the 'stage', and various chairs were brought in. Preparations were done under the aura of political conspiracy and aesthetic experiment. Finally the show had only one opening sometime in June of 1 954 (or 1 955 - nobody remembers the exact date), which was attended by tout artistic Belgrade. Many witnesses remember a tempest that started around the second act and contributed to the whole atmosphere. Everyone left the atelier with a feeling that they had attended something really revolutionary, a new chapter in the Yugoslav theatre.

31. Actually, Atelier 21 2 opened with two productions directed by its founder and later its manager, Mira Trailovió: Goethe's Faust (November 12, 1956) and G.B. Shaw's Don Juan in Hell (November 15, 1956) but Godot seemed to mark its real beginning after which a whole series of absurdist plays by lonesco, Albee, Adamov and Genet followed. This time the production received favorable reviews and became a milestone for many generations. The production had one of the longest run in the history of Yugoslav theatre (before it closed down in the 1 973/74 season it had 123 performances). Every now and then it was re-staged with the original cast: first on November 21, 1981 and last on May 25, 1992 for the inauguration of the opening of the renovated building of Atelier 212.

26 32. First threat could be traced in the Archive of CK SKJ. An 'information', marked with number 751 and handed in 1 957, represents a critique of Atelier 21 2's way of working and its reception by audience and critics. Even the theatre's council was criticised for being more artistic than ideologically oriented in creating a repertory. Suggestions were made for future strategy in which the state should intervene more (through the artistic council, criticism, and propaganda). (Arhiv CK SKJ VIII, 11/3-30, No. 75, 1957).

33. A list of removed productions at least in one season (1973/74) contains three completely different productions which were removed for various reasons: domestic comedy by Bora Óosié's Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution) for its social and political satire of domestic problems; Bulgakov's The Purple Island for seeming allusions to Yugoslav reality and Rice/Weber's Jesus Christ Super Star for its religious connotations. But this was also the time of political turmoil between conservative and more liberal currents in the hierarchy of the communist party in Serbia. Also, in 1971, after three seasons of successful run and 131 performance, the musical Hair was removed from the repertory, an act which reflected certain xenophobia. As mentioned earlier, now and then a public discussion regarding 'controversial' productions was staged. One such discussion was organised after the opening of Hair and its transcript was published in Borba. A group of intellectuals invited to participate expressed their opinions of Hair: is this kind of art made for all classes or is it made for an artistic, intellectual and social elite and how does it really relate to the Yugoslav situation. Harmless as it seemed it certainly showed the standpoint of Yugoslav intellectuals which was more traditionalist than progressive. (For the full account see: 'Jesmo li za Segrte, jesmo li za hipike'. Borba, 3-6, VI 1969). All these happened in spite of the fact that the group of people around Atelier 212 and Mira Trailovió founded Belgrade's International Festival (1967), which enabled presentation of some of the most avant-garde and experimental international productions (from Grotowski to Ronconi) and which was considered and still is one of the most important European theatre festivals (it also represented a sort of 'window' to the world for other East European artists who attended it). It also should be pointed out that Atelier 212 produced plays of Eastern European dissident playwrights such as Havel and Mrozek in the mid-seventies and early eighties. (For the full account of its repertory see: Dr. Petar Volk, 1990, p. 674-706).

34. An anecdote tells how she treated a politician who came to the Green room and saw Borislav Mihailovié Mihiz, a dissident playwright and dramaturg, who worked in Atelier 212 unofficially, since he was prohibited to work anywhere. When the politician asked: 'Is this Mihiz', she asked: 'Where? 1 do not see him. You must be mistaken'.

35. i.e. The Municipal Theatre of Ljubljana (1951), Zagreb Drama Theatre, later Gavella Theatre (1953), Little Theatre in Sarajevo (1955), the Theatre of Dramatic Arts in Skopje (1958), etc.

36. Beside lonesco, the only produced play by a foreign author was M. de Ghelderode's Escurial. This period also represented a sudden break-through of new domestic plays not only in Slovenia but also in the rest of Yugoslavia, which went on until the early seventies. Antigone by Dominik Smole introduced a new tendency in Yugoslavia of questioning and individualising classic mythology but also of presenting contemporary problems through ironic interpretation of familiar myths, whose representatives were Jovan Hristió in Belgrade with Clean Hands iCiste ruke) and Orestes; Marijan Matkovió in Zagreb with The Gods are Thirsty {Bogovi su zedni) and Heracles', and Veno Taufer in Ljubljana with Prometeus. Here should be also mentioned that Marijan Matkoviö wrote so-called metaphoric or historical farces, such was his General and his Jester (General i njegov lakrdijaè). This genre was also exploited by his contemporaries, Antun Soljan, Dioclecian's Palace (Dioklecijanova palaöa) and Belgrade's playwright Velimir Lukió who wrote

27 plays set in imagined Middle Ages, as a metaphor of tyranny and oppression, such were The Long Life of King Oswald {Dugi zivot l

37. Their ideas were inspired by works of early Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Sartre, Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois.

38. Such was the case of Joze JavorSek, whose play The Joy of Life {Veselje do zivijenja) had been produced by the group, but was not welcomed by them. After several attempts to join them, and being in a position of a lonely and marginalised dissident, JavorSek turned against them and the whole movement.

39. Among these were DuSan Jovanovió, playwright and director; Lado Kralj, dramaturge and director; and Tone Slodnjak, actor, who in the seventies, in a way continued the tradition of Oder 57 working with two of the most experimental groups Pekarna and GLEJ.

40. An unsuccessful attempt by Drzavna zalozba Slovenije to change the editorial board and therefore the orientation of Perspel

41. The play was published in the journal Maske, 6-7, 1 987 in Slovenian and in Scena, XXVI, 2-3, 1990 in Serbocroatian.

42. This was at the moment when an actor announced that 'Workers are on strike and the cows remained unmilked'. Somebody from the audience shouted: "Let Rozanc do it!" which was obviously a sign for everybody else to react.

43. A similar incident occurred in 1 959, at the performance of 0'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, into which partisan songs were interpolated. An actor, who was ex-partisan, came into the theatre in Ljubljana with his veteran pals and interrupted the performance with guns. Also, similar riots were set off by organised audiences exactly sixteen years after Hothouse, this time in Belgrade. On May 31,1990 a performance of a play Saint Sava by SiniSa Kovaèevié was interrupted by angry nationalists who could not bear that their national hero was presented as a 'sinner' of flesh and blood (which was a result of negative propaganda - nobody saw or read the play before). However, the day before, the same production by National Theatre of Zenica (Bosnia) had been presented at the Sterija Festival without incident. The riots continued in front of the theatre and later turned into an aggressive campaign and threats against the writer and actors. Both Hothouse and Saint Sava represent clear cases of populist attacks in the theatre, or so-called theatrocracy, and anticipated future dramatic social changes. Although according to Jean Divignaud (Les ombres collectives: Sociologie du théatre, 1 973) the political significance

28 of theatre events could be too easily overestimated because of their proximity to social events (as in the case of Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro and French revolution) one cannot negate a certain anticipatory power of the theatre and its historic role. Hothouse announced unavoidable changes in Slovenian politics as much as Saint Sava confirmed and announced the inevitable Serbian nationalism.

44. For a full account of what happened see Scena, VII, 2-3, 1971; A special issue dedicated to theatre life in Slovenia, 1945-1970, Prolog, IX, 33-34, 1977; A special issue dedicated to contemporary theatre in Slovenia, Taras Kermauner; Oder 57: Ideologija i poiitika and Andrej Inkret, Vrelo proleóe 64, Scena. XXVI, 2-3, 1990, p. 239-249 and p. 250-268.

45. Here it should be mentioned that, contrary to general opinion, the court banishment placed on Hothouse was not the only one in the history of censored theatre in Yugoslavia. Another prohibition occurred in Croatia, eighteen years later: In the spring of 1982, two actors, Radoslav Milenkovió and Sreten Mokorovió, formed a two man group, MM Theatre, and made an adaptation of political essays by Matija Beókovió (a writer and dissident), which were published in a book entitled On Meanwhile (0 medjuvremenu) and called their show. Exit (iziaz). It opened in Zagreb and then it moved to Dubrovnik for the Summer festival (Dubrovaöke letnje igre). First the actors were taken by policemen dressed in civilian clothes to the local police station where they underwent an interrogation regarding the content and meaning of verbal and mime messages of the play. After the interrogation they were taken to the magistrate (Zeljko Fabijanió) of the city court, where they were confronted with two witnesses for the prosecution, two spectators who experienced the show as harmful to society and politically unacceptable, so that they decided to go to the police and testify against the 'executors' of the production, especially because the audience seemed to enjoy this false presentation. Both actors had the impression that they managed to defend themselves, however six months later (in January 1 983) they have received a written order, signed by the magistrate, that they were sentenced to forty days imprisonment, because through dialogue and pantomime they maliciously and mockingly presented the heritage of the Yugoslav revolution, its participants, as well as the legacy of socialism, and, therefore, for insulting and disdaining socialist and patriotic feelings of citizens in a public space. Finally, the magistrate concluded that this punishment would serve to correct the accused so they would never repeat such or similar misdemeanor. (Borislav Mihailovió Mihiz. Kazivanja i ui

46. Since they were denied any kind of security, members of Oder 57 feared that if the students started to protest, the whole event might end up in bloody riots.

47. Another protest against banishment was placed by Commission for the protection of thinking and writing of the Association of Slovenian Writers in 1 986, issuing a statement in which it was written that the court decision does not oblige Slovenian writers and theatres in any way. Its only result, however, was that the play was published and not performed. Two years before, in 1982, Marko Slodnjak, a dramaturg and Janez Pipan, a director, wanted to stage Hothouse with the interpolation of all encompassing events but gave up the idea. Hothouse remained unproduced until today.

48. Kozak's The Congress (1968) stirred up some controversies when it was presented at Sterijino pozorje in 1 968; nevertheless, the production of the play by Slovensko narodno gledalisce had won a special prize for a production as whole.

49. Actually, his first play Madmen (Ludaci, 1964) was written for Oder 57 but was never performed by the group, since it was scheduled after Hothouse. Later on, his plays like Play Out

29 the Tumor in Brain or the Pollution of Air {Igrajte tumor u glavi Hi zagadjenje vazduha, 1971), whose second act is a picture of ideological confrontations in the theatre, was almost banned at the Sterija Festival in 1976, when presented by Slovensko ljudsko gledalièöe from Celje (directed by LjubiSa Ristió), while Karamazovs (1 979) was actually banned in Belgrade in 1 980.

50. Robert Darnton. A Police inspector Sorts His Files, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, Vintage Books, 1984, p. 145-191.

51. Since Tito's visits to the theatre were even more sporadic than his visits to ballet and opera, and because they were always followed by media and the press, they can be easily counted (not including private performances which were sometimes organised in his residency and always consisted of excerpts from the plays, performed by distinguished actors who were invited to his home). I.e. in 1955 Tito attended the production of the visiting Peking opera in Belgrade; in 1957, Tito went three times to the theatre: he attended the production of Mother Courage at Belgrade Drama Theatre, the production of Titus Andronicus directed by Peter Brook, and presented by Shakespeare Memorial Theatre from Stratford, in which Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh performed at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, and the 300th performance of Dundo Maroje in the same theatre. Miroslav Krieza was Tito's friend, so they went to theatre together and Tito especially liked to attend openings of Krleza's plays: such were the productions of Vudjak in Belgrade Drama Theatre (1953); in Agony {U agoniji), directed by Bojan Stupica at the National Theatre in Belgrade (1 959) and productions of Salome and Maskerata at Yugoslav Drama Theatre in 1 963. In 1 954 Tito became the official protector of Dubrovnik Summer Festival and in 1 977 of Sterija Theatre Festival in Novi Sad (Sterijino pozorje). Tito attended three times Sterijino pozorje, and the last time he appeared at the production of Cyclop {Kiklop), which was an adaptation of the novel by Ranko Marinkovió, under the same title. Actually, since he was not able to come to the official opening, another performance had been staged for him and his entourage. Since it lasted for four hours, the version for Tito had been reduced to one hour and a half. Tito responded: "Why did you do that? If I have a patience to wait in ambush for a bear (he was a passionate hunter) for four hours, I could also endure a theatre play." This response reflected his attitude toward theatre, which he never liked, or understood much. However, film was his real passion and he had a private screening room but also attended a number of official openings of the national film festival in Pula. He especially liked war movies and foreign actors (Sophia Loren, Richard Burton, who played Tito in Neretva, a 1971 film by Veljko Bulajic/Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lolobrigida, Orson Welles) and lavished them with expensive gifts and spectacular parties. (For Tito's relationship toward film and theatre, See: 'Tito, pozoriète i film', a special issue of theatre journal Teatron, 24, 5-6 published by Theatre Museum of Serbia in 1980 on the occasion of the exhibition under the same title mounted in 1 980 and a special issue of FHmograf dedicated to Tito in Yugoslav films, V, 15, Spring 1980).

52. Tito, pozoriSte i film, 1980.

53. The toponym 'Goli otok' was pronounced publicly for the first time, while before expressions as Hawaii and a Hawaiian were used in jargon. (Interview D. Mihailovió, 12. 6. 1995).

54. The period of preparation and rehearsals lasted about nine months, during which actors were prepared in a naturalistic manner for their roles: they went through real boxing training and a real boxing match had been staged. Since the play had been approved by the theatre manager, Bojan Stupica, and the Artistic Council, the actors, especially those who belonged to the Communist party did not recognise anything suspicious in the play. However, there are indications that even if there were some controversies they were settled by the authority of Stupica who insisted on placing it in the repertory which was mostly made of foreign classics.

30 And nobody dared to question Stupica who was also a distinguished political figure and had 'strong political connections'.

55. Nevertheless, he continued to direct films and to work as a professor at the Drama School in Novi Sad, teaching theatre directing, but also directing plays 'through his students' and writing about theatre.

56. For example of a positive review, See: Dragan Klaió. 'Kad su cvetale tikve u pozoriètu'. Student, 21.x, 1 969, which was published several days after the first attack; P. Krstié. 'PolitiCki pamflet s okusom informbirovStine'. Borba, 16. X, 1969.

57. Bojan Stupica did not go, but some actors went, trying to defend the production, saying that this is theatre, not real life. The conversation was long and painful. The biggest problem, it seemed, was a line spoken by the protagonist's father, Andra Sretenovió: "They (communists) are worse than Nazis..." This incriminated line was used as a crown evidence, even though nobody can recall exactly whether it actually was stated in the production or not.

58. The transcript of this meeting has been recently discovered and a copy of it sent to D. Mihailovió. The whole document is really an emotional testimony of how the actors, director and manager tried hard to save the production. Almost fifteen years later, one of the main protagonist in the show, Ljuba Tadió (the Colonel) stated that everyone thought that "we the actors were involved in the removal of the production, but there was something, outside from us, which we could not follow..." (Mirjana Bobió. 'Petnaest godina tikava'. Intervju, 22. VI, 1984).

59. A pseudonym used by Slododan Glumac, who was the Editor in Chief of Borba, and who used this name only twice to sign the two articles against Pumpkins on October 16 and 25, 1969.

60. Even Reuters transmitted on October 26, 1969 that the production was banned after Tito's speech. Some actors, however, think that the decision of removing was made before his speech. But the facts indicate a different case. For the full account see; Feliks PaSió, 1992, p. 50-1 21; Scena, XXVI, 2-3, 1 990, p. 93-11 7, private archives of Dragoslav Mihailovió and Feliks Pa§i6. It is possible that some new evidence will come out but this 'case' has been covered by a large number of documents, especially reviews and articles.

61. Mihailovié speaks of friends who did not 'see' him on the street or in restaurants.

62. Boro Draèkovió for the first time agreed to write an article, entitled A Paradox on an Arrow in the Throat (Paradoks o streli u gr/u) on what happened in those days for the special issue of Scena on political banishments. See: Scena, XXVI, 2-3, 1990, p. 111-116.

63. Such was the meeting held at the Serbian Philosophical Society on the relationship between 'Socialism and Culture' which took a stand against censorship and which was attacked by a number of articles, such as In the Name of Artistic Freedom (U ime slobode stvaranja) an article signed this time by certain Momir Krstió, a teacher from a village Stalaó, in the Komunist on December 1 8, 1 969.

64. Interview with Nikola Jeftió, May 20, 1995.

65. When the play received another award. Gavella's award in 1981, it provoked a small-scale media war between Belgrade press {Vecernje novosti and Borba) and the Croatian press.

31 66. Nikola Jeftié, May 20, 1995

66a. In fact, Ivica Raöan and Ivan Saleöió, the heads of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia, threatened Ristic with a ban on the production. But Ristic decided to play a risky game and not to withdraw. It turned out that his instinct was right: the politicians didn't dare to enter into an openly public confrontation.

67. Perhaps, as stated earlier, the first real alternative theatre was Akademsko pozoriste in Belgrade. In the early fifties they staged several 'grandiose satirical student shows' called Brucoéijada (Freshmen Festival), which were soon abandoned after a great students' carnival was planned (for 'religious reasons' and because nobody knew what will students 'shout disguised by masks'). However, the same group of students and later directors and writers (Makavejev, DraSkió, Babié, Djurkovió, Tatió and others) were asked to provide a script for the celebration of Tito's birthday (also official Youth Day). This group also staged Majakovski's The Bath House at the Belgrade Drama Theatre in 1956. After several corrections during the dress rehearsal, when the production opened it almost created a scandal. Between the second and third acts, a procession of 'bureaucrats' passed through the audience and took seats in the front row, in front of officials seated in the second, and talked to them directly. This production went through six or eight performances before it was banned for not reflecting enough the contemporary optimism, which was in direct collision with the production's popularity. Several other productions of Akademsko pozoriste based on new plays (such were Popov's The Wardrobe of Historical Proportions - Ormar istorijskih proporcija and Makavejev's New Man on a Flower Market - Novi öovek na Cvetnom trgu) were also banned. For example, New Man, written in a form of Greek tragedy, with a chorus of students, was performed only once in April 1961 in the Auditorium of School of Engineering in front of 700 enthusiastic students who enjoyed it immensely. Later it was cancelled for 'technical reasons' in spite of favorable reviews. (DuSan Makavejev. Letter to Dragan Klaió. February 1 7, 1 995). Here it should be mentioned that certain moral censorship was used against several student's productions {Sexplosion, Oh, Calcutta!) staged at the Dom omiadine (Youth House) in Belgrade during seventies.

68. In fact, the legacy of this notion, 'Yugoslav cultural space' managed to survive even the present war in Yugoslavia: a playwright and dramaturg from Belgrade, Nenad Prokié, works with director Tomaz Pandur in Maribor [The Divine Comedy 1993, The Russian Mission 1994, all produced at Slovensko narodno gledaliSöe in Maribor); LjubiSa Ristió still directs Jovanovió's plays (i.e. Antigone in 1994) in Subotica; and recently a Macedonian director, Slobodan Unkovski directed a Macedonian play. Powder Keg (Bure baruta) by Dejan Dukovski at Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade in 1 995.

69. Laslo Vegel. 'Dokument kritiökog postmodernizma'. Scena, 3, 1988, p. 56-57.

70. For the full account how these groups were organized and what kind of repertories they performed see: 'Alternativno pozoriSte u Jugoslaviji (Iskustva samostalnih pozoriènih grupa)', a documentary dossier compiled and edited by Dragan Klaió and Ognjenka Milióevió, Sterijino pozorje, 1982. This was the first and, so far, last attempt to create an archive and documentation for alternative groups. See also Filip Mladenovió. 'Alternativno pozoriSte u Jugoslaviji osamdesetih', 1 993, an unpublished master thesis (Library of the School of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade).

32 71. Gledalièèe Sester Scipion Nasice (1 983-1 986) was a part of the whole artistic (retro) movement in Slovenia, Neue Slowenische Kunst, to which several groups that worked in various media (group Irwin in visual arts, Laibach in music) belonged. It is interesting to mention that Scipion Nasica (Eda Cufer, dramaturg, Miran Mohar, painter and set designer, and Dragan Zivadinov, director) started their work performing in private apartments for selected audiences, which was not done for political, but aesthetic reasons. In the many manifestos which they issued they stated that the theatre as we know it is dead, and that the time had come for the restoration of post-revolutionary and post-avant-garde theatre as a pure aesthetic experience, which culminated with self-abolishment of the group at the 20th BITEF in 1986.

72. The acronym stood for the first letter of the word 'theatre' in four Yugoslav languages; (K)azali§te - Croatian, (P)ozoriSte - Serbian, (G)ledaliSöe - Slovenian, and (T)eater - Macedonian. The combination of letters also represented the company's political and artistic ideal - to overcome the division of cultures within Yugoslav society. While it was respecting differences of various Yugoslav cultures, KPGT profile had gained theatrically and politically by integrating disparate concerns.

73. Knjiievne novine, 674-675, 1984, p. 4.

74. Vladimir Stamenkovid. Kraljevstvo eksperimenata. Belgrade, Nova knjiga, 1987, p. 190.

75. In Macedonia, only one case of banishment had been recorded in Bitola, which was a temporary prohibition of a distribution of a dramatisation of the novel Mara's Wedding [Marina svadba), directed by LjubiSa Georgievski in 1 976, although this production had won a number of awards at various Yugoslav festivals. In Montenegro there were several such cases, especially in the fifties and mostly because they represented 'anti-revolutionary threats' {Gospodsl

76. This is certainly not true any longer in the new Croatian state, where Slobodan Snajder is blacklisted for his plays written in the eighties. The Croatian Faust and Gamllet. Contrary to the general opinion. The Croatian Faust (1982) had been produced in Croatia, in Split (1982) and Varazdin (1984), but was never performed in Zagreb, in spite of several attempts during the 1980's.

77. It should be mentioned that the first version of the play was completed in 1 965 but sat for years on the 'desks' of various theatre managers. When finally ITD Theatre had included it in its repertory, after a discussion between director, Bozidar Violié, and Vjeran Zupa, the artistic manager, and the writer, Breèan wrote a new version which premiered on April 19, 1971.

78. The play has been published in English translation in Scena, English Issue 8, 1985, p. 4-32. It also should be mentioned that the whole campaign against Hamlet was part of a larger campaign against the phenomenon of Yugoslav 'film noire' which depicted Yugoslav reality in a dark and critical manner.

33 79. Before it received only one performance by an amateur theatre group, Susret, also in Belgrade in 1984.

80. These plays were: Caps Down (Kape dole, Atelier 212, 1969; Second Door Left (Druga vrata levo, Atelier 212, 1969); The Map Has Fallen {Pala karta, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 1970); Darkness and Dark Wood {Mrak i Suma gusta, Belgrade Drama Theatre and Atelier 212, 1 971); Evergreen (Uvek zeleno, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 1972); Craps' Spawn (Mreéóenje éarana, Belgrade Drama Theatre and National Theatre in Pirot, 1980); and Market Day (Pazarni dan, Zvezdara Theatre, Belgrade in 1985).

81. Interview with Aleksandar Popovió, May 16, 1995.

82. Second interview with Aleksandar Popovió, June 26, 1995.

83. DuSan Makavejev recalls how the production of Majakovski's The Bath House, at which he served as assistant director to Darko Tatió in 1956, produced by Academic Theatre, was censored in the Belgrade Drama Theatre: a day before the opening, the Program Council attended the dress rehearsal and asked the actor who played Pobedonosikov (Rastko Tadió) to take off his mustache which was identical to Stalin's. (Duèan Makavejev. Letter to Dragan Klaió, 17 February 1 995). A similar incident was the cause of censorship in Popovic's The Market Day. A production was revised a day after its premiere because the main character, played by actor Voja Brajovió, looked a lot like Tito.

84. Another play, Che, A Tragedy Which Continues (Ce, tragedija koja traje) by two Serbian poets, DuSan Radovió and Matija Beókovió, was banned in Belgrade but shown successfully in Zagreb in 1969.

34 ARCHIVES:

1. Centar za dokumentaciju Sterijinog pozorja (Center for Documentation of Sterijino pozorje) in Nov! Sad - bulletins and transcripts from the round table discussions held at Sterijino pozorje, regarding productions shown at the Festival, - other documents, such as manuscripts of plays, articles, audio and video tapes, posters, programs, photographs, journals, books - various printed material from 104 theatres and 32 theatre festivals from Yugoslavia and around the world

2. National Archive of Serbia, Belgrade (Arhiv Srbije) where there is also: The Archive of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party, Belgrade (CK SKJ)

3. National Library of Serbia, Belgrade (periodicals)

4. Theatre Museum of Serbia, Belgrade (photographs, reviews, programs and posters of relevant productions)

5. National Archive of Vojvodina, Novi Sad (documents of the Central Committee of the Vojvodina's Communist Party)

6. Theatre Archives of: - Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade - Belgrade Drama Theatre, Belgrade - National Theatre, Belgrade - Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad - Atelier 212, Belgrade - Zvezdara Theatre, Belgrade

7. Private archives of: Boro DraSkovió, professor Petar Marjanovió, Dragoslav Mihailovió, Feliks Pa§i6, professor Alojs Ujez

35 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Books and Plays

'Alternativno pozoriéte u Jugoslaviji' ('Experiences of Independent Theatre Groups in Yugoslavia, Documentary Dossier'). Dragan Klaié and Ognjenka Milióeviö, Editors. Novi Sad, Sterijino pozorje, 1982 'Bijela knjiga'. Zagreb, CK SKH, 1984. Ivo BreSan. 'Smrt predsjednika kuónog savjeta'. Unpublished. Library of Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU), University of Belgrade. ■ 'Groteskne tragedije'. Zagreb, CEKADE, 1984. ■ 'Nove groteskne tragedije'. Zagreb, CEKADE, 1989. Vladimir Goati. 'PoHtiCka anatomija jugoslovenskog druétva'. Zagreb, Naprijed, 1989. DuSan Jovanovió. 'Karamazovi'. Belgrade, Nezavisna izdanja, Slobodan MaSió, No. 37, 1984. Ognjen Lakiéevid. 'Antologija savremene jugoslovenske drame'. Vol. 1 and 2, Belgrade, Svetozar Markovió, 1 984. Marko LopuSina. 'Crna knjiga: Cenzura u Jugoslaviji 1945-1991' (Black Book: Censorship in Yugoslavia 1945-1991). Beograd, Fokus, 1992. Predrag Matvejevió. 'Jugoslavenstvo danas'. Belgrade, BIGZ, 1984. Siegfried Melchinger. 'Povijest politiókog kazaliSta'. Zagreb, Grafiöki zavod Hrvatske, 1989. Borislav Mihajiovió. 'Autobiografija - O drugima'. Belgrade, BIGZ, 1994. ■ 'Kazivanja i ukazivanja'. Belgrade, BIGZ, 1994. Filip MIadenovié. 'Alternativno pozoriSte u Jugoslaviji osamdesetih', M.A. Thesis, 1993. Unpublished. Library of the FDU, Belgrade. Feliks PaSió. 'Kako smo öekali Godoa kad su cvetale tikve' (How We Waited for Godot While the Pumpkins Were Blooming). Beograd, Bepar Press, 1992. Aleksandar Popovió. 'Mreéóenje ëarana i druge drame'. Belgrade, BIGZ, 1986. ■ 'Bela kafa i druge drame'. Belgrade, Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1992. DuSan Popovió. 'U pozoriStu'. Novi Sad, 1973. Slobodan Selenié. 'Antologija savremene srpske drame' (Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Drama). Belgrade, Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1977. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Kraljevstvo eksperimenata'. Belgrade, Nova knjiga, 1987. 'PozoriSte u dramatizovanom druStvu'. Belgrade, Prosveta, 1987. Laslo Vegel. 'Abrahamov noz'. Zagreb, CEKADE, 1987. Petar Volk. 'Pozoriénizivot u Srbiji 1944/1986'. Beograd, FDU/lnstitut, 1992. 'Pisci nacionalnog teatra: PozoriSni zivot u Srbiji 1834-1994'. Beograd, PozoriSni muzej Srbije, 1995. Radovan Zogovió. 'Na popriStu'. Beograd, Kultura, 1947.

2. Essays

Robert Darnton. 'A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History'. New York, Random House, 1985, p. 145-191. Aleksa Djilas. 'Dissent and Human Rights in Post-Tito Yugoslavia, Review of the Study Centre for Yugoslav Affairs'. II, 5, London, 1983, p. 497-512. Borislav Mihajlovió and Dragoslav Mihailovié. 'Portreti'. Belgrade, Nolit, 1988, p. 270-285. Mirjana Mioèinovió. 'Komiöki zanr Aleksandra Popovióa', 'PozoriSte i giijotina'. Sarajevo, Svjetlost, 1990. Richard Schechner. 'Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought, Between Theatre and Anthropology'. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, p. 3-35.

36 3. Journals {Special Issues) and Catalogues

Bitef. Catalogue 20, 1988. FUmograf. 'Tito u jugoslovenskom fUmu, 1944-1980'. V, 15, proleóe 1980. Kultura vlasti. 'Index smena i zabrana'. No. 1, Radio B92: Beograd, 1994. Prolog. Zagreb, IX, 33-34, 1977 ('On the contemporary Slovenian theatre'). Scena. 'Special Issue dedicated to the Slovenian Theatre, 1945-1970'. VII, 2-3, 1971. Scena, English Issue 5, 1979. Scena, (Special Issue dedicated to the BITEF), XVII, 3, 1981. Scena, (Six New Yugoslav Plays), XVIII, 2, 1982. Scena, English Issue 8, 1985. Scena, (Special Issue dedicated to the postmodernism in the Yugoslav theatre), XXIV, 3, 1988. Scena, English Issue 11, 1988. Scena, (Special Issue dedicated to the Theatre and Power in Yugoslavia, 1945-1990). Novi Sad, XXVI, 2-3, March/June 1990. Sterijino pozorje. 'A catalogue dedicated to the 25th Anniversary of Sterijino pozorje (1956-1981)'. Novi Sad, 1 981. Teatron. 'Tito, pozoriSte i film' (Special Issue dedicated to Tito, Theatre and Film), 24, 5-6, October 1980.

4. Articles and reviews regarding specific productions

1946

Anonim. 'Jedna slaba i reakcionarna predstava u beogradskom pozoriètu'. Borba, 31. 12. 1946.

1948

'PoCetak rada Jugoslovenskog dramskog pozoriSta'. Knjizevne novine, 6. april 1948. 'Diskusija povodom tri prve predstave Jugoslovenskog dramskog pozoriSta' (U diskusiji koja je nedavno vodjena u Beogradu, uöestvovali izmedju ostalih: Stefan Mitrovió, Jovan Popovió, Milan Bogdanovió, Velibor Gligorió, Skender Kulenovió, Radovan Zogovió, Eli Finci i Veljko Vlahovió). Knjizevne novine, 13. jul 1948, p. 37-41.

1950

B.B. 'Drama o krizi kapitalistióke etike', Slov. poroöevalec, 12-1-1950 (A review about AH My Sons by A. Miller, production by Ljubljanska Drama). Slavko Batuëié. 'Sto smo dali kazaliStima Evrope i Amerike' (1,11, III), Narodni list, 22-VIII-1 950, VI, 1614; 23-VIII-1951, 1615; 24-VIII-1951, 1616. LjubiSa Pavlovié. 'Akademsko pozoriSte u Beogradu'. Omiadinska pozornica, 1950, IV, 1, p. 71-76. Augustin StipCeviC. 'Repertoar i repertoarska politika'. Scena, jesen 1950, I, p. 23-26, 0 repertoaru i repertoarnoj politici na§ih narodnih kazaliSta, Narodni Hst, 1 1-V-1950, VI, 1528. Ervin Sinko. 'Propaganda protiv kazaliSne umjetnosti'. Republika, 1950, VI, I, 1, p. 58. 'Osjeéaj odgovornosti kazaliSne kritike', Slobodna Dalmacija, 26-X1I-1950, VIII, 1835.

37 1951

Stanislav Bajid. 'Repertoar u Beogradu 1944-1951'. MIadost, 1951, VII, 3-4, p. 324-326. Zvonimir BajSié. 'Neki pozoriSni problemi: Uz prvi broj èasopisa Scena'. Knjizevne novine, 5-VI-1 951, p. 23. Miiutin Colié. 'Kritikovani kritikuju'. N/N, 22-IV-1951, I, p. 17. Milan Djokovió. 'Reè-dve o pozoriStu i njegovog sredini'. Knjizevne novine, 12-X-1951, IV, p. 41. Marko Fotez. 'Za propaganda pozoriSta'. Knjizevne novine, 18-IX-1951, IV, p. 36. Hugo Klajn. 'Kako unaprediti pozoriëni 2ivot u Beogradu'. Knjizevne novine, 9-1-1951, IV, p. 2. 'O nekim pitanjima naSeg dramskog repertoara'. Knjizevne novine, 27-X-1951, IV, p. 42. Petar Petrovió. 'Naèa pozoriSta i dramski pisci'. Knjiievne novine, 8-V-1951, IV, p. 19. Egon Stajner. 'Madjarsko pozoriSte i interesi sovjetske spoijne politike'. Knjizevne novine, 6-11-1951, p. 6. Tomislav Tanhofer. 'Za teatar domaóih autora'. Knjizevne novine, 15-V-1951, IV, p. 20. Stanislav Vinaver. 'Na§ pozorièni jezik'. NIN, 25-11-1951, I, p. 8. Eugene Labiche. An Italian Straw Hat (Slamni Sesir). Vukica Borovac. 'Slamni èeSir'. Narodni student. 26-X-1951, VI, p. 22. Radmila BunuSevac and Ezen LabiS. 'Slamni SeSir'. PoUtika, 18-X-1951, XLVIII, 13999. Eli Finci and Ezen LabiS. 'Slamni SeSir'. Knjizevnost, 1951, VI, VIII, 11-12, p. 503-506. Milenko Misailovió. LabiSev: 'Slamni èeSir' na sceni Beogradskog dramskog pozorièta'. NIN, 23-XII-1951, I, p. 51. Lazar Trifunovió. 'JoS jednom o 'Slamnom SeSiru". Narodni student, 2-IX-1951, VI, p. 23.

1952

Bosko Babovié. 'Samostalnost pozoriSta i repertoar'. NIN, 18-V-1952, II, p. 72. Velibor Gligorió. 'PozoriSni repertoar u novoj sezoni'. Borba, 2-IX-1952, XVII, p. 209. Dr. Bratko Kreft. '0 nekim problemima Slovenskog narodnog gledalièCa'. Narodni Hst, 23-1X-1952, VIII, 2300. 'Ljubljanska dramaturgija', GledaliSki list PreSernovega gledaliSCa v Kranju, 1952-53, p. 20-29. Jean Anouilh. 'The Thieves' Carnival' (Bal Lopova). Josip Barkovió. 'Oöigledan dokaz Bore Drenovca'. Krugovi, 1952, 1, 6, 494-496 (On polemics between E. Finci and B. Drenovac about the production of Ba! Lopova). Radmila BunuSevac. 'Bal lopova'. Politika, 26-111-1952, XLIX, 14135. Bora Drenovac. 'Umesto dalje diskusije'. Knjizevne novine, 2-VIII-1952, V, p. 62. 'U susret neizbeznoj borbi'. Knjizevne novine, 31-VIII-1 952, V, 64 p. Eli Finci. 'Pravo smeha i pravo na smeh'. SvedoCanstva, 1952, I, 7, p. 12 'Jo§ jednom o pravu smeha'. Svedoóanstva, 1952, I, 9, p. 4 'Logika zvana tramvaj'. Svedoóanstva, I, 12, p. 2. Hugo Klajn. 'Anujev Bal lopova u reziji Soje Jovanovié'. Knjiievne novine, 29-111-1952, V, p. 50. L. 2an Anuj. 'Bal lopova', Republika, 25-111-1952, XIX, p. 334 Mitrovió, Mitra. 'Povodom diskusije o skidanju Bala lopova sa repertoara'. Knjizevne novine, 14-IX-1952, V, p. 65.

38 1953

Vjekoslav Afrié. 'O kazaliènom dramskom zivotu'. Naprijed, 24-IV-1953, X, p. 17. Dr. Branko Gavella. 'Neke misli oko najnovije krize zagrebaöke drame'. NIN, 1 2-lv-1 953, 111, p. 119. 'ZagrebaCke kazaliène perspektive'. Naprijed, 5-IV-1953, X, p. 23. Borivoje Jevtic. 'Teze o naèim pozoriSnim previranjima'. Z/vot, 1953, II, II, 7, p. 289-293. Taras Kermauner. 'GledalièCe v krizi in kriza v gledaliSöu'. Beseda, 1 953, II, 5, p. 306-311. DuSan Kostié. 'Sta se hoóe od dramskog pisca'. Poh'tika, 3-Xli-1953, L, 14679. Dr. Bratko Kreft. 'NeSto o naSoj repertoarskoj politici'. NaSa scene, 1-1-1953, VI, p. 53. 'Nepravedan 1 pogreSan odnos prema domaóoj drami'. Poh'tika, 21-VI-1953, L, 14538. Miodrag Kujundzió. 'O pozoriSnoj publici'. Dnevnik, 8-XII-1953, XII, 2824. Emil Kutijaro and Slavko Midzor. 'Anketa o problemima Hrvatskog narodnog kazaliSta u Zagrebu'. Vjesnik, 11-X-1953, XIV, 2677 M.N., 'Pravo i odgovornost', Vjesnik NFH, 13-11-1953, XIV, 2463. Vlado Magjarevid. 'Fama o 'fami' ili kako se brani monopolistiöki polozaj kazaliène birokracije' (I. II). Narodnilist. 15-IV-1953, IX, 2432; 16-IX-1953, IX, 2433. Marijan Matkovié. 'KazaliSno-dramski zivot'. Naprijed, 20-11-1953, X, p. 8. 'Raspravljanje o kazalièno-dramskom zivotu'. Naprijed, 3-IV-1953, X, p. 14. 'O nacionalnom pozoriSnom stilu'. Naéa scena, 15-XII-1953, VI, p. 70. 'O pozoriSnim kritikama Milana Bogdanovióa objavljenim u 'Borbi". Borba, 31-1-1953, XVIII, 30: signed by Velibor Gligorió, Milan Dedinac, Marko Ristió, Predrag Dinulovié, Eli Finci, Cedonnir Minderovió, Jozo Laurenóió, DuSan Kostió, Erih Ko§, with statennent of editorial board of Borba. Jovan Putnik. 'Realizam u pozoriStu'. Straziiovo, 1953, 14, p. 1. 'Sta znaCi diskusija o predstavi 'Djida' u Srpskom narodnom pozoriëtu u Novom Sadu'. Dnevnik, 15-XII-1953, XII, 2830. Vlado Rolovió. 'Za realan razvoj naseg pozoriSnog zivota'. Danas, 1953, I, 3, p. 3. Tito Strozzi. 'KazaliSna pisma'. Vjesnik, 1-111-1953, XIV, 2479; 15-111-1953, XIV, 2493. Mirko Tepavac. 'Povodom repertoara pozoriSta u Srbiji'. Komunist, 1953, V, 10, 683-690; p. 726-733. Pavie Ugrinov. 'Na prekretnici?'. NaSa scena, 1-X-1953, VI, p. 95

1954

'Atelje 212'. Ljubljanski dnevnik, 15-XII-1954, IV, p. 291. Bosko Babovió. 'Nepoverenje prema domaéim piscima'. Politika, 22-VIII-1 954, LI, 14906. Zvonimir Berkovió. 'Kazaliène perspektive'. Vjesnik, 1-1-1954, XV, 2745. 'KazaliSna politika'. Narodni list, 23-X-1954, X, 2900. 'KazaliSte danas'. Narodni Hst, 16-X-1954, X, 2894. Oto Bihalji-Merin. 'U trazenju savremenog izraza'. Pet godina Beogradskog dramskog pozoriSta, 1 954, p. 10-n. Milan Bogdanovié. 'Pet godina beogradskog dramskog pozoriéta'. Pet godina beogradskog dramskog pozoriéta, 1954, p. 6-7. Oskar Daviöo. 'Pozorièta i pozoriSte'. Nova misao, 1954, li, 1, p. 94-98. Predrag Dinulovió. 'Odgovori na pitanja saradnika lista NIN: O sedmogodiènjenn radu Beogradskog dramskog pozoriSta i planu za sezonu 1954/1955'. NiN, 26-IX-1954, IV, p. 195. 'Na kraju jednog i poöetku drugog perioda'. Pet godina beogradskog dramskog pozoriSta, 1954, p. 3-5.

39 Velibor Gligorió. 'Razmièljanja o pozoriSnoj kritici'. PoUtika, 1, 2 i 3- 1-1954, LI, 14704. Bora Glièió. 'Sta je sa domaóom dramom'. NIN, 31-X-1954, IV, p. 20. Petar Govedarevió. 'Nekoliko reöi o naèoj pozoriènoj kritici'. Naéa scena, 1 5-III-1 954, VII, p. 75-76. Ljudmil Gotcheff. 'Kriza ipak postoji'. Globus, 20-XI-1954, 1, p. 36. Borivoje Jevtié. 'Novi repertoari naSih pozoriSta'. livot, 1954, III, V, 24, p. 65-67. Hugo Klajn. 'Savremena drama u beogradskim pozoriètima'. Borba, 4-VII-1954, XIX, p. 159; Borba (Zagreb), 8-VII-1954, XIX, p. 164. 'Modern Foreign Drama in the Repertory of Yugoslav Theatres, Review of International Affairs', 1954, V, 104-105, p. 24-25. Miodrag Kujundzió. 'Ako nemamo 'kritike'...'. Naéa scena, 1-XII-1954, VII, p. 88-89. L.Z. 'Nekritiöka i nesamokritièka kritika'. NaSa scena, 15-111-1954, VII, p. 75-76. Kalman Mesarié. 'Borba za kvalitet', Pozoriéte. Tuzia, 1954, II, 3, p. 1-7. 'Scenski realizam'. Pozoriéte, TuzIa, 1954, II, 4, p. 1-3. Djordje Milenkovió. '0 pozoriSnoj kritici'. Naëa ret, 30-X-1954, Xi, p. 43. Olivera Novakovió. 'Multi sunt vocati'. Naéa scena, 1-X-1954, VII, p. 84-85. Luka Pavlovié. 'Razgovori o domaóoj drami'. NaS vesnik, 8-X-1954, I, p. 28. DuSan Popovió. 'Na§i aktueini problemi i jedno miSljenje Tihomira Ostojióa'. NaSa scena, 1-X-1954, VII, p. 84-85. Jovan Putnik. 'Mere 1 bezmerja'. NaSa scena, 31-XII-1954, VII, p. 90-91. V.P. 'Da li ljudi iz pozoriSta treba da piSu pozoriSne kritike'. Naëa scena, 15-111-1953, VI, p. 57-58.

1955

'Anketa o stanju sodobne jugoslovenske dramatike in sodobnoga jugoslovenskoga gledaliSta'. Gledaliëki list V Celju, 1954-1955, IX, 12-14, p. 348-377 'Atelje212'. Beogradske novine, 21-1-1955, IV, p. 126; NIN, 31-1-1955, V, p. 213. Milan Bogdanovid. 'DruStveno upravljanje u pozoriStu'. Komuna, 1955, II, 1, p. 42-46. '0 pozoriSnom iivotu, o pozoriSnoj umetnosti...'. Pozoriéni zivot, I, 1, p. 4-5. Milan Djokovió. 'Beogradska pozoriSta u protekloj deceniji'. PozoriSni zivot, 1955, 1, 1, p. 6-24, (illustrated). '0 napretku pozoriène umetnosti'. NaS vesnik, 25-IX-1955, II, p. 87. Eli Finci. 'Nas pozoriSni metod', Almanah Saveza knjizevnika Jugoslavije, 1953', 1954, p. 91-94. Velibor Gligorié. 'PozoriSna kritika'. Pozoriéni zivot, 1955, I, 1, p. 39. 'Problemi pozoriSne kritike'. Naéa stvarnost, 1955, IX, p. 527-530. Dr. Branko Kreft. '0 uzrocima zastoja u domaóoj dramskoj produkciji'. VeCernje novosti, 30-1-1955, III, p. 597. NebojSa Misaljevió. 'Neka razmièljanja o repertoarskoj politici naSeg kazaliSta'. Hrvatski glas, 16-IV-1955, VIII, p. 301 DuSan Popovió. 'Neka aktuelna pitanja naSeg pozoriSnog zivota'. Naéa stvarnost, 1955, IX, 1, p. 52-56. Jovan Putnik. 'Pedesetpeta'. Naéa scena, 28-11-1955, VIII, p. 94-95. Bojan Stupica. 'Razgovor sa suradnikom 'Narodnog lista". Narodni list, 30-1-1955, Xi, 2983. Josip Shraj. 'Da li je pisac ölanka 'Neka razmièljanja o repertoarskoj politici naèeg kazalièta' zaista razmièljao?'. Hrvatski glas, 9-IV-1955, VII(VIII), p. 300. Branislav NuSió. 'Sumnjivo Lice' [A Suspicious Person). Stanislav Bajió and Branislav Nuèid. 'Sumnjivo lice'. Savremenik, 1955, 12, p. 691-693.

40 V. Dimitrijevió. "Sumnjivo lice' u Beogradskom dramskom pozoriètu'. Student, 7. XII 1955. Eli Finci. 'Eksperiment sa 'Sumnjivim licem". PoHtika, 13. XI 1955. 'Kako je 'Sumnjivo lice' dospelo na repertoar'. Republika, 1 6-V-1950, XVII, p. 237. (An article signed by Stari diletant - An Old Diletant). Hugo Klajn. "Sumnjivo lice' kao de6ja igra'. Borba, 16. XI 1955. Jovan Maksimovié and Branislav NuSió. 'Sumnjivo lice', Dnevnik 27, IV 1956, XV, 3559.

1956

Fran Albreht. 'Tendencija i nesporazumi u ljubljanskoj drami'. SpektakI, 1956, I, 1, p. 22-25. 'Atelje 212... PoCinje!'. N/N, 21. X 1956, VI, p. 303. Pero Budak. 'Uloga pozoriSta u kulturnom zivotu zemlje'. NaSa scena, 1 956, X, 11 6-1 1 7, p. 10-11. 'Farsa ob farsi'. NaSi razgledi, 1956, V, 7, p. 178. Bora Gli§i6. 'OpSti osvrt'. Pozoriéni zivot, 1956, 2-3, p. 5-6. Marjan Javornik. 'PoveCevalno steklo'. Ljubljanski dnevnik, 24. Ill 1956, VI, p. 71. J.P. 'Beograd u ogledalu'. NaSa scena, 1956, X, 108-109, p. 4. Dr. Hugo Klajn. 'Osvrt na kazaliSnu sezonu u Beogradu'. Vjesnik, 24-IV- 1956, XVII, 3522. Bozo Kukolja. 'Nove moguónosti i perspektive'. Narodni list, 27. IV 1956, XII, 3413. Josip Kulund2i6. 'PozoriSna kritika i Eli Finci'. Knjizevnost, 1956, XI, 2, p. 154-159. A.D. Mihailovió. 'Atelje 212'. Knjizevne novine, 11. XI 1956, VII, p. 28. Ognjenka Miliéevió. '...i jedna domaóa drama'. Pozoriéni zivot, 1956, 2-3, p. 19.

Vasja Predan. 'PoveCevaIno steklo'. Ljudska pravica, 24. Ill 1956, XXII, p. 70. Joza Rutió. 'Neka razmiSljanja o domaóoj drami i repertoaru'. Pozoriénizivot, 1956, p. 2-3, p. 13-16 'Sadrzaj 1 funkcija pozoriSta danas'. Poiitika, 3. VII 1956, Llll, 15498 (0 radu III kongresa Saveza dramskih umetnika Jugoslavije, odrzanog 2. VII 1956. u Beogradu). M. Selakovió. '0 repertoarskoj politici'. Ostobodjenje, 10. II 1956, XIII, 2912. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Na kraju sezone'. Knjiievne novine, 5 i 19. VIII 1956, VII, p. 21-22. 'ViSe kao pitanje sebi...'. Knjiievne novine, 25. XI 1956, VII, p. 29. Radovan Volf. 'Odgovornost i obaveza pri izboru repertoara'. Borba, 23. II 1956, XXI, p. 46 (Povodom izvodjenja Neveove 'Zamore' i Joneskove 'Celave pevaCice'). 'ZaSto je obustavljeno pripremanje DaviCove 'Pesme". PoHtika, 8. II 1956, Llll, 15361. Samuel Beckett. 'Waiting For Godot' (Cekajuci Godoa) Eli Finci. 'Beket, 'Cekajudi Godoa". PoHtika, 28. XII 1956, Llll, 15673. Bora Glièié. 'Beket, 'Cekajuói Godoa". NIN, 23. XII 1956, VI, p. 312. S. Beket. 'Cekajuöi Godoa'. Borba, 23. XII 1956, XXI, p. 341. Vladimir Petrió. 'Drama i antidrama (Asocijacije posle gledanja drame 'Cekajuéi Godoa')'. Knjizevnost, XII, 3, 1957. 'Cekajudi Godoa'. Knjitevnost, 1957, XI, 3, p. 279-283. Vasa Popovié. 'I jo§ jednom o mojoj lakrdiji'. Miadost, 8. V 1957, II, p. 30. Dragoslav Rancié. 'Beket, 'Cekajuéi Godoa". Student, 31. Xli 1956, XIX, p. 20. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Beket, 'Cekajudi Godoa". Knjiievne novine, 11. XI 1956, VII, p. 28.

1957

Dara Blagojevid. 'PozoriSta u Srbiji u posleratnom periodu'. Prikazi i studije, 1957, 22, p. 31-45, (illustrated). Jova Cirilov. 'Theatres in Belgrade'. Student (Special issue, 1957) Milan Dedinac. 'Eppur si muove!'. PoHtika, 14. VII 1957, LIV, 15874.

41 'Neka poredjenja'. Politika, 28. VII 1957, LIV, 15881. Mata Miloèevió. 'O 'krizi pozorièta'. NaSa scena, 1957, XI, 124-125, p. 6. Vasa Popovió. 'PozoriSnl zivot'. Borba, 14. V 1957, XXII, p. 130. Slobodan Selenié. 'Prvi susret sa irskom dramom'. Borba, 20. I 1957, XXII, p. 18. (povodom predstojeóeg prikazivanja drame 'Plug i zvezde' u JDP). 'Slovenska dramaturgija 1957'. Veöer, 28. XI 1957, XIII, p. 278. Vladimir Stamenkovié. 'Na kraju sezone'. Knjiéevne novine, 26. VII 1957, VIII, p. 47. Vladimir Mayakovsky. 'The Bath House' (HIadan Ttus). Eli Finci. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tu§'. Poh'tika, 17. V 1957, LIV, 15809. Vojin Dimitrijevié. 'Majakovski, 'HIadan tu§'. Student, 10. Ill 1956, XIX, p. 2. Bora GliSié. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tuS'. NIN, 5. II 1956, VI, p. 266. Vladimir Majakovski. 'HIadan tu§'. NIN, 17. V 1957, VII, p. 333. Ivo Hergeèió. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tu§'. Vjesnik, 9. VI 1957., XVIII, 3846. Dr. Hugo Klajn. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tuS'. Borba, 18. V 1957, XXII, p. 134. M.M. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tuS'. Borba, 8. II 1956, XXI, p. 33. Kosara Pavlovió. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tu§'. Omladina, 8. II 1956, XII, p. 950. Rasa Popov. 'HIadan tu§'. Vidici, 1. II 1956, IV, p. 19-20. Vasa Popovié. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'HIadan tu§', Veöernje novosti, 13. V 1957, V, p. 1099.

1958

Fedor GradiSnik. 'Nujni personaini in tehniöki problemi naSega gledaiiSöa'. Gledalièki list, Celje, 1957-58, XII, 6, p. 203-27. Herbert Grun. 'Plaidoyer pro domo sua'. NaSi razgledi, 1958, Vil, 2, str 47-48. Bogdan Jerkovió. 'Zalim ètojavnost nije prosudila'. Narodnilist, 28. XII 1958, XVII, 4187 (povodom skidanja s repertoara Drzióevih komedija 'Tripöe de Utoiöe' i 'Novele od Stanca' sa kazaliSnog repertoara povodom neuspele rezije B.J.).

1959

Fran Albreht. 'Sean 0'Casey, 'Plug in zvezde'. Delo, 20. Vi 1959, I, p. 50. T. Butorac. 'Prvi put zajedno'. Vjesnik, 1. II 1959, XX, 4398. Kole CaSule. 'Kriza ili prevremena smrt Estrade 1959'. NIN, 11. X 1959, IX, p. 458. Jovan Cirilov. 'DruStveno angazovano pozoriSte'. MIadost, 7. I 1959, IV, p. 117. 'SadaSnji pozorièni trenutak'. Borba, 18. X 1959, XXIV, p. 245. Tatjana Frkovió. 'Sean G'Casey, 'Plug in zvezde'. Dnevnik, 30. VI 1959, Xlil, p. 151. 'Dosada iza rampe'. Delo, 1959, V, 3, p. 404-409. Bogdan Jerkovió. 'Odgovor Upravi HNK'. Narodni Hst, 15. I 1959, XV, 4200. Radivoje Jovanovió. 'Pozorièni saveti kao organ druStvenog upravljanja'. Narodna armija, 1. V 1959, XIV, 1030. Slobodan MaSió. 'Vladimir Majakovski, 'Stenica'. Student, 59, 13. V, p. 3-5. DuSan Mevija. 'Mariborsko giedaliSCe 1945-1959'. Veöer, 3. X 1959, XIV, p. 229. Zarko Petan. 'Oder 57 - veliki upitnik IV Sterijinog pozorja'. Dnevnik, 1,2 i 3 V 1959, XVII, 4583. Vasja Predan. 'Dimenzioniranje'. NaSi razgledi, 1959, VIII, 4, p. 78. Nerkez Smailagió. 'Uloga i funkcija pozoriSnih savjeta'. Oslobod/enje, 7. VI 1959, XVI, 4041. Darko Suvin. 'Sean 0'Casey', 'Plug in zvezde'. Vjesnik, 18. VI 1959, XX, 4515.

42 1960

Ljerka Krelius. 'Uloga savjeta je prije svega drustveno-politiöka'. Vjesnik, 4. II 1960, XXI, 4709. DuSan Popovié. 'Scena i stvarnost'. Nova knjiga, 11-1960, II, 9 (o potrebi slobodnijeg razvitka pozoriSta).

1961

Dejan Djurkovié. 'K pitanju o ulozi pozorièta u naSoj stvarnosti'. Danes, 1961, 1, 15, p. 22-23. Taras Kermauner. 'Oder 57' i slovenaöka pozoriSno-kulturna situacija'. Danas, 1961, I, 7, p. 11. Darko Suvin. 'Ka oslobodjenju teatra'. Danas, 1961, I, 14, p. 10. Stanka Veselinov. 'Otvorena pitanja'. Politika, 26. XI 1961, LVIII, 17291, V, p. 242.

1962

Anketa: 'Druzbena vloga in struktura gledaliSCa'. NaSi razgledi, 1962, XI, 14, 271-273, 15, p. 292-293. Pero Budak. 'Stanje i problematika kazaliSta u SR Hrvatskoj, 1962-63'. PozoriSni zivot, 1962, Vil, 19-20, p. 1-8. Predrag Dinulovió. 'Problemi u umetniökom rukovodjenju naSih pozorièta'. PozoriSnizivot, 1962, Vil, 18, p. 1-4. Dejan Djurkovió. 'PozoriSte je u suStini funkcionaino'. Danas, 1962, II, 36, p. 6-7. Eli Finci. 'O problemima naseg pozorièta'. /V/A/, 25. II 1962, XII, p. 581. Velibor Gligorió. 'Pozoriète u novim uslovima'. NaSa stvarnost, 1962, XVI, 7-8, p. 68-77. 'Iskustva kazaliënih savjeta'. Vjesnik, 14. X 192, XXIII, 5622. Taras Kermauner. 'Sta je danaènje eksperimentalno pozoriète'. Pozoriénizivot, 1962, VII, 18, p. 7-8. Jozo Lauèió. 'Lice i naliCje kazaliène krize'. Knjizevne novine, 30. XI 1962, XIV, p. 185. Vlado Madjarevió. 'Kriza repertoara i struktura kazaliëta'. Telegram, 19. I 1962, III, p. 91. 'ZagrebaCke repertoarske zavrzlame'. Knjiéevne novine, 5. X 1962, XIV, p. 181. Slobodan Selenió. 'Angaèovana drama'. Danas, 1962, II, 35, p. 6-7. Vladimir Stamenkovió. 'Sumrak realizma ili romantiöni koreni moderne umetnosti'. Knjizevne novine, 21. IX 1962, XIV, p. 180. Dr. Ivan Supek. 'U potrazi za novim teatrom'. Borba, 28. X 1962, XXVll, p. 298. Milan VlajCié. 'Duèan Makavejev - Raèa Popov, 'Novi öovek na Cvetnom trgu'. Student, 1 7. IV 1 962, XXVI, p. 12. Vuk Vuöo. 'Sta je eksperimentalno pozoriète danas'. Pozoriéni zivot, 1962, VII, 18, p. 5-7.

1963

Anketa: 'Koliko pozorièta doprinose u borbi za najvièi kvalitet naèe kulture' (I). Politika, 10 i 17 II 1963, LX, 17725 i 17732. Dejan Djurkovié. 'Rokoko restauracija'. Danas, Beograd, 16. I 1963. 'Kasapnica'. VeCernje novosti, 11. XI 1963. Jovan Óirilov. 'Otvoreno pismo Eli Finciju'. Beogradska nedelja, 20. I 1963, III, p. 70. Eli Finci. 'Razgovor sa saradnikom lista'. Borba, 13. I 1963, XXVIII, p. 12. 'Tragikomiöna farsa o viasti'. Politika, 15. I 1963. 'Bizarne igrarije'. Politika, 10. XI 1963. Dalibor Foretió. 'Za novi teatar'. Polet, 1962, X, 4, p. 11-12. Dragoslav Grbió. 'Besmisiena vlast'. Telegram, 8.11 1963.

43 Ognjen Lakióevió. 'Lepi dani pozoriëni'. Telegram, 13. XII 1963. Velimir Lukié. 'Dramski autor i nesporazuml'. /V/A/, 14. IV 1963, XIII, p. 640. Hugo Klajn. 'O autorltarnosti i autokritiönosti u pozoriènoj kritici'. Savremenik, 1963, IX, vol. XVII, 2, p. 118-132. Miodrag Kujundzió. 'Torta za dijabetiöare'. Dnevnik, Novi Sad, 13. V 1964. Zdravko Kokotovió. 'Uspjeh drame Velimira Lukióa'. Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo, 23. Vlil 1963. Jovan Maksimovió. 'Savremenost u ruhu istorije'. Veöernje novosti, 15. I 1963. M. Mirkovid. 'Dug zivot kralja Osvaida'. Beogradska nedelja, 20. I 1963. 'Repertoari naèi stvaStarski'. Beogradska nedelja, 17. Ill 1963, III, p. 78. 'Velimir Lukió na velikoj sceni'. Beogradska revija, 17. XI 1963. Slobodan Novakovié. 'Bertove koöije ili Sibila'. MIadost, 13. XI 1963. Mile Nedeijkovié. 'Mana kao ljudska vriina'. Student, 12. XI 1963. S.0. 'Novo dramsko delo Velimira Lukiéa'. PoHtika, 12. I 1963. Miodrag Protié. 'Dogadjaji na beogradskim scenama'. Knjizevnost, XIX, 1964, 1, p. 62-63. G.P. 'Prispevek k domaöi dramatiki'. Delo, Ljubljana, 16. XI 1963. Slobodan Selenió. 'Pravi jezik jednog zanra'. Borba, 15. I 1963. 'O dirigovanom iivotu' ('Bertove koóije ili Sibila). Borba, 12. XI 1963. Lojze SmaSek. 'Proti razdrobljenosti in ozini. Problem integraine jugoslovenske kuiture v luöi naèih gledaliSkih prizadevanj'. Veóer, 23. lil 1963. XIX, p. 69. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Tragom farse, ivicom parodije'. NIN, 20. I 1963. 'Vitalna tema, uspela predstava'. NIN, 17. XI 1963. Ivan Supek. 'U potrazi za novim teatrom'. Pozoriéte (Tuzia), 1963, V, 2, p. 5-10. Petar Volk. 'Kraljevo novo odelo'. Knjizevne novine, 25. I 1963. 'Traganje za uzviSenim'. Knjizevne novine, 15. XI 1963. Vuk Vuöo. 'Sipanje ulja na vatru'. Knjizevne novine, 22. II 1963, XV, p. 191. 'Ljudsko i neljudsko'. PoHtika ekspres, 9. Xi 1963. 'Sta je eksperimentaino pozoriéte danas'. Pozoriéte, (Tuzia), 1963, V, 1, p. 1-6.

1964

Dominik Smole. Antigone {Antigona). Eli Finci. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. PoHtika, 28. 11 1964, LXI, 18103. Masko Frndió. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. Borba, 28. II 1964, XXIX, p. 57. Marian Golouh. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. Delo, 12. IV 1960, 11, p. 101. Virgil Kurbel. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. Vjesnik, 28. II 1964, XXV, 6116. Vasja Predan. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. Ljubljanski dnevnik, 12. IV 1960, X, p. 87. Jozo Puljezevid. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. Delo, 28. II 1964, VI, p. 57. Katka Shalamun. Dominik Smole. 'Antigona'. NaSi razgiedi, 1963, XII, 6, p. 124.

1965

Velibor Gligorió. 'Pozoriéte se ne moze izolovati od drustva i njegovog razvitka'. NIN, 18. VII 1965, XV, p. 758. Ksenija Jovanovié. 'O nekim etièkim i struönim pitanjima gledano iz aspekta samoupravljanja'. PozoriSni zivot, 1965, X, 28, p. 11. Jozo Puljizevió. 'Kazalièna umjetnost u èah-mat poziciji'. Vjesnik, 17. I 1965, XXVI, 6434. MIaden Skiljan. 'Kriza' teatra i samoupravljanja'. Telegram, 26. Ill 1965, VI, p. 256.

44 1966

Nando Roje. 'Umjetniöki savet'. Telegram, 28. I 1966, VII, p. 30. 'Kazalièni odbor - Koordinator kazaliSnih stremljenja odredjene regije'. Telegram, 1 1. II 1966, VII, p. 302.

1968

Miodrag Ilió. 'Sezona velikih ostvarenja i jos veóih promaSaja'. Scena, 1968, IV; II, 4, p. 349-361. Dragan Klaié. 'Ka autentiönom teatru ill odumiranje pozoriSta'. Poija, 1 968, XIV, 11 9-120, p. 30-31. Branislav Miloèevió. 'Kakvo pozoriète danas'. Kultura, 1968, I, 1, p. 111-118. 'Politika iteatar'. Vidici, V-Vl 1968, XVI, p. 121-122. 'Otvoreno pismo republiökih odbora dramskih umetnika o polozaju pozorièta u Slovenijl'. Delo, 23-25. VII 1968, X, p. 199-201. Vladimir Petrió. 'Modern! pozoriSni izraz i Ateije 212'. Scena, 1968 IV, I, p. 1. Petar Selem. 'Hrvatsko glumiSte na rubu potrebnosti'. Kritika, 1968, 3, p. 248-253. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Pozoriète u novome kljuCu'. Knjizevne novine, 1. XII 1968, XX, p. 342. Slobodan Selenié. 'Gde je istina?'. Scena, 1968, IV, I, 3, p. 287-291. Augustin StipCevió. 'Repertoar i repertoarna politika na zagrebaèkim pozornicama'. Scena, 1968, IV, II, 4, p. 403-409. Aleksandar Popovió. 'Kape Dole' (Caps Down], Borislav T. Andjelió. 'Prazno i otuzno'. Susret, 20. Ill 1968. Zarko Jovanovid. 'Vic za CarSiju'. VeCernje novosti, 19. II 1968. Milosav Mirkovió. 'Satira na Skrge'. Politika eskpres, 19. II 1968. Muharem Pervió. 'SatiriCan i dinamièan spektakl'. Politika, 20. II 1968. Slobodan Selenió. 'Prva i druga polovina veka'. Borba, 24. II 1968. Petar Volk. 'Varijacije, uz premijeru satiriöne igre 'Kape dole' Aleksandra Popovióa'. Knjizevne novine, 2. Ill 1968.

1969

Zeljko Falaout. 'Studentski pokret, studentsko kazaliSte'. Prolog, 1969, II, 4, p. 23-31. Darko GaSparovió. 'Neka razmiSljanja o studentskom kazaliStu'. Prolog, 1969, II, 5, p. 57-59. Branko Heóimovié. 'Impresije o stilu (Ateije 212)'. Telegram, 1. II 1969, X, p. 458. Jovan Hristió. 'Avangarda 1969'. Knjizevnost, 1969, XXIV, XLIX, 11, p. 488-490. Ivan Ivanji. 'PozoriSna komuna kao novi vid samoupravne integracije druStva'. Kultura, 1968, 2-3, p. 228-234. Duèan Jovanovié. 'Stirje element! krize sodobnega (slovenskega) gledalièöa'. Problemi, 1969, VII, 76, p. 29-32. Pero Kvrgió. 'Stvarnost scenskog zivota'. Telegram, 12. XII 1969, X, p. 502. 'PolitiCko kazaliSte'. Telegram, 12. XII 1969, X, p. 502. Gojko Miletid. 'Pozoriète i druStvo'. Scena, 1969, V, II, 4-5, p. 50-65. Samo Simöiö. 'Gledalièöe je kreacija socialnih miljejev'. Problemi, 1969, Vli, 83-84, p. 25-27. Slobodan Snajder. '0 kazaliSnom djelovanju'. Prolog, 1969, II 5, p. 22-25. Josip Vidmar. '0 pozoriènoj kritici'. Odjek, IX, 1969, XXII, p. 17-18. Aleksandar Popovió. Second Door Left {Druga vrata levo). Zeljko Falaout, Aleksandar Popovió. 'Druga vrata levo'. Prolog, 1969, II, 4, p. 66-67. Svevlad Slamnig, Aleksandar Popovió. 'Druga vrata levo'. Marulió, 1969, II, 3, p. 81-82.

45 D. Vukov-Colié, Aleksandar Popovió. 'Druga vrata levo', Vjesnik, 17. IV 1969, XXX, 7961. Antun èoljan. 'Dioklecijanova palaöa' (Dioclecian's Palace). Nikola Batuèié. 'PalaCa'. RepubHka, 1969, XXV, 5, p. 277-278. Petar Breöié. 'Antun Soljan, 'Dioklecijanova palaöa', Telegram, 30. V 1969, X. Muharem Pervió. 'Antun Soljan, 'Dioklecijanova palaöa'. PoUtika, 24. V 1969, LXVI, 19983. Veselko Tenzera. 'Antun èoljan, 'Dioklecijanova palaöa'. Kolo, 1969, VII; 5, p. 482-484. Ragny/Rado. Hair (Kosa). Zoran Andjelkoviö. 'Hajde da se trampimo!'. Veóernj'i list, 21. V 1969. D. Gajer. 'Kosa' kao lek'. Politika ekspres, 20. VI 1969. 'Ni za ëamare, ni za milovanje'. PoHtika ekspres, 25. V 1969. Dragutin GostuSki. 'Kroz rupu na tarabi'. Knjiievne novine, 24. V 1969. 'Jesmo li za èegrte, jesmo li za hipike'. Borba, 2., 3. VI 1969 (A talk on Hair prepared and conducted by Feliks PaSiö and Stevan Staniö). Zarko Jovanoviö, 'Kosotres'. Vedernje novosti, 21. V 1969. P. Kosin. 'NajSokantnija predstava oduSevila gledaoce'. PoUtika, 20. V 1969. V. Kurbel. 'Imitacije'. Veöernji list, 31. V 1969. N. Milenkoviö. 'Nogom u bubrege'. TV Novosti, 6. VI 1969. Milosav Mirkoviö. 'Draga dragog prati u armiju!'. PoUtika ekspres, 21. V 1969. 'Arkadija u Paliluli'. PoUtika ekspres, 23. I 1971. Milutin MiSió. 'Laina pobuna'. Borba, 22. V 1969. Muharem Perviö. 'Arkadija u pustinji'. PoUtika, 13. V 1969. Svetislav Spasojeviö. 'Svlaöi se ko ieW'. PoUtika, 31. V 1969. Vladimir Stamenkoviö. 'Dokument o novom senzibilitetu'. NIN, 25. V 1969. Dragoslav Mihailovió. 'Kad su cvetale tikve' AA^hen the Pumpkins Bloomed). Agencija 'Psssst', 'Puöe tikva'. Student, 2. XI 1969. Mirjama Bobiö. 'Petnaest godina tikava'. Intervju, 22. VI 1984. D.A. 'Ne cvetaju samo tikve...'. PoUtika, 16. X 1969. Oskar Daviöo. 'Protiv administrativnih meèanja u stvaralaStvo: duznosti demokratskog Coveka i komuniste'. Student, 16. XII 1969. 'Dezurno uvo, Politika ekspres'. Nedeljna revija, 30. Ill 1969. Slavoljub Djukiö. 'Glumci-komunisti o predstavi 'Kad su cvetale tikve'. PoUtika, 16. X 1969. D. Gajer. 'MiSa Janketié nokautiran'. PoUtika ekspres. 17. V 1969. Blagoje lliö. 'Sloboda' koja ugrozava slobodu'. PoUtika ekspres, 27. X 1969. Zarko Jovanoviö. 'Crni sjaj Duèanovca'. Veöernje novosti, 8. X 1969. Ljerka Krelius. 'NapuStali kazaliSte iz protesta'. Vjesnik, 19. X 1969. Dragan Klaiö. 'Kad su cvetale tikve u pozoriStu'. Student, 21. X 1969. 'Povratak Ljube Sampiona'. PoUtika, 12. VI 1984. Momir Krstiö, nastavnik- Stalaö. 'U ime slobode stvaranja'. Komunist, 18. XII 1969. P. Krstiö. 'Politiöki pamflet s okusom informbirovStine'. Borba, 16. X 1969. 'Trulez u dubini'. Borba, 25. X 1969. Milosav Mirkoviö. 'Sampionski o èampionu'. PoUtika ekspres, 8. X 1969. Muharem Perviö. 'Vreme proSlo, vreme sadaènje'. PoUtika, 13. X 1969. 'Pozorje'. Student, 14. X 1969. 'Predsednik Tito odiikovao Jugoslovensko dramsko pozoriète'. PoUtika, 20. XII 1969. Zarko Samardziö. 'Bestseler na sceni'. Cik, 15. V 1969. 'Sluöajevi koji nisu 'sluöajni'. Narodna armija, 24. X 1969. Vladimir Stamenkoviö. 'Cari prepoznavanja'. NIN, 12. X 1969. 'Povratak s razlogom'. NIN, 24. VI 1984. Viktor Sirec. 'Sporno delo vzeto s sporeda'. Delo, Ljubljana, 30. X 1969. 'Tikve'. NIN, 19. X 1969. V.S. 'Tikve'- zioupotrebljene!'. Veöernje novosti, 14. I 1969.

46 1970

Marjan Matkovió. 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'fGeneral and his Jester). M, Grgitevié. 'Marjan Matkovid, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. Veöernji Hst, 16. II 1970, XIV, 3258. Branko Heéimovié. 'Marjan Matkovié, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. Telegram, 20. II 1970, XI, p. 512. Milutin MiSió. 'Marjan Matkovió, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. Borba, 24. IX 1970, XLVIII, p. 263. Muharem Pervió. 'Marjan Matkovió, 'General i njegov lakrdijaè'. Politika, 28. XI 1 970, LXVIl, 20468. Jozo Puljizevié. 'Marjan Matkovió, 'General i njegov lakrdijaë'. Politika, 17. II 1970, LXVIl, 20248. 'Marjan Matkovid, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. Vjesnik, 16. II 1970, XXXI, 8260. Djuro Rosló. 'Marjan Matkovió, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. Dometi, 1970, III, p. 1-2. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Marjan Matkovié, 'General i njegov lakrdijaS'. A//A/, 18. X 1970, XX, 1032.

1971

Taras Kermauner. 'PozoriSte kraj ivice'. PozoriSte, 1971, XIII, 4, p. 396-404. Jozo Puljizevió. 'Zagrebaöka formula uspjeha'. Politika, 14. VIII 1971, LXVIII, 20782, XV, p. 833. 'Srpsko pozoriSte i drama posie Drugog svetskog rata'. Scena, 1971, VII, II, 5, p. 3-31. Bora Cosié. 'Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji' {The Role of My Family in the World Revolution). Borislav Andjelió. 'Revolucija' u porodiönom krugu'. Komunist, 1 1. II 1971. Bora Cosié. 'Glumci dopisali psovke!'. Vedernje novosti, 6. II 1971. Zarko Jovanovió. 'Sumrak 'Porodice'. Veöernje novosti, 8. II 1971. Milosav Mirkovié. 'Tango na djubriStu'. Politika ekspres, 8. II 1971. Feliks PaSió. 'Malogradjani i majstori'. Borba, 8. II 1971. Dragoslav Petkovié. 'Jedna subjektivna vizija'. Susret, 17. II 1971. Muharem Pervié. 'Kratko veselje dugo ozaloSdene porodice'. Politika, 11. II 1971. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Na ostacima romana'. /V/A/, 14. II 1971. Petar Volk. 'PozoriSna zabava'. Knjiievne novine, 13. II 1971. Ivo BreSan. 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Don/a, opóina Blatuéa' (The Stage Production of 'Hamlet' in the Village of Lower Jerkwater}. Nikola BatuSié 'Ivo BreSan, 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. RepubHka, 1971, XXVII, 7-8, p. 855-857. Andrej Inkret. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Delo, 27. IV 1972. Dragan Klaié. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Borba, 19. IX 1971, XLIX, p, 258. Feliks PaSié. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Borba, 11. IV 1972, LI, p. 116. Ivo BreSan. 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Borba, 14. V 1972, LI, p. 131. Ivo BreSan. 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Borba, 11. XI 1972, LI, p. 312. Muharem Pervió. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Predstava Hamleta u selu MrduSa Donja, opóine BlatuSa'. Politika, 22. IX 1971, LXVIII, 20821.

1972

Boro DraSkovió. 'Izbjegavanje pozoriSta'. Odjek, 1972, XXV, 9, p. 13. J.K. 'Slovensko avangardno gledaliSóe kam?'. Sodobnost, 1972, XX, 5, p. 541-542.

47 Taras Kermauner. 'Na prostorima radijalizacije'. Odjek, 1972, XXV, 8, p. 7. Boris Senker. 'O angaziranom kazaliètu'. Vidik, 1972, XIX, 1, p. 91-94, Borut Trekman. 'Dejstva protiv leporeöja'. Delo, 22. I 1972. Mikhail Bulgakov. 'The Purple Island' {Purpurno ostrvo). Feliks PaSid. 'Bulgakov: 'Purpurno ostrvo'. Borba, 19. XI 1972, LI, p. 720 Muharem Pervió. 'Bulgakov: 'Purpurno ostrvo'. Politika, 20. XI 1972, LXIX, 21240. Vladimir Stamenkovid. 'Bulgakov: 'Purpurno ostrvo'. N/N, 1972, XXI 1 142.

1973

Milan Djokovid. 'Prvenstvo umetniCkog kriterijuma'. Knjizevne novine, 16. IV 1973, XXV, p. 437. Dr. Danko Griió. 'DruStvena organizacija i stvaralaStvo'. Scena, 1973, IX, I, 3-4, p. 25-35. Jo2e JavorSek. 'Blizu svijeta öeznje'. Odjek, 1973, XXVI, 8, p. 9. 'Okrugli sto: SadaSnji trenutak pozorièta'. PoHtika, 14, 21, i 28 IV 1 973, LXX, 21 381 -21 395 (Round table discussion on the present day situation in the theatre). Georgij Paro. 'Najpozitivnije htenje koje se danas javija u naèem kazaliètu je ono da se priblizi §to Sirenn sloju publike'. Polja, 1973, XIX, 168, p. 13. DuSan Popovid. 'Politiöko pozoriëte'. Odjek, 1973, XXVIII, p. 919-926. 'Razgovori o pozoriStu'. Borba, 1. Ill 1973, Lll, 64 (A discussion held by communists from the Belgrade's theatres at the City Committee of KP Belgrade). Pavie Stefanovió. 'Na kojim se idejnoestetskim pozocijama nalazimo'. Pozoriëte, 1972, XIV, 5-6, p. 631-637. Mira Trailovié. 'Samoupravljanje i pozoriëte sa iskustvima iz Ateljea 212'. Scena, 1973, IX, I, 3-4, p. 36-43. RiceAA/eber. 'Jesus Christ Super Star' (Isus Hrist Superstar). Milosav Mirkovié. 'Antipopovska opera'. PoHtika ekspres, 23. IV 1973. Vladimir Stamenkovió. 'Legenda i eksperiment'. NIN, 23. X 1972.

1975

Tone PerSak. 'Glavne tendencije i kriza suvremenog dramskoga kazaiiSta u Jugoslaviji'. Dometi, 1974, VII, 9, p. 95-105.

1976

Slobodan Stojanovió. 'Aleksandar Popovió, 'RuziCasta noó'. Knjizevne novine, 15. IX 1976, XXVIII, p. 519. DuSan Jovanovié. 'Igrajte tumor u glavi i zagadjenje vazduha' (Play Out the Tumor in the Head and Air Pollution). Boro DraSkovió. 'DuSan Jovanoviö, 'Igrajte tumor u glavi i zagadjenje vazduha'. Scena, 1976, XII, 3-4, p. 25-28. Andrijan Lah. 'DuSan Jovanovió, 'Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnazenje zraka'. Dialogi, 1976, XII, 3, p. 186-187.

48 Lojze Smaèek. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnazenje zraka'. Veöer, 13. I 1976, XXXII, p. 9. Veno Taufer. 'DuSan Jovanovió, 'Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnazenje zraka'. Naéi razgledi, 1976, XXV, 3, p. 72.

1977

Petar Boziö. 'Pluralizam ili totalitarizam?'. Prolog, 1977, IX, 33-34, p. 38-46. Duèan Jovanovid. 'Kritika i polemika ill ... Cutanje za koru hieba?'. Prolog, 1 977, IX, 33-34, p. 7-16. Vlastimir Stamenovió. 'Neki pogledi na aktuelna pitanja druStvenog polozaja pozoriSta danas'. KuHurni i/Vof, 1977, XIX, 5-6, p. 447-455. Fabijan Sovagovió. 'Napad i obrana teatra'. Kulturni zivot, 1977, XIX, 5-6, p. 437-447.

1978 Muharem Pervió. 'Druètvena i umetnièka protivreöja u teatru'. Poh'tika, 15. Iv 1978, LXXV, 23177. MIaden Skoljan. 'Oblici medjusobne zavisnosti kazaliëta i druètva'. Prilozizavoda za kulturu Hrvatske, 1 977, 1, p. 1-11 (Summary in English). 'Tribina Sterijinog pozorja: DruStvena uloga pozoriène umetnosti u samoupravnoj socijalistiökoj Jugoslaviji', Scena, 1978, XIV, I, 3, p. 51-69 (Participants: Duèan Popovié, MIaden Skiljan, Jovan Cirilov).

1979

Tomislav Gavrió. 'Istrazivanje teatra'. Izraz, 1979, XXIII, 6, p. 540-546. 'Pitanja o politiökom teatru'. Gradina, 1979, XIV, 5, p. 63-69. Duèan Popovié. 'The Theatre in the Socialist Self-Managment Society'. Socialist Thought and Practice, 1979, XIX, 1, p. 79-89. Ivo Breèan. 'Smrt predsednika kuónog saveta' (The Death of Tennants' Association President). Nikola Batuèic 'Ivo BreSan, 'Smrt predsednika kuónog saveta'. Republika, 1979, XXXV, 11, 1159-1161. Ale§ Berger. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Smrt predsednika kuónog saveta'. Naéi razgledi, 1 979, XXVIII, 24, p. 71 1. Igor MrduljaS. 'Ivo BreSan, 'Smrt predsednika kuónog saveta'. Prolog, 1979, XI, 41-42, p. 123-125. Sreten Perovió. 'Ivo Breèan, 'Smrt predsednika kuónog saveta'. Pobjeda, 8. XII 1979.

1980

Luka Hajdukovió. 'Tito i Sterijino pozorje', Letopis Matice srpske. 1980, CLVi, CDXXV, 5, p. 847-854.

1981

Jovan Cirilov. 'Sezona mira u Beogradu'. Scena, 1981, XVII, 4-5, p. 81-86. Dalibor Foretió. 'Danilo KiS i Ljubièa Ristió', 'Misa u A-molu'. Izraz, XXV, 3, p. 233-238. Setafedin Hodza. 'Samoupravne Interesne zajednice i pozorièna umetnost'. Scena, 1981, XVII, I, 3, p. 56-62.

49 Zorica Jevremovió-Munitió. 'Prijavo kazaliSte'. Scena, 1981, XVII, I, 3, p. 79-85. Taras Kermauner, 'Reziserima nagradu lli konopac?'. Knjizevna reö, 10 i 25. X 1981, X 174 i 175. Ljubièa Ristió. 'U Jugoslaviji nije teëko biti politiCki hrabar u pozoriëtu, treba biti hrabar u zivotu'. PoUtika, 7. X 1981, LXXVIII, 24428, (Interview). Alojs Ujez, 'Osnovni organizacioni modeli savremenog jugoslovenskog pozorièta'. Scene, 1981, XVII, I, 3, p. 3-13. Milorad VuCelió. 'Danilo Ki§ i LjubiSa Ristió', 'Misa u A-molu', Knjizevne novine, 21. I 1 981, XXXIII, p. 619 DuSan Jovanovié. 'Karamazovi' (Karamazovs). Jovan Cirilov. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Karamazovi'. PoUtika, 16. XII 1981, LXXVIII, 24496. Dalibor Foretió. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Karamazovi'. VJesnik, 1981, 12. Xil 1981, XLli, 12318. Dzevad Karahasan. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Karamazovi'. Odjek, 1981, XXXIV, 5, p. 13. Uroè KovaÈevié. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Karamazovi', Zivot, 1981, XXX, 10, p. 366-367. Vladimir Stamenkoviö. 'Duèan Jovanovid, 'Karamazovi', NIN, 1981, XXXI, 1617, p. 43. Milorad Vuöelió. 'Duèan Jovanovió, 'Karamazovi'. NIN, 1982, XXXIII, 1625, p. 35.

1982

Ivo Breèan. 'O scenskom izvodjenju drame', Prolog, 1982, XIV, 51/52, p. 153-155, (Interview). Dalibor Foretió. 'Neöastivi na filozofskom fakultetu'. VJesnik, 13. XI 1982, XLIII, 12612. Jovan Cirilov. 'The History of Atelier 212: An Attempt at Periodization'. Scena, 1982, XXIV, 1-2, p. 122-131. Dragan Klaió. 'Tema sezone: Govor o revoluciji'. Knjizevne novine, 24. VI 1982, XXXIV, p. 650. Mata Miloèevió. 'The Present Moment of the Yugoslav Theater'. Scena, 1982, XXIV, 5, p. 30-31. Igor Mrduljaè. 'Measure for Measure, or The Troubles of Yugoslav Thalia'. Scena, 1982, XXIV, 5, p. 31-35. Georgij Paro. 'Ja sam za teatar o politici, a ne za neki politióki teatar...'. Oslobodjen/e, 28. VIII 1 982, XXXIX, 12276 Feliks Paèió. 'The Yugoslav Theatre in 1981/82'. Scena, 1982, XXIV, 5, p. 36-53. Ljubióa Riètic. 'Ja mislim da umetnik ne mora sluziti nikome, pa ni svom vremenu'. Mladost, 18. I 1982, LXIII, 1268, (Interview). 'Rizik svakog ko se bavi ovim poslom...'. Knjizevne novine, 18. 11 1982, XXXIV, p. 642, (Interview). 'Igrajte tumor u glavi' je bila predstava....'. Knjizevna reö, 10. IV 1982, XI, p. 186-187, (Interview). Slobodan Snajder. 'Hrvatski Faust' (The Croatian Fausx). Dalibor Foretió. 'Slobodan Snajder, 'Hrvatski faust'. Vjesnik, 28. XII 1982, XLIII, 12690. Dragan Klaió. 'Slobodan Snajder, 'Hrvatski faust'. Knjizevne novine, 13. I 1983, XXXIV, p. 662. Miroslava Otaèevió. 'Faust-kompleks danas'. Knjizevnost, 16. IX 1982, XXXVII, 9, 1331-1334. Prolog, (Part of the issue dedicated to 'The Croatian Faust' and 'Gamllet' by Slobodan Snajder: Daiibor Foretió, 'Triptih o trijadi'; Bruno Popovió, 'Teatar oko teatra'; Dzevad Karahasan, 'Jedno oóitovanje'; Slobodan Snajder, 'Gamllet-maèina: refutatio bez nade') XIX, 4, 1987, p. 81-131. Laslo Vegel. 'Slobodan Snajder, 'Hrvatski faust'. Knjizevne novine, 13. I 1983, XXXIV, p. 662. Jovan Radulovió. 'Golubnjaóa'. Teodor Andjelió. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. NIN, 1982, XXXIV, 1670. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. Relations, 1984, 13, p. 53-56. Sava Dautovió. 'Otkud opet zabrane'. PoUtika, 16. XII 1982, LXXIX, 24855. Jovan Cirilov. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. PoUtika, 27. X 1982, LXXIX, 24807. Jovan Delió. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. Knjizevne novine, 28. X 1982, XXXIV, p. 657. Zoran Gluèóevió. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. Knjizevne novine, 27. I 1983, XXXV, p. 633 . Jovan Hristió. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaóa'. Knjizevnost, 1983, XXXVIIl, LXXV, 1/2, p. 200-204.

50 Andrej Inkret. 'Jovan Radulovid, 'Golubnjaöa'. Politika, 21. I 1983, LXXX, 14889. Zorica Jevremovió. 'Jovan Radulovid, 'Golubnjaèa'. Knjizevna ret, 10. II 1983, XI, p. 204. Dragan Klaió. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'GolubnjaCa'. Knjizevne novine, XXXIV, 661, 23. XII 1982. Vlado Kruèié. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaèa'. Prolog, 1982, XIV, 53/54, p. 136-142. Petar Latinovié. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaöa'. Dnevnik, 27. I 1983, XLII, 13018. D. Nikolió. 'Jovan Radulovié, 'GolubnjaCa'. Dnevnik, 13. X 1982, XLI, 12916. Vida Ognjenovió. 'Ukidajnno svoje slabosti, ne predstave o njlma'. Knjizevna reC, 25. XII 1982, XI, p. 201. 'Okrogla miza 'Dela' o 'GolubnjaCi' kot besedilu in upozoritvi'. Deio, 5. II 1983, XXV, p. 29. Borka Pavióevié. 'Sluzavi okus straha'. Knjiievna reö, 25. XII 1982, XI, p. 201. Petko Vojnió PurCar. Radovan 2drale. 'Jovan Radulovié, 'Golubnjaöa'. Dnevnik, 13. I 1983, XLII, 13004. 'Razgovor u komisiji za idejna pitanja i informisanje CK SKH: 'Golubnjaöa'. Vjesnik, 6. II 1983, XLIV, 12728. Vladimir Stamenkoviö. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaöa'. NiN, 1982 XXXIV, 1661. Kosta Todjer. 'Jovan Radulovió, 'Golubnjaöa'. Dnevnik, 20. 1 1983, XLII, 13011.

1983

BoJidar Alió. 'Ne znam gde poöinje realnost...'. Dnevnik, 5. VI 1983, XLII, 13145, (Interview). 'Anketa: Kulturni dogadjaj sezone'. Politika, 13. VIM 1983, LXXX, 25090. Miroslav Belovió. 'Tuzno je u pozoriStu...'. Oslobodjenje, 27. IV 1983, XL, 12515, (Interview). Andrej Inkret. 'Militantno politiöno gledaliSöe'. Delo, 8. XI 1983, XXV, p. 259. Dejan Mijaö. 'Covek koji stvara novo, aktivno pozoriète...'. Knjizevna reö, 10. II 1983, XI, p. 204, (Interview). 'PozoriSte i repertoarska politika'. Politika, 5. Ill 1983, LXXX, 24932. Milan Rankovió. 'O tabu-temama u naSoj umetnosti'. Knjizevne novine, 10. Ill 1 983, XXXV, p. 666. Milorad Vuöeliö. 'Politiöko pozoriëte'. Knjiïevne novine, 10. Ill 1983, XXXV, p. 666.

1984

Teodor Andjelió. 'Politika u pozoriStu'. NIN, 1984, XXXV, 1732, p. 26-27. LJubièa Georgijevski. 'O politiökom teatru'. Scena, 1984, XX, 1, 3, p. 24-27. Alfons van Impe. 'Pozoriète i vlast'. Scena, 1984, XX, I, 3, p. 3-9. DuSan Jovanovió.'Covjek u kijuönim situacijama'. Oslobodjenje, AAM 1984, XLI, 12855, (Interview). Dzevad Karahasan. 'Strah od samoóe'. Scena, 1984, XX, 1, 3, p. 17-22. Tonnislav Ketig. 'O neöemu óemu vreme vi§e nije'. Scena, 1984, XX, I, 3, p. 22-24. Tvrtko Kulenovió. 'O kretanjima i razmeni ideja u jugoslovenskoj pozoriènoj avangardi poslije drugog svetskog rata'. Treóiprogram. Radio Sarajevo, 1984, XIII, 46, 64-68. Paolo Magelli. 'Ono §to danas serviraju kao politióki teatar...'. NIN, XXXV, 1735, p. 32-33, (Interview). Borka Pavióevió. 'Pogled s mosta'. Knjizevnost, 1984, XXXIX, 6-7, p. 956-959. 'Razgovor: 'PozoriSna kritika i pozoriSni zivot u novinama'. Politika, 1. VII 1984, LXXXI, 25415. Djoko Stojiöió. 'Mesto i uloga pozoriSta danas'. Razvitak, 1984, XXIV; 3, p. 9-10. Rade Serbedzija. 'Uvek sam verovao da smo takvo demokratsko druëtvo...'. Knjizevna reö, Vll-Vlll, 1984, XIII, p. 238-240, (Interview).

51 Fabijan Sovagovid. 'Teatar je stalno bio politiöan...'. /V//V, 1984, XXXV, 1772, p. 31-32. Ljuba Tadié. 'Mi smo se uhvatili dve terne -- srpstva i informbiroa... PoHtika, 3. Ill 1984, LXXXI, 25290, (Interview). Drazen Vukov-Coliö. 'PolitiCki prizori politiCkog teatra'. Start, 1984, 396, p. 16-18.

1985

Jovan Cirilov. 'Smisao i besmisao pozoriSnih mrznji'. Knjizevne novine, 1 5. IX 1 985, XXXVI, p. 694. Jovan Hristió. 'Klasici i politika'. Knjizevne novine, 15. Vi 1985, XXXVI, p. 690. Taras Kermauner. 'V Cem sta 'politiCno gledaliSCe' in 'politiCna dramatika' politiCna?'. Nova revija, 1985, IV, 35\36, p. 387-404. Radoslav Lazié. 'Theatrographia Yugoslavica - PozoriSna dokumentaristika i informatika'. Scena, 1985, XXI, I, 1-2, p. 203-205. DuSan Popovió. 'Tridesetogodiènji jubilej u znaku informbiroa'. Scena, 1985, XXI, II, p. 4-15. Ljuba Tadió. 'Boiji strada od goreg'. Knjiievne novine, 1. VI 1985, XXXVI, p. 689, (Interview). Milorad Vuöelió. 'PozoriSte - jedan od simptoma krize'. Knjizevne novine, 15. VI 1985, XXXVi, p. 690. Ivo BreSan. 'NeCastivi na filozofskom fakuttetu' (Devil At School Of Philosophy). Dalibor Foretié. 'NeCastivi na gimnaziji u gradióu N.'. Danas, 1986, 208, p. 39. Marija Grgiöevié. 'NeCastivi na filozofskom fakultetu'. Vjesnik, 46, 3.2. 1986, 13793. Boris Senker. 'NeCastivi na filozofskom fakultetu'. Novi prolog, 1987, 3, p. 186-191. Zvonko Tarle. 'NeCastivi na filozofskom fakultetu'. Borba, 64, 19. 2. 1986, p. 50. Laslo Vegel. 'NeCastivi na filozofskom fakultetu'. PoHtika, 83, 6. 2. 1986, 25984.

1986

Peter BoziC. 'Razvoj gledaliSke literature in gledaliSkih sredstev v slovenskem gledalièCu v obdobju od leta 1945 do danaSnjega dne, I part'. Maske, 1985, 1, p. 11-22. Vesna CvjetkoviC-Kurelec. 'Arhiv HNK i kazaliSna dokumentaristika u Hrvatskoj'. Moguónosti, 34 (1986), 1/3, p. 68-71. Dalibor ForetiC. 'Dvije linije ili ptica na grani'. Oko, 13, 3.7.1986, p. 373, (about contemporary Yugoslav theatre). Dragan KlaiC. 'VeStina preèivljavanja'. Scena, XXII, 6, 1986, p. ????. Vladimir StamenkoviC. 'MeraC socijalne napregnutosti'. Knjizevna kritika, 17 (1986), 1, p. 65-70, (Interview).

1987

Dalibor ForetiC. 'Two Lines'. Scena, English Issue, 1987, 10, p. 3-14. Svetozar CvetkoviC. 'Profesionaini glumac i njegov razvoj u samoupravnom pozoriStu'. Scena, 23, 1987, 2, 4/5, p.88-89. Pero KvrgiC. 'BiljeSka o glumcu, samoupravnom normativizmu i kazaliStu'. Scena, 23, 1987, 2, 4/5, p. 87-88. Josip LeSiC. 'An Outline for an (Un) Written History of Theatre in Bosnia and Herzegovina'. Scena, English Issue, 1987, 10, p. 71-89. Vasja Predan. 'Post-war Slovenian Theatre, Drama and Theatre Criticism'. Scena, English Issue, 1987, 10, p. 135-142.

52 1988

Andrej Inkret. 'Pozoriète kao arheoloèki izvor'. Scena, 24, 1988, 2, 1391-44. Dragan Klaié. 'Yugoslav Theatre: Eight Current Contradictions'. Scena, English Issue, 1988, 11, p. 8-13. Pero Kvrgió. 'Notes of the Actor: On Selfmanaging Normativism, and on the Theatre'. Scena, English Issue, 1988, 11, p. 23-24. LjubiSa Ristié. 'Nismo doèiveli poraz'. Danas, 7, 1988, 308, p. 42-44, (Interview). Slobodan Stojanovió. 'Na§ teatar u kriznim vremenima'. PoHtika, 85, 23. 5. 1988, 26806. Mira Trailovié. 'Yugoslav Theatre on International Scene, or How We Present Ourselves Through the Theatre to the World'. Scena, English Issue, 1988, 11, p. 24-26. Laslo Vegel. 'Dokument kritiCkog postmodernizma'. Scena, XXIV, 3, 1988, p. 56-57. Andrea Zlatar. 'Povijest predstave kao rediteljska biografija'. Novi Prolog, III {XX), 8-9, 1988.

1989

Taras Kermauner. 'What Are 'Political Theatre' and 'Political Drama?'. Scena, English Issue, 1989, 12, p. 99-177. Branko PleSa. 'Koliko je naS savremeni pozoriSni zivot autentiöan...'. Scena, 25 (1989), 4, p. 100-104. Risto Stefanovski. 'An Outline for the History of Macedonian Theatre'. Scena, English Issue, 1989, 12, p. 134-148. 2elimir Stublija. 'Zarobljenici sna o izgubljenom raju'. Oko, 17, 27. 7. 1989, p. 432.

1990

Aleksandar Milosavljevié. 'Sveti Sava'. Dnevnik, 48, 9-2-1990, p. 17.

53 Beyond historical avant-gardism:

Some reflections on political engagement and aesthetic non-conformism in postwar Flemish theatre

Dr. Rudi Laermans BEYOND HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDISM: SOME REFLECTIONS ON POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND AESTHETIC NON-CONFORMISM IN POSTWAR FLEMISH THEATRE

Dr. Rudi Laermans University of Leuven, Belgium

I In more than one respect, the history of modern art, and a fortiori the history of modern theatre, is synonymous with a still continuing series of discontinuities, of breaks and ruptures. Particularly on the level of aesthetics, modern art has understood itself as driven by a non-conformist energy, even by the conscious will to be non-conformist. In the so-called historical avant-garde, this appetite for non-conformism became a sort of official dogma. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Dadaism and Surrealism, Futurism and Constructivism - just to mention the most renowned movements - proclaimed in a clamorous way that continuous renewal or the thirst for originality was one of the principal duties of every true modern artist. Within the diverse realms of aesthetic practice, one had to be provocative and experimental, different or 'deviant'. For a modern aesthetic product, thus uncountable manifestos declared, was only worth that name if it did not reproduce existing aesthetic standards. Imitation was the black sheep of the historical avant-garde, non-conformism its idol.

The historical avant-garde did not only promote non-conformism with regard to aesthetic criteria or artistic practices, including the notion of the work of art (see M. Duchamp's ready mades) and the dominant rules concerning the presentation of works of art. Within movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, the desire to shock bourgeois taste went hand in hand with the desire to break the economic and political power of the ruling class. Again and again, aesthetic heterodoxy was linked with a profound political engagement: longing for a constant renewal of art seemed to imply ipso facto a revolutionary stance to 'the powers that be'. As is well known, this often resulted in sometimes violent internal clashes over particular political liaisons, e.g., between anarchists, Trotsky fans, and straight communists. Notwithstanding these differences, a lot of avant-gardistic artists found it self-evident to be - or to become - a member of the Communist Party and to participate in an active way in political struggles.

As the expression already suggests, the historical avant-garde seems to be a thing of the past, a page in the history of modern art that has been definitively turned over. But is this really the case? Is not the spectre of avant-gardism still alive and well, perhaps not always in contemporary artistic practices but certainly in the discourse on art? Indeed, one can give the word 'historical' another meaning than 'being ripe for the museum' (or for 'the dustbin of history'). Events, ideas or movements are also considered to be 'historical' when they have heavily influenced or modelled the thinking or doing of later generations. In this sense, the historical avant-garde was and still is historical. In the postwar discussions on non-conformism and engagement in the arts, the principal ideas of A. Breton or T. Tzara were clearly trendsetting in Europe. They even changed into anonymous clichés, into standard types of reasoning and making arguments. Thus even the thinking of European critics, scholars or artists who never read one page of the writings of the leaders of the historical avant-garde may be deeply influenced by avant-gardism. For in the European discourse on (post)modern art, the common, not to say orthodox view regarding non-conformism and engagement subscribes to the avant-gardistic assumption that aesthetic 'deviancy' and a radical political orientation are twins. According to this widespread representation, he or she who challenges the existing artistic rules must also be a political rebel, a 'left-winger' (or, more particularly, a socialist, a feminist, an anarchist, and so on). And when the person in question does not make political statements, it is still possible, even necessary to make explicit the implicit political message of the non-conformist works of art he or she produces.

1 One can give several examples that deny the empirical validity of the dominant clichés concerning non-conformism and engagement. In the sphere of drama and theatre, it is for example quite doubtful if radical postwar innovators such as E. lonesco or S. Beckett were interested in politics at all. And how to make sense of the works (not to mention their words!) of American pop artists such as A. Warhol or R. Lichtenstein, whose ambiguous aesthetic status is only matched by their ambivalent socio-political content (are they criticising or idolising mass culture?). Or to take up a more recent example, which also brings us closer to the immediate subject of this essay: can one link the many-faced oeuvre of the Flemish performing artist Jan Fabre, who wrote and directed theatre plays, operas and choreographies, with a radical political position? Fabre's work is quite unconventional and undoubtedly adresses the question of power. But in order to grasp the specific articulation of aesthetic and political non-conformism in his oeuvre, we must leave the still dominant avant-gardistic model behind us. '

In the following reflections, I will try to make clear that post-'68 theatre in Flanders walked indeed on other paths than the road outlined by the historical avant-garde. As far as I can see, the sketched developments were not particular to Flanders. But I leave it to the reader to determine if she or he can detect striking similarities between the described trends within the field of Flemish performing arts and the evolution in the theatre of her or his own country.

11 Around 1968, the mainstream of Flemish theatre was in a deep crisis, from which it only recently has started to recover. The two leading city Royal Netherlands Theatre) and the KVS in Brussels (KVS = Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg - Royal Flemish Theatre) offered their regular visitors, mainly recruited from the local bourgeoisie and middle class, the standard repertoire of Shakespeare and Molière, mixed with boulevard comedies. The same was true of the RVT (Reizend Volkstheater - Travelling Popular Theatre), a company that played the smaller city theatres of Flanders. Until 1967 it was part of the Nationaal Toneel (National Theatre), actually an administrative construction that besides the KNS also comprised the Studio Herman Teirlinck, a drama school in Antwerp.

Not only the playlists of these companies witnessed a total lack of inspiration; the directing and staging were testimony of an even greater lack of artistic courage. Indeed, on the stage dominated an outdated naturalism and/or a psychological realism that more than once fell behind the elementary lessons of Stanislavsky. As were most of the other staff members, the majority of the actors were interested only in making money and receiving some applause at the end of every performance (and this notwithstanding the fact that some of them had quite some talent). The unions backed their financial appetites; this resulted in November 1974 in a strike and, one year later, in an official decree that regulated anew the subsidies for Flemish theatre. The decree also installed a council that was to ensure the aesthetic quality of the performances by the subsidised companies. Because the majority of its members had direct links with the official theatres, the intended quality control only provoked laughter from the side of independent critics.

Nowadays, the situation has not changed that much in Antwerp (KNS) and was only recently adjusted in Brussels (KVS; the RVT has been disbanded). In 1992, the board of the KVS appointed Franz Marijnen as artistic director. Thus at last one non-conformist theatre maker, who had left Flanders years before because of the deplorable state of mainstream theatre, got a chance to use his talent in a well-equipped Flemish theatre (Marijnen first worked in the U.S.A and then directed in the Netherlands for several years the Ro Theatre, the city theatre of Rotterdam). All in all, the artistic reorientation of the KVS came much too late. For meanwhile, a new circuit of theatre houses had seen the light; of these, the Brussels Kaaitheater (Quay Theatre), now located in the refurbished Luna Theatre, before World War II a popular venue, is one of the most important exponents.

2 With the exception of the third city theatre, the NTG in Ghent (NTG = Nieuw Toneel Gent - New Theatre Ghent), started up in 1965, all significant aesthetic developments within Flemish theatre have taken place outside the small circuit of established and generally well- subsidised companies. This is a constancy within the field of Flemish performing arts and gives it a distinctive character. While for instance in Germany at least some official city theatres played a prominent role in the renewal of repertory theatre, KVS (Antwerp) and KVS (Brussels) could go on for years and years with their naturalistic stagings of the classics. In the last instance, this was possible due to the partly official, partly unofficial links of both companies with political parties and, more particularly, with the caste of ruling politicians. This explains why some of the most striking examples of traditional, not to say reactionary theatre (from a dramaturgical point of view) were, and to a great extent still are to be seen in the KNS in Antwerp, a city that was for decades a socialist bulwark (meanwhile, the political situation in Antwerp has changed dramatically: the town has become the most important sally-port of the right-wing party Vlaams Blok - Flemish Block).

The existing situation was heavily criticised in 1968 in a manifesto that was aptly called T68 (the letter T stood, of course, for theatre). This sharp analysis of Flemish theatre also contained interesting proposals to improve the theatrical landscape. It was written by Alex Van Royen, a theatre maker; Hugo Claus, well known for his novels and since many years a virtual winner of the Noble Prize for Literature, but probably also the most important postwar drama-writer in Flanders; and Carlos Tindemans, during the sixties a severe and obstinate theatre critic who later established at the University of Antwerp a lively department of theatre studies. Actually, T68 urged the necessity of a new sort of repertory theatre that would incorporate the principal achievements of modern acting and directing. The manifesto did not meet with much applause. In 1968 it seemed still very non-conformist in Flanders to advocate a little more of Brechtian directing or to propose the injection of a wise dose of Grotowski-inspired ideas in the training of actors...

Around 1968 the situation looked all the more poignant because the first postwar wave of theatre experiments had arrived in a dead-end street. During the 1950s, small theatres were set up all over Flanders. These chambre theatres, as they were usually called, mainly presented absurdist pieces (E. lonesco and S. Beckett were extremely popular in this circuit) and texts written by the new generation of English dramatists (such as H. Pinter and J. Osborn). Most of them worked with amateur players and sometimes offered, partly because of scarce financial means, interesting examples of 'poor theatre'. As one may expect, the overall dramaturgy and staging were heavily text-orientated. Thus many a chambre theatre broke with the dominant tradition of naturalism, although not altogether with psychological realism and, more generally, with certain forms of 'authentic acting'.

Because they operated outside the circuit of subsidised companies, several of the smaller theatres and affiliated companies disappeared after a shorter or a longer time. Others survived financial difficulties and in the end managed to obtain some official recognition. This was, for instance, the case with the Fakkeltheater (Torch Theatre, Antwerp), Antigone (Kortrijk), Toneel Vandaag (Theatre Today, Brussels), and Area (Ghent). In the discussions on the pros and cons regarding the subsidising of the new theatres, one of the recurrent themes was the non-professional status of several of the actors. Not dramaturgic renewal but working with amateurs gave these companies an aura of non-conformism in the eye of the theatrical (and a fortiori the political) establishment. Actually, the big companies and the existing theatre schools, where most of the teachers were actors of KVS, KNS or RVT, wanted to continue their monopolistic control over the acting profession. In their view, amateurs were only welcome in the circuit of non-subsidised amateur theatre. By contrast, in the field of officially recognised, 'artistic' theatre, amateurs could only 'lower' the aesthetic standards - that is to say, they could

3 only threaten the secure postion of professional, well-paid actors who did not question the dogma of naturalisnn.

As I already said, some of the smaller companies succeeded in obtaining government money. But this partly financial, partly political victory turned out to be an aesthetic overthrow. Indeed, the newly subsidised companies now had to meet stricter standards regarding management and regularity in playing. At the same time, most of them used their larger financial means to update their theatrical 'hardware', such as seating, scenery, and technical equipment. They thus created anew financial burdens. In the end, both the official criteria and the desire to become 'a real (medium-sized) company' resulted in the watering down of the quality of the chosen plays and the staging in order to attract a wider public of regulars. For this reason, by the time the authors of the T68-manifesto wrote down their Ideas the whole field of Flemish theatre looked so dull and monotonous that even the publicly voiced dream of a well-functioning repertory company appeared quite non-conformistic. By the way, a couple of years before, the staging of one of the plays of H. Claus, a co-author of the manifesto, was interrupted by the police because of the presence of two nudes. In more than one respect, one was in these years quite rapidly a non-conformist in Catholic Flanders...

Ill T68 did not advocate some variant of political or revolutionary theatre. In a way which was comparable to the wave of dramaturgic innovations during the 1950s within the chambre theatres, the non-conformism of the manifesto was restricted to aesthetic matters, to the question of how theatre had to look in order to deserve a certain quality label. In the light of the backward dramaturgy and directing within the big companies, a simple answer could be given; Flemish theatre should be 'modernised'. It had to be less provincial and therefore needed an awakening shot of modernism; Flemish theatre should be brought 'up to date' by way of a refreshing bath In the most outstanding examples of modern theatre as seen abroad. In line with this reasoning, to be non-conformist was first and foremost synonymous with the desire to conform Flemish theatre to foreign traditions, foreign examples, foreign texts and methods. As I will try to clarify later on, this tendency to look abroad for new models that could Improve existing theatre practice was reiterated at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. During this period, which was decisive for contemporary performing arts In Flanders, non-conformism was again In more than one respect synonymous with the import of ideas that were already established abroad. Or to phrase this in another way: In a small region such as Flanders, aesthetic non-conformism often equals aesthetic internationalism. To a certain extent, this was also true for the major renewal in the years that followed the meanwhile mythical year 1968.

During the 1970s, the curious theatre-goer could attend performances of foreign 'experimental' theatre companies quite regularly in Ghent and Brussels. In Ghent, Proka, an organisation started up In the local Academy of Fine Arts, progammed amongst others Polish avant-garde theatre in the by now legendary Zwarte Zaal (Black Venue); In Brussels, outstanding examples of foreign fringe theatre could be seen in the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Palace for Fine Arts), In the Théêtre 140 (run by French-speaking people), and, to a lesser extent, in the Beursschouwburg (literally translated: the Stock Exchange Theatre - actually, this still existing venue, which these days predominantly programmes diverse specimens of multicultural popular culture, was named after the nearby Stock Exchange Building). Towards the end of the 1970s, foreign avant-garde theatre was also shown in the venue of the Centre for Experimental Theatre in Wilrijk, Antwerp, animated by the already mentioned Carlos Tindemans, and in De Warande, the official cultural centre of Turnhout (near Antwerp), where Eric Antonis, now alderman of culture in Antwerp, proved with considerable success that It was possible to set up, in a manner of speaking, a theatrical oasis In the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, a new generation of Flemish theatre nnakers had discovered political theatre. In the wake of the 1968 upheaval, many amateurs and professional actors embraced Marxism as the key to the highway of consciousness-raising and, in the end, toward the overthrowing of capitalism. The most prominent example of Flemish political theatre was Mistero Buffo, staged for the first time in 1972 by the Internationale Nieuwe Scene (INS - International New Scene). Again inspiration came from abroad. The play was written by the Italian marxist Dario Fo, whose use of the commedia dell arte tradition was closely followed in the INS-dramaturgy. The staging was also heavily influenced by another Italian example of political theatre, i.e. Arthuro Corso. Mistero Buffo proved to be a real public success, not only in Flanders - the INS played amongst others the Muntschouwburg, the national opera house in Brussels - but also in other countries. INS presented, for example, its adaptation of Fo's play with much applause in France during the famous Avignon festival, and in the Netherlands within the all in all quite 'bourgeois' context of the Holland Festival.

Later on, some actors who became dissatisfied with the atmosphere within the Antwerp-based INS set up a new company, De Mannen van de Dam (The Dike-Men). Other important exponents of the 1970s wave of political theatre were HTP (Het Trojaanse Paard - The Trojan Horse) and Vuile Mong en zijn Vieze Gasten (Filthy Mong and his Dirty Fellows). Both companies travelled extensively in Flanders and, to a lesser extent, in the Netherlands. HTP subscribed to the Trotskyist variant of Marxism, while Vuile Mong was a rather anarchistic collection of sometimes weird individual characters. Like the INS and its later offshoot, De Mannen van de Dam, both companies were devoted to the cause of political enlightenment; theatre had to bring the dream of revolution one step closer to reality. For this reason, they refused to make use of existing repertory theatre: Shakespeare, Molière, even Beckett or lonesco, were considered to be 'bourgeois authors'. It is an intriguing and perhaps unanswerable question if this harsh judgment was not inspired by 'the bad example' of the KNS, the KVS, and the RVT. If one only had seen, or even had played in old-fashioned, naturalistic performances of the classics, it may indeed have seemed impossible to adopt the canonical texts of drama literature in an imaginative and critical way.

One cannot have any doubts about the integrity of the political engagement of the actors that were part of the INS, De Mannen van de Dam, HTP, and Vuile Mong en zijn Vieze Gasten. They literally did everything together; in financial and artistic matters, collective self-management was the rule. They played for free or for a low fee during strikes or when a left-wing groupuscule needed money and organised a so-called benefit evening. They really believed in the socialist cause and considered themselves to be artistic workers- for-the-revolution. But did their political engagement also result in original aesthetic forms, in some sort of new political theatre?

Pace the many discussions on B. Brecht's writings about epic theatre, political non-conformism was often paid with aesthetic conformity to a sometimes reactionary standard of naturalism. The revolutionary message had to be clear and transparant, and 'thus' the acting and staging complied with simple, even crude variants of realistic representation. The Ridiculous Capitalist with the Big Cigar, the Proud Worker clothed in Rags, the Suffering Woman who complained loudly about her lack of Money,... - these and other well-known stereotypes of agit-prop theatre also dominated Flemish political theatre during the 1970s. In this respect, it was a sometimes stunning refutation of the avant-gardistic thesis that aesthetic non-conformism and political engagement go along quite well with each other. To put it bluntly, during the 1970s one could see in Flanders a lot of propagandistic theatre that lacked any artistic or aesthetic value. For the representatives of the theatrical establishment, this only proved they were right in continuing the staging of the canonised repertory in an old-fashioned manner...

5 But this is only half of the story. Indeed, the more interesting examples of Flemish political theatre of the 1970s did renew aesthetic standards, although in another direction than one may expect in the light of the avant-gardistic model. INS and HTP, and particularly Vuile Mong en zijn Vieze Gasten, brought elements of popular culture, especially of vaudeville, circus, and cabaret, into the realm of legitimate theatre. Thus the rediscovery of the Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte via the work of Dario Fo and Arthuro Corso stimulated Flemish political theatre to incorporate still other forms of popular representation and 'theatricalisation'. This sometimes resulted in interesting examples of grotesque theatre; other performances were just well-made examples of entertaining, left-wing boulevard theatre; and another time, a performance ended up in a big and hilarious, carnavalesque laughter that for one moment liberated the public from the (bourgeois?) demand of self-control and emotional restraint. Unfortunately, Flemish political theatre did not truly explore either the revolutionary potential or the aesthetic possibilities of this non-conformist laughter. Left-wing dogmas ('the message') hindered the deepening, also politically, of the carnivalesque (in the sense M. Bakhtin uses this expression). In this respect, it could have learned something from the avant-gardistic tradition, especially from Dadaism.

The new official decree on theatre that was voted in 1975 also left its imprint on Flemish political theatre. Within the framework of the decree, small companies could obtain some money if subscribing to certain quantitative standards regarding, amongst others, the number of yearly performances. All the just mentioned companies did apply succesfully. Once again, the final outcome of this official recognition was quite drastic. The observance of the stipulated requirements, such as the norm of 75 yearly performances, obliged these groups to renounce further artistic experiments: they had no other choice than to become routinised 'agit prop machines'.

IV At first glance, during the 1980s the pendulum appeared to swing back again from political engagement to aesthetic non-conformism within the field of Flemish performing arts. But as every regular theatre- goer knows, appearances are deceitful, seductive masks that conceal more than once an underlying 'truth' which contradicts the seeming evidence of sensory perception.

For Flemish theatre of the 1980s, Jan Decorte's staging of F. Hebbel's melodramatic Maria Magdalena during the Kaaitheater Festival (Quay Theatre Festival) was as important as Mistero Buffo for the wave of political theatre of the 1970s. The bi-annual Kaaitheater Festival was started up by Hugo De Greef in 1977 and lasted until 1985. From that year onwards, De Greef reorientated his organisation in the direction of a production house with its own venue. The shifting programming during the years the Kaaitheater Festival lasted, illustrates very well the end of the period of political theatre and the coming of new (postmodern?) times. The first edition of the Kaaitheater Festival did show several groups devoted to political theatre, such as INS, Rote Rube (Germany), and La Cuandra de Sevilla (Spain). But during the first half of the 1980s, De Greef increasingly confronted the public of his festival with a different sort of theatre aesthetic, with the 'experimental' work of groups such as the New York based Wooster Group and of individual directors such as R. Hoffmann (a clear exponent of Bausch-orientated Tanztheater). These and related forms of 'theatricalisation' seemed to focus primarily on purely formal, aesthe- tic questions. Was the staging of the problems of capitalistic society traded in for 'the problems of the society of the stage'? Was the representation of a non-conformist political attitude substituted for the self-reflexive challenging of the art of theatrical representation per sé? These issues were raised more than once during the first half of the 1980s. As I said, possible answers had to be more nuanced than was usually, and to a great extent still is, the case.

6 Jan Decorte, who later became the artistic director of the formerly political theatre group HTP, presented his epoche-making interpretation of Hebbel's piece during the third edition of the Kaaitheater Festival, held in 1981. Actually, the performance was just outstanding repertory theatre. But given the poor quality of official Flemish repertory theatre, it was not that surprising that critics and public alike were amazed by Decorte's laboured direction. Again a play was labelled 'experimental' and 'avant-gardistic' because it took another, more conceptual road than the unthought naturalism of KVS and KNS. Again a director was considered to be highly non-conformist because he did what others had already done before abroad. And indeed, again the play in question was heavily influenced by foreign examples, i.e. by the new German dramaturgy and staging as exemplified by the work of, amongst others, P. Stein and J. Gosch. Of course, none of this diminishes Decorte's achievement. For at least he had the courage and perseverance to do just that which probably had to be done.

In his later career Decorte proved to be the real enfant terrible, the pur sang non-conformist of recent Flemish theatre. Slowly but surely, he deliberately alienated nearly all the first-hour admirers of his work by making ever 'poorer' theatre. More particularly, Decorte became a specialist in the reworking of classical texts, particularly Shakespeare. And reworking was - and is - for Decorte synonymous with deleting and abridging, and with the transformation of the main characters into thin, strip-like figures who lack any eloquence in language or behaviour. Decorte usually combined this textual no-nonsense approach with a burlesque, vaudeville-like way of acting and directing. Shakespeare as a would-be comedy writer? Most Flemish theatre critics could not laugh with Decorte's unashamed treatment of the classics: they found the results unbearable to look at. In their opinion, Decorte made too much fun of theatre and crossed the sacred line that separated a legitimate way of challenging theatrical conventions and drama texts from pure charlatanerie. This harsh judgment seemed all the more plausible when Decorte, in order to make the required minimum of 75 yearly performances for his subsidised HTP company, organised a series of Shakespeare parties with only drinks and music, and no performances (the trick did not do: Decorte lost his subsidies).

Is Decorte really the clown of Flemish theatre that most critics and theatre amateurs take him to be? Further evidence for an affirmative answer is usually found in Decorte's turbulent lifestyle. For many years he was called 'the uncrowned king of Brussels' nightlife'; and In 1991 he became an M.P. after joining the libertarian party that was started up by the convicted swindler J.P. Van Rossem. Notwithstanding these and other colourful anecdotes, one cannot easily dismiss the impression that the in-crowd of Flemish theatre never dared to face the radicalism of Decorte's work. Indeed, Decorte not only challenges the dominant theatrical conventions but calls into question the idea of theatre as an art form in a way that is reminiscent of the 'dadaism' of, amongst others, T. Tzara and M. Duchamp. In more than one respect, it is highly significant that the fine arts have learned to live with such radicalism while the performing arts, and probably not only in Flanders, do not digest manifestations of carnivalesque non-conformism. Or to put this in another way: within the field of theatre and the performing arts, certain forms of 'de-sacralisation' still are 'not done', even look immoral in the eyes of those who are devoted to the pseudo-religion of acting and directing.

All in all, Decorte remains an outsider within Flemish theatre. Nevertheless, traces of his 'thin acting' approach and comedy- inspired staging can be found in the early performances of Arne Sierens and his company De Sluipende Armoede (The Sneaking Poverty - now disbanded), and in the work of the director P. Peyskens and of the theatre collectives Stan and Dito Dito. During their formative years, the latter two were also heavily influenced by, once again, a foreign example of 'acting while (seemingly) not acting', i.e. the Amsterdam based company Maatschappij Discordia.

7 Stan and Dito Dito have a lot in common, which is one reason why they have set up common projects. Although they are guided by outstanding, charismatic actors - Frank Vercruysse (Stan) and Willy Thomas (Dito Dito), the latter also a promising drama writer - both companies subscribe to the ideals of collective directing and artistic self-management. Both also try to tackle political subjects, such as multiculturalism or the immorality of the powerful, by reinterpreting canonical drama texts from a critical point of view. In these respects, Stan and Dito Dito are direct heirs of Flemish political theatre of the 1970s. Notwithstanding the similarities, there exist striking differences between Stan and Dito Dito, and INS or Vuile Mong on the level of theatrical representation and political engagement.

For Stan and Dito Dito, Marxism no longer is an evident perspective: power no longer equals capitalism, socialism no longer equals freedom from oppression (and vice versa). In their performances both companies rather direct the attention of the public to the many faces of power, and the dispersion of power within the global social field. When closely scrutinised power is everywhere, thus they seem to say: power inhabits the relations between men and women, between whites and coloured immigrants, even between brothers and/or sisters of the same family. The poison of power is omnipresent and therefore Stan and Dito Dito can turn nearly every classical play into a demonstration - remember Brecht's epic theatre! - of 'the power of Power'. Both companies link this quasi-experimental study of power with a thorough deconstruction of the enchanting, magical power of theatre as an outstanding example of 'the art of (ideological) illusion'. Indeed, in their performances Stan and Dito try to cut through the magic of theatre, especially the always looming possibility of a too easy identification with the represented characters and situations. Particularly the 'thin acting' method proved - and still proves - to be a very succesful strategy in deceiving the gaze of the spectator.

V Jan Decorte showed the first example of his radical carnavalesque approach of dramaturgy and acting during the 1983 edition of the Kaaitheater Festival. In an often funny way Shakespeare's King Lear was turned upside down in the Beursschouwburg, much to the bewilderment of the public. The same edition of the Kaaitheater Festival also presented three contemporary internationally-renowned Flemish performing artists, i.e. choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, multi-media artist Jan Fabre, and theatre director Jan Lauwers (then with Epigonen viz, now artistic director of Needcompany). In the work of the latter two artists one can discern again a profound critique of the ideological nature of 'magical theatre' (and a fortiori of the naturalistic tradition and, more generally, of realist representation).

Fabre treated this subject in a very direct way in the five hour piece The Power of Theatrical Madness, also the play with which he gained international fame. In it he suggested that the enchanting power of theatre is synonymous with the theatre of political power. More particularly, he tried to make clear that kings, ministers, and other political representatives do not possess power as such. Rather, they act within the realm of representation and theatrical simulation: to look powerful equates with being powerful. And as with 'real' theatre, the theatre of power is only effective because of a strange belief in appearances, a collective desire to be deluded and enchanted by simulacra.

In his meanwhile considerable oeuvre, Fabre again and again tries to undermine The Power of Theatrical Madness' by making use of 'the real body' - of the physical body that sweats and becomes tired or confronts the public gaze with an alarming, non-aesthetic nakedness. Whereas the disciplined body of the well-trained actor or dancer is one big simulation machine, the physical body does not lie and deconstructs the surface of controlled gestures. In order to make the latter body appear within the tissue of regulated appearances, Fabre uses quite simple means, such as the endless repetition of movements (thus exhausting the bodies of his actors or

8 dancers) or, in his choreographies, long standstilles (which are physically impossible for the dancing bodies).

During his productive career, Fabre moved from theatre to choreography and opera, and back again, in all these genres Fabre has challenged basic conventions and assumptions, such as the usual narrative relationships in opera between the libretto and singing, and the acting or dancing. But only in his theatre work sensu stricto, this aesthetic radicalism is matched by the clear addressing of the question of power. Again power has many faces: in his plays Fabre deals, amongst other things, with the power of 'beauty makers' and newsmakers or journalists (in Das Interview das stirbt - 'The Dying Interview'), and of the media and linguistic clichés or cultural stereotypes (in Sweet Temptations, also a melancholy meditation on the powerlessness of reason and rational thinking).

Together with Dito Dito and Stan, Fabre is by far the most consequent non-conformist within the field of contemporary Flemish performing arts (as said, pur sang rebel Jan Decorte is more of a 'loner', a carnavalesque and at the same time tragical figure). In their work they combine again and again a deep distrust of 'the power of theatrical madness' or the possible ideological nature of 'enchanting acting' with a sometimes cynical unveiling of the many social masks of King Power. The same is true of the work of Jan Lauwers, who for instance in his recently begun Snakesong trilogy demonstrates in a penetrating way how intimate confessions in personal relationships are intertwined with unequal power balances and a devasting 'will to know' (one is reminded here of M. Foucault's famous analysis of the relationships between power and knowledge, pouvoir and savoir).

To a lesser extent, the sketched trend can also be discerned within the work of Blauwe Maandag Compagnie (The Blue Monday Company) and Lucas Vandervorst, artistic director of De Tijd (Time). Both companies are not as radical as Fabre and Lauwers or Stan and Dito Dito. Rather, they try to work within the framework of contemporary repertory theatre. Besides, Blauwe Maandag Compagnie also makes striking efforts to promote Flemish drama writing, thereby witnessing a clear preference for texts with a carnivalesque undertone (such as the widely acclaimed play WUde Lea - 'Wild Lea'; the burlesque directing of this piece and other potentially subversive texts was much closer to the tradition of boulevard comedy than to the radicalism of Decorte). These self-imposed limits on the level of dramaturgy and aesthetic representation may be called into question when one is convinced of the necessity of non-conformism within the domain of the performing arts. Notwithstanding the legitimacy of this position, one must keep in view the overall situation of Flemish theatre. Indeed, during the 1980s companies such as Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and De Tijd did challenge succesfully the official hegemony of KNS and KVS. If in the end the board of the KVS did appoint Franz Marijnen as artistic director, this was mainly due to the fact that Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and De Tijd had meanwhile established themselves as leading, although not officially recognised companies within the field of repertory theatre.

It took some time, but in 1993 a new decree on the performing arts offered the Flemish companies that were started up during the 1980s at least some financial security. This decree also recognised the pioneering work of the new venues and initiatives which made great efforts to promote the innovative work of the new generation of Flemish theatre makers. Under the catch-all heading of 'arts centres', the decree at last recognised the efforts of the already mentioned Kaaitheater, and of other important organisations which backed the new wave within Flemish theatre, such as Vooruit and Nieuwpoorttheater ('Foreward' and 'New Gate Theatre', both located in Ghent) and Stuc (Louvain). After years of a sometimes hard struggle to survive, non-conformist theatrical and organisational initiatives thus obtained the means they undoubtedly deserved. At the same time, this official recognition opened up a new phase. In particular, it

9 remains to be seen if - and how - the companies and organisations in question can handle the new regulations. The near future shall prove if the latter will be a suffocating straight-jacket or a jumping-ramp to non-conformist ways of making theatre.

By way of conclusion, I want to make three general remarks regarding non-conformism and engagement within recent Flemish theatre. First, it is striking that aesthetic non-conformism (i.e., the challenging of theatrical conventions) and political engagement go along with each other in the work of Stan, Dito Dito or Fabre. Nevertheless, it deviates substantially from the avant- gardistic model that was discussed in the introduction of this essay. This has everything to do, and this is my second point, with the fact that within contemporary Flemish theatre power is taken up as a many-faced, omnipotent 'fact'. In this respect, it shows striking similarities with the analysis of power of trendsetting French thinkers such as M. Foucault (who criticised the so-called centralistic view of power) and J. Baudrillard (who in his writings indefatigably adresses the question of the power of seduction and enchantment by mere appearances). Looking back in (theatre) history from this point of view, the historical avant-garde was to no lesser extent a victim of a monolithic representation of power as the political theatre of the 1970s.

At the same time, and this is my final consideration, the always subtle and sometimes tongue-in- cheek approach of power within recent Flemish performing arts does leave one more than once with an uneasy dissatisfaction. To state it bluntly: one regularly comes out of the theatre with the feeling that the diagnosis was okay but no remedy was offered. Or is power indeed co-extensive with the social? Does human sociability condemn us ipso facto to a life in which we sometimes conform to power and at other times enjoy power? To be honest, I do not know..

10 Bibliographical note

The introciuctory remarks on the historical avant-garde are much indebted to the not undebated analysis of Peter Burger, Theorie der Avant-garde, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1974.

The postwar development within Flemish theatre up till the end of the 1970s are well documented in the study of Daan Bauwens, Kan iemand ons vermaken? Documenataire over theater en samenleving in Vlaanderen, Gent, Masereelfonds, 1980. The same author recently made a useful round-up of the new circuit of so-called arts centres in a document for the yearly organized Dutch-Flemish Theatre Festival (Huizen van kommer en kwel. De groei en werking van de kunstencentra, 1992).

Insightful comments on the 1970s wave of political theatre and 'the new wave' of the 1980s can be found in a series of books published by the Werkgroup Theater (Workgroup for Theatre) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). A selection of the most important articles, together with some new essays, was published in 1989 under the direction of D. Hellemans, R. Geerts and M. Van Kerckhoven (Op de voet gevolgd. Twintig jaar Vlaams theater in internationaal perspectief, Brussels, V.U.B Press).

Other useful material can be found in the yearbooks Dramatisch Akkoord and Theaterjaarboek, in the bi-monthly magazine Etcetera (started up in 1983), and in the reader Het vel van Cambyses. Fragmenten van een kritisch vertoog over theater, dans, opera, fotografie, film, televisie en video, Leuven, Kritak, 1993 (published under the sponsorship of 'Antwerp 93, Cultural Capital).

n From private idea to public concern

Notions and strategies of political engagement in Dutch theatre from the 60' on

Janny Donker FROM PRIVATE IDEA TO PUBLIC CONCERN: NOTIONS AND STRATEGIES OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN DUTCH THEATRE FROM THE 60' ON.

Janny Donker

Political theatre in the Netherlands originated in the 1960s, particularly in the final years of that decade. In order to understand its character, it is necessary to sketch briefly the political situation in that memorable epoch.

The end of the '60s now stand now stands out in the collective memory as the era of Flower Power, 'I'imagination au pouvoir', and psychedelic experiments, but the situation was more complicated than that. The preceding decade had been characterized by a 'United We Stand' mentality. The necessity of reconstruction after the devastations of the Second World War left little space for controversy between Left and Right, between workers and employers. The Cold War had replaced the war against Nazi Germany; Europe had allied herself with the U.S.A. to check Communist expansion and 'keep the world safe for democracy'. But now that the ravages wrought by the war had largely been repaired, the facade constructed with so much thought for homogeneity began to exhibit flaws that indicated fundamental tensions within the structure behind it.

For one thing, it was discovered that the class war was not over. True, that proletariat no longer toiled on the verge of absolute poverty and workers were living in relative comfort, but the gap between a worker's wages and the income of the people at the top remained very wide and power remained in the hands of what came to be known as 'the Military-Industrial Complex'.

It was also discovered that the allied Champions of Democracy - the U.S.A. in the first place - were on friendly terms with, or even protected, regimes that were far from democratic, such as Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, and several dictatorial governments in Central America and the Caribbean. Social inequality proved even worse in the U.S.A. than in Europe. Sympathy for Communism revived, stimulated by the first feeble signs of relaxation on the part of the Soviet regime and by idealized reports (afterwards shown to be completely false) on Maoist China. Latent anti-Americanism in Europe flared up, aroused first by the U.S.A.'s frantic attempts to wipe out the little outpost of Communism in their front garden, Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then by the American intervention in favour of a corrupt regime in South Vietnam. So the '60s became a period of re-awakened political consciousness, of protest, and even of reviving terrorism. The hippies were contemporaneous with the Baader-Meinhof Group and their attempts on the lives of members of the German establishment.

The '60s present both a grim and playful face, alternately, and - at least in Holland - one cannot always be sure which of the two one is looking at. The playfulness reflects the fact that, however much there may have been left to complain about, people were living in relative opulence. Protesters were not facing starvation, imprisonment or worse like the workers of earlier generations. The revolt of the young in particular was not directed against specific socio-political structures so much as against the mental outlook of their parents - the spirit of hard labour and discipline that had brought back opulance after the ravages of war and that valued the fruits of its labour - material comfort - above everything else, including freedom of thought and action. Many of the younger people, taking material conditions and their continued improvement for granted, thought that it was time to relax and to begin directing one's life as one saw fit instead of obeying demands to become a 'useful member' of a society focused on production, consumption, and profit. They rebelled against Authority as such, the authority of parents, teachers, and 'the people in charge' generally, all of whom were considered the embodiment of conservatism for the sake of power and comfort and of lack of imagination and humour. In the Netherlands, this attitude was represented by the Provo movement of the middle '60s with its tactics of provoking the established order by

1 means of ludic 'happenings' in public space. The authorities reacted with often disproportionate vioiance, and what began as a playful provocation in many instances took a grinn turn.

Without committing itself to any specific political ideology or identifying itself with the class war, Provo stimulated an awareness that people should stand up for their right to self- determination. In this way it helped to set the trend for the numerous action groups that emerged during the late '60s and early '70s, many of which 'did' pursue specific political goals. These groups, whatever their target and scope, all shared the conviction that little or nothing was to be expected from trade unions and similar organizations, institutionalized as they had become, and compromised by negotiations with the powers that be. If things were to change radically, they would have to be changed 'from the botton, not from the top'.

To sum up: the spirit of revolt was stirring in the '60s, but it took time to define its political goals - if it had any. There was much indignation in Europe about injustice and atrocities committed far from home, in Greece, South Africa, Latin America, Angola, the U.S.A., but awareness of the defects of one's own society was slow in taking shape. There was as strong movement towards a more adventurous lifestyle, including sexual freedom and experimention with drugs, which found expression in the slogans of the students' revolt in Paris in May, 1968: 'All power to Imagination' and 'Beneath the cobblestones (which the insurgents let fly at the heads of the riot police) there is the beach'. But this movement evidently missed the system's really vulnerable spots. Repression quickly put on the mask of permissiveness, appropriating the slogans but leaving the cobblestones in their usual place, and the managers of the consumer industry proved, by investing in 'creative' advertising and Public Relations, that Imagination was, in fact, already in power. When the general feeling of discontent 'did', finally, take a truly political turn, it either assumed the shape of terrorism which strove to wreck the system by violence, or manifested itself in the politicizing of action groups born out of a belief that people should take matters into their own hands. Members of action groups for the improvement of housing or labour conditions or against pollution or discrimination of women started reading Marx.

So did theatre makers. Political theatre had been virtually non-existent until well into the '60s, due to a general tendency to dissociate art from politics. Nazi and Soviet art served as a warning against harnessing art for political purposes. At the same time, adversaries of modern art in the democratic countries of the West proved as quick as Hitler had been to denounce as 'cultural Bolshevism' whatever did not suit their taste. In a speech delivered in the United States House of Representatives on August 16, 1949, Congressman George A. Dondero complained of 'Communist-inspired and Communist-connected 'isms', inflicted on 'the plain American people' by a 'horde of germ-carrying art vermin' from abroad. In the Netherlands, detractors of undesirable innovation found a target in Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam. The fact that Sandberg sympathized with Communism was enough for them to smell an agent from Moscow behind every new experiment in visual art. Both the example of totalitarianism and the risk of being associated with Communism (which could have serious consequences in those early years of the Cold War) combined to cause artists to shy away from overt political commitment.

If politics did not appear on stage in the Netherlands, there was at least a feeling that theatre should reflect 'modern man's existential predicament', which meant that Sartre, Beckett, lonesco, and Arrabal were performed by the more daring theatre companies. In the later '60s even an overtly political play occasionally found its way to the stage, such as Brecht's Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses or Peter Weiss' Song of the Lusitanian Bugly. But when the actress Annemarie Prins founded 'Teater Terzijde' in 1966, with the express object of presenting politically committed theatre, nothing in the existing repertory would serve her purpose. The group had to construct its own pieces. Characteristically, the first two pieces performed during its short existence (Teater Terzijde disbanded in 1969) dealt with the murder of Garcia Lorca and the war in Vietnam. This accorded with the general tendency to

2 weep for the woes of the world while overlooking less spectacular wrongs comnnitted on one's own doorstep. The oppressed at home had to wait for the very end of the '60s before theatre makers took up their cause.

The event which led to the partial policization of the theatre in the Netherlands was itself not of a particularly political nature. From October, 1969, uniti February, 1970, a group of actors, critics, and regular memebers of the audience forced a series of discussions about conditions in the theatre, often by creating a disturbance during performances. They protested against the monopoly of the big government-supported theatre companies, against the non-committal ease with which directors and actors switched from Marivaux to Albee to Peter Weiss and back, and against the hierarchical structure of the ensembles, which left the actors no power of decision and, consequently, no real responsibility for the part they were acting. In this latter respect, Aktie Tomaat - as the group's activities were called, after the tomatoes thrown at the actors at the start - was the product of the general movement towards self- determination. Soon, however, voices began to be heard which reminded one that the colour of tomatoes is red. These voices identified existing conditions in the theatre as part and parcel of the capitalist cultural apparatus. Instead of providing entertainment for the bourgeoisie or producing art for art's sake, they said, the theatre should become - as Annemarie Prins had already started - 'a means to an end, not an end in itself. Its purpose ought to be to make people aware of the socio-political structures that encompassed their lives - with a view to subverting them. So theatre makers started reading Marx.

As a consequence of Aktie Tomaat several new groups were formed by actors banding together collectively to create their own productions based on topics that were interesting them at the moment. One of these was 'Werkteater', founded in September, 1970, which soon started to aim at specific audiences instead of the 'general public' of the established houses. They created a piece on life in a psychiatric clinic, for instance, to be performed on location before patients and staff - leaving the audience in grave doubts as to who were the normal people and who were not. The recurring theme was, once more. Authority: why does society put some people in a position to decide what is good for others? Other groups addressed classical class war themes, or the educational system. In the course of the '70s numerous ensembles were formed, both amateur and professional, that aimed at specific target groups, such as farmers, teenage schoolchildren, women, and homosexuals. The political message was essentially the same in all cases: be aware of the social conditions that determine your chances in life and work, and of your own powers to change them.

Political theatre, conceived with this end in view, required a revision of theatre making practices. As an example 'Proloog' may be cited, originally a 'regular' ensemble but which decided to devote itself to the cause of arousing political consciousness among various social groups in 1970. When the target group had been selected, actors would do research on the spot, trying to find out how the prospective audience experienced their situation, and develop ideas for a theatrical performance from their findings. The result would then be tested by presenting it before an audience recruited from the target group and further developed in reaction to their responses. Through this exchange of opinions, which continued even after the piece had reached a stage that under other circumstances would have been considered final, the audience was made co-author of the production addressed at them. Hopefully this would enable them to identify more intimately with the events on stage while at the same time gaining insights they would not have found otherwise. However, by adopting as co- authors people to whom thinking in terms of artistic quality was alien, theatre makers seemed to claim that artistic quality no longer mattered at all. In their hands, theatre had become a technique for enchancing political consiousness, and only its politicizing effect on the audience determined whether a production was a success or a failure. If audience response resulted in factory occupation or the formation of an action group, only a 'bourgeois' critic would complain that the piece was 'bad theatre'. The refinements introduced by the pioneers of modern theatre in their individualistic, often apolitical explorations of the medium had no place where the aim was to educate office and factory workers, housewives and

3 schoolchildren, not to an appreciation of 'high art', but to awareness of political conditions. By contrast, the advertising business was keen to appropriate such subleties for its own capitalist ends.

Political theatre of the type practiced by Proloog experienced a boom during the '70s, the decade when even government policiy in the field of culture selected 'permanent education' for its goal, encouraging citizens to 'search for their own identity in a world subject to permanent transformation' and appointing artists as guides to help them find the identity in question. On the other hand, little of it survived the '80s, the era the World's Fashion Leaders decided was to be devoted to the Satisfaction of the Ego, whereas the domain of culture fell under the domination of Postmodernism. Whatever the reasons for the decline of straightforward political theatre, redress of the wrongs that provoked its activity is certainly not one of them. If it made sense for artists to commit themselves politically in 1970, it made no less sense in 1985, and it surely makes sense now. For one thing, we have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was interpreted as proof of the inevitable failure of all political systems not based on the Western idea of democracy. In reality, however, political systems are being judged primarily in terms of 'economic' success or failure. The 'triumph of Western democracy' masks the triumph of economic thinking over political thinking. Politics itself, conceived as an open and continous discussion about the organization of the network of human realtionships we call society, is at stake. This concerns artists as much as any other member of society, and there is less reason than ever why they should not raise their voice.

The 'forms' political commitment may take, however, appear much less self-evident than they did 25 years ago. Of course, a number of well defined issues offer themselves. The list is familiar by now: gender, race, incest, pollution, drugs, AIDS - dealing with these in fact constitutes a passport to 'political correctness', and there are simple straightforward ways of dealing with them. One may put one's experience as a visual artist at the service of neighbourhood action groups, for instance, by installing exhibitions on housing conditions. Or one may make a 'ritual' out of regular gatherings on a river bank to remove detritus from the water. But the question remains whether art has anything better to offer than marching in step with the 'good guys', the people who militate against discrimination, pollution, and so on. What, exactly, is politically committed art? What are the means at its disposal?

'Political' art operates simultaneously in the context of the history of its medium and in the political context of its time. In a woodcut by the German artist Gerd Arntz, dating from 1931, the image is divided in two by the flat roof of a factory building. On top of the roof is a kind of bungalow with a balcony on which a fat man, comfortably seated and smoking a cigar, catches coupons that issue instead of smoke from the factory chimney. Behind him are two other men: one is reading a book, the other prepares to shoot an arrow at the behind of a woman crouching on the floor on all fours, naked except for a pair of stockings. The lower level depicts a very different scene. Silhouettes of men and machines are seen behind the factory windows. A fence and a brick wall divide the factory premises from the street. Two armed soldiers and a civilian in a buttoned-up coat, apparently also carrying a gun are guarding the entrance against a large group of men in labourer's outfit. The meaning of the image is clear enough. Its readily legible structure and stark black-and-white match the structure of society as the artist saw it: a society divided in two classes, the capitalists who reap the profits of other people's labour and enjoy their intellectual or perverse pastimes in safety, protected by the military, and the workers whose chances of employment depend on the ups and downs of the economic conditions created by those on the top level. The figures are standardized in a manner that stresses class membership at the expense of individual features. This expresses the artist's conviction that social change is wrought by masses rather than individuals, but the standardization also refers to a system of production which reduces the worker to 'the man at the conveyor belt', a mere automaton endlessly repeating the same operation corresponding to his station along the assembly line.

4 The political context in which Arntz made his graphic political statements was the Germany of the Weimar Republic after the economic collapse of 1929 and shortly before the Nazi rise to power. This was a time of clear-cut political distinctions: the proletariat against industrial capitalism, democracy against authoritarianism. Critically-minded artists like Arntz accordingly left no doubt as to who were the good guys and how to identify the bad ones. Arntz employed a visual vocabulary - matter-of-fact in its imagery, and borrowing elements from geometrical abstraction - that, seen in the context of artistic evolution in the '20s, was decidedly 'modern'. His work may be called politically and artistically adequate.

When in the course of the '60s the call came for a revival of political consciousness among artists, the fat cigar-smoking capitalist and the 'common man' in cap and worker's jacket (or their slightly updated equivalents) once more took their prominent place in critical political iconography. Artists generally looked back to the Interbellum. Mayakovsky and Walter Benjamin were rediscovered, along with the artist of the Russian Revolution; Brecht seemed to assume a new relevance. One might think that nothing had changed. And this was true in the sense that below the surface the old division of wealth and power persisted. But on top an economic system dominated by scarcity had been replaced by an opulent consumer society. The 'ideal citizen' was no longer requested to behave in a 'politically correct' manner according to democratic ideals or party doctrines, but to fulfill his obligations as a consumer. To remind him of his duty was the work of what Vance Packard, in a famous book published in 1962, termed The Hidden Persuaders. Brutal repression was still resorted to when the establishment felt its position to be seriously endangered, but the masses were kept in check by the promises of comfort, luxury, and status formulated by the designers of advertisements, packages, household appliances, furniture, clothing, and cars in ever more subtly suggestive language. The department store and the supermarket became the chief places of instruction in public morality. They were seconded by the mass media as instruments of hidden persuasion by entertainment.

In this new consumer society, where not labour but an increasing amount of leisure to be spent consuming was becoming a main issue, the notion of 'proletariat' was losing significance. Among the first to realize this were the Situationists, a Paris-based group of artists and revolutionary intellectuals who were active between 1957 and 1969. Their leading theoritician, Guy Debord, coined the phrase 'société du Spectacle', the society of the spectacle, to describe a politics of reducing the great majority of the people to spectators at a fireworks of entertainment and information not of their own making, comfortably seated but prevented from intervening. The issue, according to the Situationists, was no longer better wages, but the right to shape one's own existence - and the possession of the means to do so. The Dutch artist Constant, who was a member of the 'Internationale Situationniste' from 1957 until 1960, developed plans for a world-wide artificial environment designed for a future when men would be living a nomadic existence, free from the obligations of labour which - according to a belief shared by many at the time - would have become completely mechanized. Constant's New Babylon project was intended to provide these future world citizens with materials and stimuli to live a life of non-stop creative activity. By way of Constant, Situationist ideas reached the Provo movement in the Netherlands amd Situationists also backed the students' revolts in Paris in May, 1968, which they regarded as the fruition of their own resistance against the consumerist society of the spectacle since the late '50s.

In view of the changes just described, the validity of the symbolism inherited from the '20s and '30s might be seriously questioned. The simple conflicts between bosses and workers, doctors and patients, real estate speculators and squatters, and the like, presented in theatrical form by political theatre groups, might appeal to audiences for whom such controversies were part of everyday reality, they covered only a restricted area of what was happening in society. And seen in the context of the history of the medium, the black-and- white straightforward portrayal of social reality appeared outdated; what had been effective by virtue of its modernity in 1 931 was no longer so in the '70s.

5 Things have not stopped changing since the days of the Situationsts. Consumerism has refined and tightened its grip on Western society, instead of the homo ludens, the inhabitant of Constant's New Babylon with whom creative imagination is perpetually in power, we have the dutiful consumer, whom the mass media are keeping in tune with the needs and trends of a world-wide industry. The sources of these needs and trends are becoming more and more difficult to identify. The construction of the 'Autobahnen' network in Nazi Germany could be traced to political decisions taken by a government. But the Electronic Highway seems to be forced on us by Beings From Outer Space, so to speak, invisible agencies whom even governments are obliged to obey.

The huge office buildings haunted by these mysterious entities are visible enough; yet they appear intangible through the omnipresence of their influence, and one knows there is no stopping them even if one broke every window in their deceptively transparant glass facades.

Politicians - though they may indulge in occasional outbursts of concern for the freedom of the individual - tend to follow where big business leads, and to adopt the well-functioning commerical enterprise as a model for the organization of society as a whole. They are also adopting managers' jargon to discuss political issues. As a consequence, the pervasive voice of consumerism with its 'strategies', its 'efficiency' and its judicious employment of 'human resources' to hit its 'targets' can be heard everywhere, the art world not excepted. It is a voice that managers use to sound seductive, patronizing, or obscurely threatening as the occasion requires - but also to leave an impression that what it says is not what it is actually talking about. In political discussions, this kind of talk causes clear-cut distinctions to become blurred by a mist of subtle manipulations, from which everything and everyone emerges compromised. The 'forces of evil' elude identification. Consequently, it is a nebulous, complex, and often misleading picture that presents itself to the politically conscious artist.

'Reading Marx' no longer offers a solution. At the. Postmodernist thinking, which dominated the '80s, affirmed the 'death of the ideologies': the 'grand stories' on which belief in the transformation of society had been founded were no longer deemed credible. To determine one's course of action, one could no longer fall back on clear-cut political ideologies with their explanatory apparatus, as the 'political revivalists' of the late '60s still had been able to do.

Turning, once more, from the political situation to the history of the medium, one notices an important new element. The years that witnessed the revival of political theatre were also the years in which the primacy of language on the stage was seriously challenged. Mime and modern dance - the essentially non-verbal performing arts - had developed separately from text-oriented theatre during the '60s, but the next two decades saw the rise of many intermediate forms combining movement, dance, visual elements, and text. If language was used at all, theatre makers generally refused to observe the rules of psychologically constructed dialogue; similarly, actors no longer felt the need to mimiek everyday life. Especially important in this context was the conception, imported from dance and mime, of the actor's body as the essential 'instrument' of the performing arts. The body at that time did not yet carry the excessively carnal, visceral overtones, the associations with violence and disease it has acquired in more recent years, at least not on the stage. (The 'body art' practised by many visual artists in the '70s was a different matter.) The body in motion became a vehicle for meaning: 'content', according to tnis conception, was no longer the exclusive privilege of language, but could also be located in the body. If the body employed speech to render it manifest, it was merely using one among the various means at its disposal.

Initially dismissed by the theatrical establishment as mere 'fringe', non-text-oriented forms of theatre now have a large part of the field to themselves, and text-oriented theatre is absorbing their influence. Mime has been particularly important in this respect. The Mime school founded by Frits Vogels in Amsterdam in 1965 and later incorporated in the Theaterschool in that city was at the origin of two leading mime companies. Bewth (1965)

6 and Grif (1975), and through the years several of its graduates have switched to multimedia or even appeared in 'regular' plays. Artists wishing to make political theatre could hardly ignore these developments.

One more complicating factor must be mentioned: the growing awareness of non-Western cultural traditions and ways of making theatre. Of course, cultured people in the West had known for a long time that the 'higher' cultures - of the Middle East, India, China, and Japan - had produced 'great' literature, theatre, music, and painting and sculpture. Their products were admired in the West, and so were those of the 'tribal arts' of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. But the objects of admiration almost invariably dated from the past - 'glorious' in the case of the 'high' cultures, 'unspoiled by colonial influences' in the case of the tribesman. Present-day non-Western culture tended to be seen as the doubtful heritage of colonialism, a sorry substitute for the ancient arts and traditions that were by now largely lost. Recently, however, the existence of a growing body of literature and works of art - sharply distinct from the tales and poetry and works of visual art collected by Westerners during the colonial era - being produced in various African countries, for instance, has begun to obtrude itself on Western cultural consciousness. The West must 'learn to live with plurality' and, what is more, 'learn to live with plurality' on its very doorstep, in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Brussels or Amsterdam. Immigrants confront the native artists of Europe and America not only with other forms and traditions, but also with ways of functioning as artists quite different from those in which they have been educated.

Present-day 'political' artists are faced with, on the one hand, a complex and elusive political situation and, on the other hand, a bewildering variety of theatrical forms to choose from, including some from cultures very different from their own. On the politcal side, simple discrimination between the good and bad guys appears inadequate; on the side of the medium, dialogue and mimetic acting are no longer to be taken for granted as the proper means of making political statements. What possibilities, then, remain open to an artist who aims at politcal impact?

Before attempting to answer this questions, two remarks must be made. In the first place, the political impact of a work of art is not strictly dependent on the intentions of the artist. The audience has to read a political message in it, and it may do so even where the artist intended nothing of the sort. Pictures, books, plays, even musical compositions have in fact been praised and blamed for political contents that their creators were unaware of; the Nazi condemnation of virtual all of modern art for 'cultural Bolshevism' is a notorious case in point. A purely 'formalist' work may acquire a political meaning in a specific context.

Secondly, turning from the viewpoint of the audience to the viewpoint of the makers, it has been said since Romanticism that intentions do not count for everything in the process of creating a work of art. 'Conscious activity must be linked to an unconscious force,' Schelling wrote as early as 1807. 'Works of art that lack the stamp of this unconscious science betray themselves through a perceptible lack of life proper to themselves and independent of their creator', whereas art that is animated by this unconscious element 'imparts to its product, simultaneously with supreme clarity of comprehension, that (aspect of) unfathomable reality which makes it resemble a work of Nature.' It is not enough for an artist to possess a political conviction and a will to express it through the medium of his arts: there must also be some mysterious inner force at work during the process of creation which helps him to come upon the adequate form of expression as if by surprise. This point was stressed by André Breton when discussing the political position of Surrealism in 1935. Breton insisted on the dissociation of revolutionary art from revolutionary party doctrines, arguing that the cause of the emancipation of man is not necessarily served most effectively by overt revolutionary symbolism. The latter's effect may be instantaneous and transient, whereas a more lasting influence may be exerted by 'latent content' at a deeper level, even in the absence of political

7 allusions on the surface. The function of the unconscious as a guarantee of the 'truth' of a work of art is, of course, central to Surrealism. But even without being a Surrealist one may venture to suggest that specifically artistic quality - that is, a work's capacity to convince its audience as a work of art - as something more than the plain statement that things are like this or that - is related to Schelling's 'unconscious science'. The fascination exerted by powerful works of art is due precisely to the circumstance that they do not state 'this is so and there's an end of it'. There remains always a tension between what is said (and this may be said with great precision) and what is only suggested - between form and something that resists capture by form and evaporates across the enclosing walls, as it were. This aspect of artistic creation seems to have been neglected by not a few political theatre makers of the '70s in favour of immediate effect and prompt recognition by the audience. And it is true that many a work of poor artistic quality has achieved political impact where the audience of a masterpiece missed the point, stopping at admiration of its excellence as a work of art.

If, after these preliminary remarks, the question is posed again: What possibilities remain open to theatre makers aiming at political impact under the present circumstances? there is, first, the nature of the medium to consider. The political theatre of the late '60s and early '70s - at least in the Netherlands - tended to rely heavily on dialogue and traditional ways of acting in order to get its message across. Actors functioned primarily as vehicles for text, which they supported by mimicing real-life situations or by symbolising political relationships in a kind of shorthand acting, so to speak - something like an equivalent of Arntz's graphic 'shorthand' of 1930. Elements form cabaret and musical might also be borrowed, as Brecht had already done in his early plays. Their use of language allowed theatre makers to be very explicit about their political intentions, the more so as they were generally dealing with simple power relationships. And even if one is aware that politics have become rather more complicated than such black-and-white images suggested, language and mimetic acting still seem to offer the most effective means to achieve political impact. They enable one to state problems and solutions, to voice accusations and rouse the audience to action in terms and images that everybody can understand.

As has been said, however, the primacy of language in the theatre has been put in question by the development of many non-verbal forms of performance over the last 25 years, and political theatre is not in a position to ignore this. The question is, then, what kind of statements these non-text-oriented theatrical media permit the artist to make.

Language is able to be explicit by virtue of long-standing conventions which couple meanings with sounds that in themselves are meaningless. Where similar conventions are lacking, as in music and dance, formal properties - pitch, timbre, rhythm, pace - may still indicate broad areas of associations. The French horn, for instance, has been used by Romantic composers to evoke the mood of 'ineffable longing' which was their ideal. But horns were also the instruments used by hunters, and Bach, Haydn and other composers scored for them to evoke hunting scenes. There are many ways in which sounds and movements can become associated with more specific areas of significance. For example, certain figures and steps of classical ballet, when they appear in the context of a modern choreography, stand for a whole body of traditions. Originally, the movements in question may have carried only 'natural' connotations of a general character, such as bodily pleasure, melancholy, or sexual attraction and rivalry. But in the course of the history of dance they became symbols of a specific ballet culture, to the extent that today they can be used as 'quotations'. Dancing on Spitzen, formerly an expression of the wish to create an illusion of fairy-tale weightlessness, exposes the artificiality of this ideal (and reminds one of the painful discipline it involved) when used in the context of a choreography that destroys that illusion.

The body itself - the chief 'instrument' of the non-verbal performing arts - takes on different meanings in the course of time. Dance pioneers of the early 20th century tended to see it as the envelope of the soul, and the dancer's movements as a negation of its material nature. The body carries very different connotations now that it is daily presented to us as the victim

8 of war, torture, deprivation, and sickness - but also as an object of desire, to be tanned and perfumed with care and kept in the shape dictated by fashion, or as the playground of the latest rage in 'body manipulation'. The image on the television screeen switches from mutilated victims to flawless beauties under the shower almost without transition. And the live body on stage is charged with meaning by the appearance of its electronic double in the home.

In everyday social intercourse, a great deal of information is transmitted without the aid of language. Clothes, attributes, tools and architecture tell people what to expect from each other at specific times and places - 'Wenn man anbrüllen darf. Und vor wen man den Hut zieht,' as they say in Mahagonny. People 'read' the architecture of buildings along a street, the condition of the pavement, the clothing and movements of passers-by, in order to find out which kind of behaviour best suits the locality and the occasion. To know 'whom one is allowed to bully and whom one should take one's hat off to may be vital.

It is clear from these examples that meaning is conveyed by many other 'carrying devices' besides language, all of which are capable of being utilized in the theatre in some form or other. It is also evident that non-verbal communication is not necessarily lacking in precision. What is does lack, however, is the possiblility of discursive reasoning. The notes that follow one another in a musical composition, the movements of a choreography add up to something that may be, and frequently is, called a 'phrase'. But they do not add up to 'sentences'. The notes and movements do organize a succession of feelings, of bodily or emotional sensations, but they do not organize a train of thought. They cannot state a proposition or convince us by argument, however much we may feel we are being spoken to. Consequently, the question remains whether non-verbal modes of signification lend themselves to the making of political theatre. Does not political theatre require the unequivocal transmission of specific messages, and is this possible without resorting to explicit verbal statement and mimetic acting?

Political theatre of the type practiced by Proloog and similar groups in the '70s certainly did call for unequivocal statements about very concrete conditions. 'Politics' was understood in its current, everyday sense: the politics enacted in parliament, by governing bodies at all levels and in negotiations between the various social groups and classes. It may be argued, however, that every society, from an isolated village to a vast empire, is a political system and that every decision taken by any one of its members has political significance - even the decision to keep aloof from politics. This is, in fact, what militant Marxists at the time were telling artists who had always thought that they were 'just making art'. Conceived in this way, 'politics' covers all behaviour that links the individual to society and society to the individual; only a Robinson Crusoe could claim to have no business with it. Under this expanded definition, distinctions between verbal and non-verbal, discursive and non-discursive modes of communication in the theatre no longer matter. A solution is offered which spirits the problem away in one sweeping gesture.

There can be no doubt that theatre, as a form of intercourse between artists and audience, belongs to those activities that link the individual to society, or at least attempt to turn private thoughts and feelings into a collective concern. This occurs in an extreme form in the current tendency to exhibit 'real life' on stage, live or by means of video or film. Ron Vawter and Michael Matthews appeared on stage in the terminal stages of AIDS. Such performances have already provoked violent reactions on the part of reviewers who claim that the horror or compassion roused by 'victim art' are incompatible wiht aesthetic judgement. The condition of victims and the processes of victimizing have been enacted in the theatre often enough, but in this case there is no miming of conditions: the actor is living them in his own body. He is thrusting his private suffering under the nose of the audience, as it were, and trying to force them to collectively come to terms with it. This may be called political theatre, though not in the precise and restricted sense that the re-enactment of a dialogue between a trade union leader and a factory owner may be called political theatre. It may be called so, perhaps, in a sense more appropriate to the diffuse and complex nature of political conditions today.

9 The indignation provoked by 'victim art' may be due to a dawning awareness that a tacit but essential agreement between artists and audience is in danger of being violated, namely that theatre represents a laboratory situation. An experiment is being offered, to be observed by the spectators as well as by the actors. The patient is not going to die on stage any more that the severed head of Macbeth displayed at the conclusion of the tragedy is obtained by decapitating the author. (To die on stage would in fact be the supreme outrage to the audience.) The idea of an experiment is implied in even the most conventional theatrical performance, albeit on a trivial level: this night may prove a failure in spite of preveous success, Romeo may miss a cue, someone may have loaded the pistol with the wrong kind of ammunition... On a less trivial level, every performance consists of a pattern of behaviour which is to be tested by actors and audience alike. The artists have to find out if they can believe in its validity, if it will carry them through the performance; the audience has to assess its significance as a proposition about an aspect of existence. And the essential substance of the experiment is meaning: actions, motions, images, gestures, words all are involved in processes of generating and communicating meaning or demonstrating how meaning is transformed, destroyed and lost.

Creation and transmission of meaning is the essence of social intercourse, and as such basic to those types of social intercourse that we identify as 'polities'. Under its aspect of being a laboratory for the generation and communication of meaning, the theatre could be described as 'pre-politcal'. It deals with the ways in which human beings influence one another's behaviour by means of signification, and it operates in an area of society where signification has no immediate practical consequences. There are other areas where the manipulation of meaning does have immediate practical consequences, and to these the experiment of theatre might be relevant - as models or, more likely, as a much needed corrective.

Hollow phrases and empty sounds have probably never been absent from public discourse. Now, however, as has been stated before, we are living in a society dominated by economic thinking and the language of business managers and Public Relations experts has been adopted in many other fields besides commerce, including politics. Advertising specializes in discrepancies between manifest and latent content, between what is explicity shown or stated and what is actually the case. What texts and images denote is not difference in product qualities, but difference in marketing strategies. If publicity for product A excites the consumer's cupidity, this only means that A's manufacturer has the cleverer Hidden Persuaders in his pay. The consumer knows or suspects this, and a clever PR man today may ingratiate himself with the customer by winking at the audience, as it were, and intimating that his propaganda is not to be taken completely seriously. In many other areas of social intercourse, however, successful functioning depends on the belief that participants in the discourse mean what they say and that what they say has real meaning. If this belief is shaken, feelings of uneasiness arise. Society functions on a mixture of mutual confidence and distrust, and the balance between them should not be disturbed. Most cultures put a premium, if not exactly on sincerity and truthfulness, at least on being as true as one's word, and they do so for good reasons. Human communication is often enough marred by stupidity, ignorance, and sloppiness, but a conviction persists nonetheless that meaning is something that should not be tampered with. And the language of political discourse nowadays too frequently gives rise to the feelings of uneasiness just referred to. Words used by politicians seem to float in air, severed from their moorings in social reality.

Under these conditions, it may be the business of the arts to bring back respect for the essentials of communication. Whatever else they have to offer, and whatever their subject matter and medium, in the best examples they present instances of intensified signification. The precarious marriage of meaning and form is constantly threatened with divorce. It is within the possibilities of the arts to keep this menace in check by a perpetual vigilance - the kind of vigilance an artist himself needs in order to ensure that the form of the work he is creating corresponds as much as possible to the creative desire that moves him. Our heads live in an airy world of images and words, a virtual continual checking against the reality of

10 actual events and feelings. The arts, while no doubt contributing to the construction of virtual reality, also possess the power to bring us back to earth.

Returning now to the question of what constitutes political theatre, it does not appear necessary to provide a strict definition. In its 'pre-political' functioning as a laboratory of meaning it always possesses a potential relevance to the manipulation of meaning that is going on in political discourse. But it also possesses the means to leave the basic level of generalities and to become much more specific in its statements. It is a composite medium, and each one of its components has close analogies in everyday social intercourse. Dialogue corresponds to conversation. The movements and disposition or actors on the stage are a parallel to the play of attraction and repulsion enacted in private and public space in daily life. Dance, music, costume, the scenic space itself with its stage sets and lighting - all have their counterparts in the world of ordinary human business. All this enables theatre makers to refer unequivocally to the facts of real social and political life, if they expect to achieve political impact by doing so. The theatre as a whole possesses the means to make people aware of what is really happening in society in a multitude of ways, overt or elliptical, employing the entire range of media, from the actor's corporeal presence to the rarefied spirituality of metaphysical dialogue - from 'victim art' to Wittgenstein. To be explictly didactic is one of those ways: one may prepare 'lessons' - Lehrstucke - for politicians or other target groups. But this is far from implying that political theatre should perforce be didactic. In fact, if one wishes people to learn, it is not always wise to adopt a teacher's position.

By its very nature, theatre attempts to turn private matters into a collective concern. It is an encounter between artists and audience, in which the former confront the latter with a proposal. As this description implies, this is primarily a one-way traffic - particularly in our time. To conceive the message and devise the appropriate means to get it through is considered to be the artist's business. The audience by its very presence agrees that theatre a collective concern; so do administrators by having theatres built and voting money to support actors' and dancers' companies. But neither offers clues as to how the transition from private idea to public concern is to be effected: society tolerates and even supports artists, but refuses to assume responsibility for the actual creation of works. Under these circumstances, theatre makers can be guided only by the uncertain lights of their personal urges and intuitions. If they have political aspirations as theatre makers, they are obliged to individually define the scope and aims of 'politcal theatre' and to work out its forms and methods. Perhaps the only injuction common to all is to remember that they are guardians of the collective treasure of meaning.

11 THEATER INSTITUUT IMEDERLAIMD

The Theater Instituut Nederland provides information, conducts research, initiates debate, encourages reflection and supports professional development in relation to the needs of those working in the performing arts, both national and international. It also promotes knowledge of and insight into the theatre - in all its manifestations - among today's and tomorrow's public. To accomplish these goals, the Theater Instituut Nederland oversees a large museum collection; collects current information; organizes events such as discussions, conferences, workshops, exhibitions and international presentations; publishes books, CD's and other materials, and participes in a large number of international networks.

DE BALIE

De Balie for culture and politics - is located in the former municipal courthouse in Amsterdam. These days theatre performances, public debates and lectures are held in wat once was a courtroom. De Balie searches for subjects in which culture and politics touch or overlap and in that context, a broad definition of these concepts is of the utmost importance. Since 1992, De Balie has been developing into a centre for the discussion on censure and the right to freedom of speech is under pressure, whenever it occurs. De Balie's involvement in this area has resulted in four initiatives: Press Now, Rushdie Defence Committee, Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algeriéns (CISIA) and Stichting Index on Censorship Nederland.