2024-09-23 14:01:31
The performance, which evoked the strongest response at the International Theater Festival in Pilsen that just ended, expressed thoughts, attitudes and feelings with overwhelming openness.
In the production How I Didn’t Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It, Polish playwright and director Mateusz Pakula watches his father die day by day. Directed by Dušan David Pařízek based on the book by Pavel Vilikovský, Dog on the Road is a sarcastic commentary on the nature of one’s own nation, performed by Slovak actors.
Die like a dog
Mateusz Pakula recorded several months during which he cared for his father in the last stage of cancer in the book of the same name. His descriptions and comments on his painful death are interpreted on stage by five actors in mourning suits. Relentlessly, matter-of-factly, precisely, but not without emotion, irony or rage. The production is a co-production of Krakow’s Laznia Nowa theater and Teatru Źeromskiego from Kielce.
In addition to a few chairs and a sound desk, the stage consists of a black object resembling a giant toboggan – Pakul’s father is said to have designed one of these as an architect, but it can also be associated with an abdominal cavity with a tangle of intestines or just a dreamscape, which is sometimes set in motion by an opalescent light projection. The white circle in the middle is probably the light at the end of the tunnel through which we are said to pass to the other world.
The openness with which Pakula talks about what he sees in the face of slowly approaching death, what he feels and what comes to mind is both overwhelming and liberating. He doesn’t shy away from anything. He shares with the audience the physiological manifestations of his father’s urination, nausea or pain. But also the timidly and paradoxically discovered intimacy of her relationship with him, including a faeces-stained handshake.
Care for a father dying of cancer was developed by Mateusz Pakula first in a book, then in the form of a play. | Photo: Klaudyna Schubert
Resignedly, she mocks the grotesquely cynical expressions of her grandmother, her father’s mother-in-law. He comments on the absurd covid isolation and the heartless, almost perverted behavior of the hospital staff, who refuse to take note of the situation of the dying.
In his honesty, there is no intention to shock, only a determination to show how it really is. The end of everything everywhere. “Why can’t I die like a dog?” asks the father, tormented by pain, pointing out that even the animal’s suffering can be shortened. The author then develops his question further: in an angry lament about the impossibility of euthanasia, thus the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, and in even broader social contexts. And at the same time, he is helplessly looking for a way to overdose his father with morphine so that he can finally die.
The ability of the director and actors to see even in the most drastic situations like this a comic moment is cathartic. In addition to the factuality of the descriptions, it is precisely the immediate, well-hitting humor and the light-hearted musical line with Bond motifs or the “performance” of the Gipsy King group that make it possible to watch the two-hour performance with tension, without drowning in depression at the end of it. On the contrary, Pakul manages to achieve a relief catharsis by “merely” telling the truth about his father’s death.
The production How I Didn’t Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It premiered last January. The Pilsen Festival was her first guest appearance abroad. The dramaturgs of Czech shows deserve a thumbs up, they should invite exactly such projects, also in an international context, which are revealing.
The power of the Polish production stood out especially in contrast to the opening production of this year’s edition called Hekuba, not Hekuba. It was tried out by the famous Comédie-Française under the direction of Tiago Rodrigues, director of the Avignon Festival, where it also premiered last year. The intellectually sophisticated collage confronts the case of abuse of autistic children in institutional care with the tragedy of the heroine of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides and the animated series whose protagonist is a female. The artistry of that production, despite the absolutely brilliant acting, paradoxically weakens its urgency.
Slovakia in a nutshell
The essay novella Pes na cesta by Pavel Vilikovský, a practically unknown Slovak novelist and translator in the Czech Republic, was perfect for the adaptation and direction of Dušan David Pařízek at the Slovak National Theatre. It sounds poignantly current, even though the original was created during the time of Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar and the production premiered before the current cabinet took office, whose Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová dismissed the heads of the local National Gallery and the Slovak National Theater this summer.
Vilikovský, who is no longer alive, claimed to be the director’s favorite Austrian writers Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, and his thinking, brilliant ironic strokes and uncompromising, even mocking view of his own nation have much in common with them, as well as with Pařízk’s theatrical analyzes of the Central European space.
Actors Alexander Bárta, Richard Stanke, Ľuboš Kostelný and Robert Roth are pictured in the picture from the production Pes na cesta. | Photo: Robert Tappert
The text itself is so strong that the director didn’t even have to invent anything. He used a model that has worked well for him many times: the empty stage is bordered by white areas like the walls of a cube, and the actors project contextual photos onto them from the meteor. Parízek chose four great actors: Alexander Bárta, Łoboš Kostelný, Robert Roth and Richard Stanke. Each of them almost ideally embodies one of the Slovak male archetypes with their visage and temperament.
The director broke down Vilikovský’s text for them by topic into imaginary situations and polemical lines. The whole thus acts as an authentic disputation of intellectuals on the subject of Slovakia, full of accurate, self-ironic, insulted or, on the contrary, grandiose observations regarding their homeland in the context of Europe, its history and culture. Literature, theater are discussed, and purely private relationship motives are humorously incorporated.
The audience in Pilsen received this clever and funny “self-deprecating” pamphlet with extraordinary understanding and warmth. In Slovakia it is sold out months in advance. Without the actors’ convincing personal – and, given the social situation there, civic – attitude, the production would not have been able to convey such a strong message. The statement on the current state of culture in Slovakia, which the actors read after the Pilsen performance, seemed almost unnecessary. Everything has been said.
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