For the fifteenth successive year, the “Szekspirowski” Festival celebrated Great Will in three cities on the shore of the Baltic Sea: Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot. The organisers have put together a serious festival, with diverse stylistic proposals, in their aim to provide as many varied samples of the countless stagings on texts by Shakespeare. This seems to have been the main selection criteria of the artistic director, Prof. Jerzy Limon, since extremely diverse performances joined in for the nine festival days. Interested, great and, in some cases suited, and even exceptional, they all stood out through vision, or experiments on various theatrical languages. Thus, Shakespearean stories were watched in animated film, as was the case of the Lear Anatomy of the Finnish Ensemble Anatomia, directed by Mikaela Hasán or turned into mere excuses for music, when priority was given to Renaissance sounds composed by Clément Janequin and Josquin Desprez. In the Macbeth of the Swedish company Romeo&Julia Kören, in Benoît Malmberg's vision, it sounded at times round, at times grave, and at times suave in the sumptuous and austere space of St. John Cathedral, in a performance like the captivating productions watched on Mezzo.
The Polish audience was seduced by the original use of the cathedral or park space in the mentioned performances or by the actors' freshness and vitality in a sort of a “Hamlet fitness”, as was the case with the performance by young creators from Theatre Tanca PWST w Bytomiu. The mix of spaces and languages to suit texts by Shakespeare probed once more the universality of The Bard. His lines resounded in sparkles in an impressive forest from Gdynia leading to the edge of the beach. Words here came in Polish, Portuguese and English, that is, in the languages of the countries participating in the "Burza” (“Tempest”) Project. Also a mix, but this time of famous scenes, sort of Shakespearean greatest hits, came from Radu Alexandru Nica's staging, Shaking Shakespeare, a production of the German State Theatre in Timișoara. With the support of the Warsaw Cultural Institute, the performance from Timișoara had the honour of opening the festival. All the above represented experiments able to grasp attention and kept the level of the festival at a high level. Exceptional performances were also present with “Hamlet” of the Russian Kolady Theatre, directed by Nikolai Kolyada (who also presented “King Lear”) or “Miranda” of the Vilnius Theatre, directed by the Lithuanian director Oskaras Korsunovas. Two proposals that the readers will learn more about in the following weeks and the Romanian audience will get the chance to see in the 2012 “Shakespeare” International Theatre Festival.
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The fact that in its 15th year the “Szekspirowski” Festival is like a promising teenager is also shown by the fact that it determined the Gdansk cultural institutions to build a Shakespeare Theatre, after the Globe model, equipped will all the modern stage technique. Certainly, another argument was the tradition of the avant la lettre cultural exchanges of the Renaissance times between Polish and British theatre, when British actors mentioned by archives played in Gdansk, and least but not last, the success of the festival itself. The audience here was also able to contribute to the construction. For 25 Zlot, they had the chance to buy a brick and a founding member certificate for the future theatre scheduled to be opened on the 2013 edition of the festival
Macbeth, directed by Grzegorz Bral, Pieśń Kozła Theatre
Among the most generous proposals included in this year's edition was Macbeth from the Pieśń Kozła Theatre, directed by Grzegorz Bral. With a history of hundreds of years of stagings by Shakespeare behind, any director approaching the most representative plays of the Bard, any director has to wage a fight with the evergreen stories attached to them. First of all because of the themes, and then, due to their remarkable popularity. Which are the means by which theatre can remake in front of today's audiences the invocation, the force of the primal, exemplary gesture? This is the question that Grzegorz Bral seems to have had in mind when he started off in approaching Macbeth. Mist and lights create a magical space, filled with the unreal lucidity of trance. In the dimmed lights (lighting design by Robert Baliński), spaces and scenes cut in small breaches. Mist completely wraps the stage, allowing eyes to see, in masterful control throughout the performance (stage design by Mira Żelechower-Aleksiun and Grzegorz Bral), only small parts of it. The audience is surrounded by mist. Is it English fog or shamanic substances? The entire staging relies on semidarkness. Actors play in candle lights.
In this Macbeth imagined like an anthropological experiment, the audience get the opportunity to witness a regression of theatre back to its chanting form. With the help of the Shakespearian plot, direction constructs a ritual performance, in quasitribal forms and the look of a Shamanic rite. The play seems to reenact founding mythical events, of exemplary weight in the history of the community. The sorceress – the group of the three was reduced to a single one – opens and closes the performance seen in its whole as a trance vision taking place between the two moments. Throughout, lights, shadows, spectres, oriental sounds and dances celebrate a certain scene. Just as it happened in ritual theatre, which provided holy protection, whether it reenacted the cosmogony, or delivered the community the needed teachings, Macbeth feeds on primal energies.
The Shaman- sorceress (Anu Salonen) brings back events from the past. In a central position, as an implacable character controlling fate, she reenacts history in incantation like modulations. Furthermore, all characters whisper their lines subversively, in religious inflections. The oriental influenced sound, carefully and minutely orchestrated, gradually slips in a true magic chant. In kimonos, with swords and samurai gestures, the phantasmal characters seem to be otherworldly shadows telling their story in lamenting arpeggios and then disappear. But their universe is kept under the mark of the sword. Insertions from the Nippon world and mix unitary in shape remain, however, a mere stylistic accessory. The recurrence of the oriental signs distils the air of chevalier events, placing the story in a mythical, swashbuckler atmosphere. Because this Macbeth does not focus on the fight for power, but on almighty fate. The deeds reenacted by the sorceress thus take place as ineluctable. The unrest, the eternal motion of the swards in the masterful choreography inevitably leads to a tragedy. When Macbeth (Gabriel Gawin) kills the king, behind the stage, in a game of reversing laws of space and distance, characters climb on walls, and cling on platforms in frenzy. The flow of the world left without its divine head spins in motion. Only that Duncan will always be present on the stage, marking history even after his death.
The few black scenery elements set a space of the nether world. The background of the stage remains covered in shadows for the most part of the performance. Mist only clears in the ending. The dark, veiling atmosphere subliminally creeps under one's skin. Borders of reality easily vanish to allow another to drift in and replace it. Various characters come up to the fore stage from the other-world. Whilst their role in history comes to an end, they will soon withdraw back into their recesses. The technical performance of the seven actors (among whom, Anna Zubrzycki as Lady Macbeth) who remain on the stage most of the time is brilliant. The accuracy of the interpretation in every tiny nuance, gesture and sound, spares them of the risk of falling into exterior, meaningless shapes. The intricate choreography, showing flawless training, calls for frequent changes in the rhythm. The actors, however, preserve their energy, dance, step on tables, jump over each other, fight with sticks without being any minute ridiculous. Their excellence removes any suspicion of gratuitous exoticism. Thus, Japanese rhetoric cannot be interpreted as a mere graft on the Shakespearean story, but as being part of an experimental, original, and consistent performance, perfectly in line with Shakespeare's text.
