Labyrinth of an Obscure Law: Różewicz Stirs Polish TV

Labyrinth of an Obscure Law R6zewicz StirsPolish TV Elzbieta Baniewicz ART IS RARELY one of the early fruits of revolution. Today Polish artists, who demanded freedom at the Round Table not so long ago, talk chiefly about money. Culture is costly, and new economic order, with its suppression of inflation, has brought recession and growing unemployment, so it can hardly be expected that the government will zealously try to save art rather than health services, housing, or industry. Film production has dropped from a few dozen films annually to merely a few. Movie theatres survive thanks to commercial American productions like Batman, and they are being closed down more and more frequently, unless someone manages to change them into currency exchange offices. The theatre repertoire looks rather like the bookstore windows, where naked bottoms and guns advertising gutter literature appear beside memoirs of the camps, and dreambooks compete with anti-communist propaganda, science fiction , and the confidences of witches. Plays with small casts and song concerts promising financial profits have ousted productions of national literary masterpieces or Shakespeare, which used to be a kind of specialty of the Polish theatre. Eminent actors had used the language of universal literature to wrestle with Fate, God, History, inscribing into the works of the classics contemporary experiences, ranging from the existential to the political. Thanks to them the public imagination gained new perspectives. Now economic dangers dominate most discussions of art, though chaos in the domain of values seems much more important than financial chaos. The ethos of Solidarity, founded with the significant participation of artists around the idea of a common enemy, has fallen apart, and a few dozen 56 parties have come into being, from Social Democrat to Christian Democrat. It is no longer enough for artists, nor for politicians, to declare themselves against communists. Choosing values has become a much more subtle matter than it was last year, and few can cope with the new situation. The broadcast of Tadeusz R62ewicz's play Do piachu. . . (Bite the Dust), prepared by the TV theatre seen by millions every Monday, was the most important artistic event of the last few months. No production has shocked public opinion as much for a long time. The protests of indignant viewers even reached parliament, and prompted violent polemics in the press. The attack was on both the author and our TV, which "dared to show such dirty rubbish using state funds." Both the substance of the play and its extremely naturalistic aesthetics offended audience members. This is nothing new, since before being accepted, each of R62ewicz's plays had met with resistance from both the actors who were to play in them and from the public. But the sharpest attacks were made on Do piachu . . .; after the premiere at Warsaw's Teatr Na Woli in 1979, the author was accused of betraying his nation and of desecrating its values; he withdrew the play and forbade its further production and translation. Do piachu . .. is a provocative text concerning matters most important to Poles, namely the national mythos and its fundamental concepts of bravery, heroism, the romantic struggle for freedom, and military honor, deeply rooted in the national mentality. On the one hand, this is understandable as the ideology of a country deprived of freedom for centuries; Polish soldiers fought for the freedom of their country on all world fronts and in many abortive uprisings. On the other hand, patriotic heroism became a permanent stereotype effectively obscuring any other truth about war. A dozen or so years ago, when history was still a domain under the absolute rule of politics, it was the defenders of stereotypes who protested against R62ewicz's play. They continue to do so today when emerging democracy is freeing life of the dominance of ideology, but has also set free the old specters of intolerance, chauvinism and my-God-andmy -homeland type incantations. The TV play's director, Kazimierz Kutz, a well-known Polish movie director , presented the author's text as faithfully as possible. In ten filmed sequences reminiscent of a Brechtian morality play, and alluding to the drama of the stations of the Passion of Christ, he presented the moving story...